DIGGING IN: Garlic Harvest Approaches

Garlic, Allium sativum, is a bulbous plant easily grown in East Lansing gardens and common at the farmer stalls at the East Lansing Farmers Market in the spring and early summer. While the whole plant is edible, most people eat the mature bulb, which is formed from 6-10 cloves divided by a papery skin. In the next few weeks, garlic bulbs should be ready for harvest.

Raising garlic usually starts with the harvest of the underground bulbs at the base of the garlic stem. After maturing and drying, an individual clove from the garlic head can be planted in the fall to form a new garlic plant the following spring and a new head of garlic in the summer.

Garlic cloves should be planted 2-4 inches deep and about 4 inches apart. Garlic plants can be planted pretty close together, but they need loose soil in order to grow larger heads. Garlic also likes well-drained soil. The author has a garlic bed that has been occasionally sitting in water the last month and it is wilting and in danger of drowning.

When the garlic stems emerge in the spring, they are edible if you want to eat them like chives. They quickly become fibrous and chewy, but the early stalks are tender and garlicky and can be used in a salad or in any recipe where you would use chives.

Through the spring, your garlic stack will formed multiple strap-shaped leaves that spread out to the side of the stem. Then, in mid-June, a long and usually curled garlic scape will grow up and out of the main stalk of the garlic. To encourage a larger garlic head, most gardeners will cut off the scape. The scape itself is edible, although fibrous. The author and his family have successfully roasted the scapes and ground them in a food processor to make topping for fish and grilled meats.

If you leave the scapes on the plant, the end of the scape will form small bulbils at the top of the stalk where a flower would be. They look like a flower, but modern garlic reproduces asexually and does not flower. The group of bulbils looks like a flower, but it is really a group of little clones of the plant that you can plant. (More on bulbils below.) The bulbils, too, are edible. You can crush them or cook them like you would garlic cloves. They can be difficult to peel, but if you don’t mind the texture, they are very flavorful.

By July in East Lansing a few garlic plants will be ready for harvesting the below-ground heads. When the strap-like leaves begin to brown and dry, it is time to dig up the garlic heads at the base of the stalk. Once the garlic heads are out of the ground, they need to dry and cure for a few days to mature the paper-like covering over the cloves. Once dry, the garlic heads will store very well as long as they are kept dry. And, come fall, you can plant some of your crop to grow new garlic the next summer.

While most people plant garlic cloves in the fall to harvest garlic heads the following summer, you can also plant the bulbils to harvest the greens as you would chives, or to harvest full garlic heads in two years.

Planting the bulbils is as simple as putting the bulbils in a pot under a little bit of soil and watering about once a week. The bulbils will sprout in a week or so and grow into chive-like, edible plants. They are pretty in a pot, taste like garlic, and can take a joke. Garlic attracts almost no pests or diseases and does not mind if you forget to water it for a while.

Once your bulbils sprout, you can move them to an outdoor garden and transplant them into a bed where they can grow and then overwinter. Over the winter, the plant will die back to the bulb in the ground and then come back in the spring like a fall-planted clove. If you lack the space to dedicate a whole bed to a two-year crop, you can transplant the bulbil sprouts in between other annual plants like basil, kale, or cabbage.

Garlic is a very popular food for its spicy flavor and is a common feature of many old-world cuisines. The taste comes from many sulfur-containing compounds in the plant. Some of these sulfurous compounds, like allyl methyl sulfide and methyl mercaptan, last long enough in the body to enter the blood stream, off-gas into the lungs, and be breathed out as “garlic breath.” These chemicals also gets excreted in your urine and your sweat.

It may be because garlic changes the smell of our breath, sweat, and urine that garlic has been long used as a medicine. In recent years, there have been many studies of garlic to reduce blood pressure, to improve cholesterol lab numbers, and as a blood thinner to prevent clots. Randomized controlled trials do not suggest that garlic is clinically useful for any of these conditions. At the same time, garlic is easy to grow, tastes wonderful, and is not apparently bad for us except perhaps during a job interview.