Everyone is Talking Garlic
The YouTube Gardening community, the Facebook gardening groups, the IG influencers, lots of garlic how to, this time of year. What can I add to the conversation?
I don’t think I have anything technical to add, but if I don’t discuss garlic, I would be leaving out a big part of my fall gardening life. I grow a lot of garlic. I grow garlic in just about every veggie bed in our North Kitchen Garden at PDX Garden Home. I save garlic cloves, mostly the ones that were falling apart from harvest, which is opposite of the expert advice to save and plant your biggest and best bulbs, but I’m greedy! I want to eat my biggest and best bulbs. So I also buy new garlic seed from a local nursery to ensure I get some truly great garlic among what the experts insist will be mediocre garlic from my last season leftover cloves.
Growing up my dad loved garlic. The only direction I remember my dad giving mom when it came to family meals was to make sure to add garlic. Or after we sat down to dinner he would ask, did you add garlic to that? Elephant garlic was particularly prized. I grew my own Elephant Garlic this last season and was so excited to indulge. I ate several roasted heads in one sitting. Well you don’t want to know what happened after that. This is where the experts will chime in with the fact that Elephant Garlic isn’t a true garlic but actually a large bulbing leek. I don’t think that makes a difference to my stomach asking my mouth for a second opinion before overindulging. The experience definitely slowed down my desire to eat straight garlic, but it didn’t extinguish it. I’m just getting better about eating it in moderation.
As I write this in late November, it’s not too late to get your garlic in the ground in our climate, here in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve already stuffed my beds with garlic, so in keeping with my new found moderation, I’ll call it good and planted for this coming season.
Here is my Garlic list
- For hardneck I planted German white
- For softneck I planted Transylvania
- I also planted Elephant Garlic
- And finally I planted a mix of hard neck and soft neck clothes left over from last year but I don't know the variety!
Good luck in your Garlic growing adventures!