Growing Garlic & Alliums

If there was one thing I really loved at the Farmer's Market this past summer, it was trying lots of different types of garlic. At the supermarket, garlic is just "garlic" and you have no idea where it comes from. When you look at garlic production, 75% is in China and 2% is in the USA, so switching to locally-grown garlic is a good idea.

What I learned sampling garlics is that I like a hotter garlic than I might have initially guessed. Buying from local growers, most of my garlics came with a variety name and the farmer could describe the qualities and suggest ways of cooking. I learned I like to eat hotter garlic than I would have guessed initially. One variety I tried had fantastic flavor, but I found the teeny, purple cloves had a thick layer of skins and were a pain to peel. Some garlics have double layers of cloves, some make flatter cloves and elephant garlic only seems good for roasting when you're having a dinner party and can feed the huge things to a group.

Since garlic overwinters, there's more room in the garden for it and you don't have to contend with insects pests hardly at all. In fact, by its very nature, garlic wards off a lot of insects all by itself, so it can be a good companion plant to other veggies. One of my garden books said that garlic can sometimes make peas, beans and other legumes unhappy, so I picked a spot in the garden away from where those things will be planted next spring.

For my first experimental growing, I got organic varieties at the Farmer's Market to plant. All you have to do is break up the heads and plant the individual cloves.

Alliums are the plant family that includes garlic, onions and leeks. In fact, those huge elephant garlic cloves are actually a type of leek.

There are edible and decorative allium types. We've already got two other types of alliums in our garden. One is chives which a lot of people grow. They are very tiny and mild in flavor compared to garlic and onions and grow very easily in pots.

I also have a variety called "society garlic" and it's an ornamental. A friend gave me a small shoot of it years ago and it's grown from that one sprig of leaves into a little cluster of bulbs in a pot. The purple flowers it makes aren't a tight ball like other ornamentals, and looks more like a spray of flowers. It doesn't flower until later summer and early fall.

I have a brand-new ornamental vareity that I'm going to grow in a pot called "hair allium." (that's what is shown in the picture here) These are a mutation of regular alliums and the flower they make are a purple center with very twisted green "hairs" coming off it in every direction. I've heard them called "totally ugly," "weird," "space alien flowers" and "like a Dr. Suess plant" and fell in love with them immediately when I saw a picture at the flower bulb sellers booth at the Farmer's Market in late September. I got eight bulbs for $5 and I really hope they are as weird as other web sites say.

I went with the winter garlic plan as I've got a small backyard and growing space is at a premium. Since garlic can withstand the cold of winter, it made much more sense to grow it then as opposed to over the summer.

My garlic went into the ground in early October. And that was pretty much all I saw of it until about March. Then the garlic tops, called "scapes," stared to appear. The picture you see here is one of the more robust plants, photographed in early April.

I'll let it keep growing until sometime in June. When the flowers start to appear, I'll snip them off so that the plant directs all of it's energy into making the bulbs.