I showed you my garden potato haul a few weeks ago. Now I'll show you my garden garlic haul, all grown with sneaky little cloves of garlic that have hidden in various spots of my garden over the years.
About 15 years ago, I decided to plant some grocery store garlic cloves in my garden. Yes, I read the warnings -- viruses, pests, tiny crops. I decided to give it a try anyway. So, I planted 1 head of garlic (about 10-12 cloves) in my garden. The next summer, I dug about 10 heads of garlic from those cloves. I replanted some of these new garlic heads in a new spot in my garden the next year. And so on, and so on.
Garden garlic is a bit like garden potatoes in that there are always a few sneaky heads that remain hidden from my trowel when harvesting and basically replant themselves for the next year. Most of the time, I'd notice in spring they came up but then forget about them by the time the tops died back.
This past spring, I found several spots in my garden with new garlic growth. As I had a hunch my garden would be more important in 2020 than previous years, I dug up what I found and grouped them all together in one single spot so I could more easily harvest them this summer. I'm not even sure how many individual cloves I planted last spring, maybe 40 or more, just a guess. In late August/early September, the tops were dying back and I decided to dig my garlic patch. This is what I harvested.
Some of these are full-sized heads of garlic, some are smaller heads of garlic, and many are swollen single cloves. All of these are usable in cooking.
To give you an idea of how much garlic I harvested, the head just to the left of the pile is about the size of a regular supermarket head of garlic. I harvested what I think is about 1 2/3 to 1 3/4 pounds, or the equivalent of about 20 or so heads of garlic. This is more than I would normally buy in the fall to last through winter and into early spring for our family of 5, years ago.
I had left the garlic in a box for a month, curing for storage. The other day, I sorted my garlic according to use: those cloves that need using right away (a couple had begun to sprout), those for planting, and the bountiful remainder for use over the next several months. Yesterday, I cleared a spot in one bed and planted 3 heads (34 cloves, total) of the best of what I harvested in September. I'm hoping for a plentiful garlic harvest in 2021, too.
I've noticed a few green sprouts still in the garden that I missed either last spring or this summer when digging. I thought I did a thorough job. But that's just how sneaky garden garlic can be. I'll be finding garlic in my garden for years to come, all descendants from that one supermarket head planted many years ago.
