Works for Me Wednesday: Growing Garlic
6/20/2012
I do not have a green thumb... but even I can grow garlic!
Garlic is an easy herb to grow. It's as simple as: stick it in the ground and forget about it! It really is that easy! And it multiplies for you. You plant a clove and later harvest a head of garlic (which usually contains 5-8 cloves). Growing garlic doesn't take much space (it grows tall, not out) and will grow in almost any soil.
Garlic is planted in the fall, about 2 weeks before the ground freezes. So in Indiana where I live, it works well to plant it in mid-November. Then you do nothing more. In the spring, it will start to come up when the ground thaws. It will grow tall and green. Eventually flowering heads will appear on the top. When the leaves start to turn brown and dry out, dig up one of your garlic heads and see if it's ready to harvest. If it's still a little green, give the rest another week or two.
Due to a very mild spring (it hit 90 degrees in March), our garlic shot up early and was already ready to harvest last weekend!
Here's my husband with our garlic all uprooted. A tip we learned after we harvested... if you cut the flowering head off the top soon after it appears, the plant will focus its energies more on growing the garlic bulb/head. So we'll try that next year to see if the bulbs grow even bigger.
And here are all the garlic cloves.
We then press the garlic cloves, mix in a small amount of olive oil and put teaspon-size dollops onto wax paper. We freeze the garlic that way and then store it in a freezer bag for the rest of the year. Whenever a recipe calls for minced garlic, we have our own garlic ready and waiting.
It works for me!
2 comments:
This is my first year growing garlic. My plants seem to be doing well, however some of them just died, and I can't figure out why. I found a mole hole in the middle of the ones that did die, and the only thing I can think of is that the mole ate the garlic!
I love your idea for mincing and freezing, I have never thought to do that, but definitely a good way to preserve the garlic!
Thank you for such a great informational post! I have been wanting to try garlic gardening but just haven't. No excuses now!
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