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| Garlic |
| Garlic is a food with Personality. There is no exaggeration in calling garlic one of life's most intense sensory experiences --in the same élite class as hot peppers. People get heated and emotional when these subjects are raised. Some folks eat garlic daily. Garlic breath, and even worse its posterior expression (garlic gas) is agonizing. Let's explore growing garlics in Seattle. Your actual harvest time varies with factors such as the kind of garlic, when it is planted, and the weather. Around here, July, August or September is prime time for digging garlic. |
| Garlic is a sun-loving bulbous plant, Allium sativum, closely related to onions and chives. The active garlicky element is also present in other lesser known but curious plants worth growing if you love garlic. Regular garlic is available in dozens of cultivated varieties --mild, strong, small, large, various colors, easy or bothersome to peel, blooming or not, etc. Generally it is planted in fall and harvested the next summer. If it is a kind that sends up a flowerhead, growers usually break-off and stir-fry the immature flowerheads, so "bulb energy" isn't diverted into flowers and seeds. But you can let a few garlic plants blossom, since the flowerheads are attractive round clusters up to 6 inches wide, of hundreds of tiny white or pinkish florets. |
| Elephant Garlic is an immense plant with larger bulbs and leaves. It is a hybrid introduced in 1919 by Luther Burbank. The bulbs are round, mild tasting, and ripen early. The leaves are bold in size, intensely flavored, and electrify salads. The flowerheads are rather anticlimatic. |
| Garlic Chives (Allium tuberosum) are petite nonbulbous, flat-leaved plants with lovely white flowers in late summer. The bright green leaves are plucked and eaten just like chives. The plants are never dug up, just divided every so often; they need no especial coddling, being quite tough. |
| Wild Garlic (Allium vineale) is a weed, its skinny dark bluish-green leaves hollow, its bulbs no bigger than hazelnuts. Flowerheads an inch wide, usually full of bulblets, appear in June or July. Its flavor is harsh and uncouth, but since the weed is shade tolerant, can be harvested in the wild, and braves winter freezes, you might do well to harvest some greens in the dead of winter, when the other garlic greens may be unavailable. |
| Society Garlic (Tulbaghia violacea), an evergreen species from South Africa, has flat leaves like Garlic Chives, but pinkish or purplish flowers. It's usually grown as an ornamental. Some nurseries sell it with variegated leaves. I've quit growing it, after 3 different attempts all ended up frozen to death in cold winters. But I would dearly like to know why it is called Society Garlic --surely a neat story is behind the name. |
Still other garlics exist, but are rarer, and I've not grown them.
(originally published in The Seattle Weekly, August 1996)
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