Many currencies can be used for bribery—dollars, dinars, diamonds, gold, rubles, rubies.
I use garlic.
At my friends-and-family farm on an island in Washington state, nothing’s for sale. Whatever’s not eaten in our own kitchen or stashed in the freezer for later use, we give away. If it happens that we curry a little favor with our recipients, so be it. And there is no more popular giveaway than garlic.
“Hope some of that makes its way down here,” says my sister in Houston after I send out a friends-and-family email with a picture of this past June’s 2022–2023 crop, drying in the sun.
“How’s the garlic crop this year?” ask numerous other correspondents, family members, neighbors, and friends, such as an Alaska resident who manages to grow a fine basil stand every year and turns it with my garlic into pesto that heads to the freezer for winter comfort or into a halibut/cream cheese/jalapeño dip that, well, is just plain wicked.
The answer is that the garlic crop is always fine, since I started some 30 years ago. It’s one of the most widely adapted culinary vegetables and can be grown from high northern latitudes to the tropics, from near timberline to the Sonoran Desert. So for home gardeners in most of the United States, garlic is one of the easiest and best garden delights.
Reasons to Plant
Why grow garlic in the first place? Start with the wretched quality of most bulbs you find in the grocery store (the classic white California garlic is bred and grown for shipping value).“Misuse of garlic is a crime,” argued chef Anthony Bourdain. “Please, treat your garlic with respect ... Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screwtop jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don’t deserve to eat garlic.”
If you grow your own, you can actually circumvent the peeling issue. Many varieties of hardneck garlic are single-skinned and easily peeled with a paring knife. No need to crush it and fight with those frustratingly thin paper-skin layers.
Is there a world cuisine that does not include garlic? Sami or Inuit, perhaps—although garlic can be grown as far north as Alaska. Chefs and food fanciers have sung the praises of this very simple crop for millennia. “If you can smell garlic, everything is all right,” declared famed British writer J.G. Ballard.
So bring this amiable, easygoing essential into your garden, your kitchen, and your extended family’s, make it your very own, and reap praise and love from everyone you know.
Getting Started
There are hundreds of varieties, so pick one to suit your fancy. I strongly recommend hardneck, single-skin types with a little color, as in my experience in the horticultural world, color means flavor. You can get your seeds by buying a few heads of garlic you like at a farmers market or organic food store or ordering online at a reputable source such as Territorial Seeds. Please don’t start with that horrid white stuff from Safeway.Planting
It takes little space—very little, in fact. You can grow a year’s supply for yourself in a two- by three-foot bed. If you want to be beneficent and give away garlic, double your space and presto, you’ve got several dozen extra bulbs. Takes care of your Christmas list.I produce about 100 large bulbs in a single bed measuring three by eight feet. I set aside 20 bulbs for seeds (more on that in a moment), keep a dozen for my own kitchen, and give away the rest, thus earning 10,000 good karma points from my fellow humans.
Garlic has just two key requirements: It’s a heavy feeder and must make much of its growth in cool, wet conditions.
Planting in the fall or early spring meets the first condition. Garlic plants are very hardy—mine have happily endured December temperatures down to 10 degrees F—and you can get past that (down to zero, say) by mulching. So, plant mid-October or early November—in my experience, any time before Thanksgiving is fine—4 inches apart in rows 8 inches apart, setting the cloves root side down so the top is about an inch below the soil surface. After that, you do nothing until mid-May.
If your garden regularly experiences subzero temperatures in winter, plant garlic cloves in mid-March or whenever the ground is workable up to early May, and plan to harvest in late August or September.
As for the soil, prepare a bed that’s half organic material, especially high-nitrogen stuff such as composted manure, coffee grounds, grass clippings, rotted leaves, and so on. Fish fertilizer is a superb side dressing in May, just before the plants start to set their new bulbs.
The goal is mid-term growth. The cloves will first send up an exploratory shoot; then grow a lavish, very dense root system; and then aim a leafy, single, sturdy stem toward the heavens. Once bulb-setting starts, plant growth mostly stops, so the bigger the plant you can grow by mid-May (or midsummer in spring-planted areas), the bigger the bulb will be 4 weeks later at harvest.
Watering may be needed in May, or in July and August if you are growing in a dry northern climate. Stop watering about a month before you plan to harvest.
Harvesting
Dig up the plants when the bulbs are fully grown, but don’t let them languish in the ground after that. Left to their own devices, garlic bulbs open up and spread out in an efflorescent radius, like cosmos blossoms; this is one of Allium sativum’s strategies for taking over the world in about 50 million years, spreading itself 2 inches a year. But I am sure the plant is happy for us to make use of it since we are extending its range far, far beyond its Asian and Middle Eastern homeland.How to tell when to harvest? You'll read that it’s ready when the first leaf turns brown, but in my experience, that’s way too early. Experience will tell you a general time to expect readiness—at my farm, it’s late June—and you check by digging up one plant to see. Cloves fully formed, a bit of color in the skin, and a stem starting to loosen from the bulb are ready!
Wash the bulbs. Ignore the advice forbidding this (why wouldn’t you wash dirt off your vegetables?) and then set the plants to cure in the sun. I hang mine between two bean trellises, but any place will do as long as they won’t get wet. After three or four weeks, cut off the stems, remove the roots, place them in a bowl, box, or bag (not plastic), and there you have it, a year’s supply of garlic.
Save enough seeds (the seeds are the individual cloves) to replicate your crop, or expand it if you like, and start over in the fall.
The Big Stink: Facts and Myths
It’s an AlliumOnions, leeks, shallots, chives, scallions, and decorative alliums are garlic’s close cousins, all belonging to the genus Allium. Garlic, specifically, is Allium sativum, the species name meaning “cultivated.” Alliums are within the lily family, so garlic is a distant, distant cousin to tulips and lilies—some of the latter, in fact, are edible.
The rose family is one of the botanical world’s largest, with thousands of plants ranging from the eponymous flower to apples, plums, and more. However, garlic is in the Liliaceae sector, not so vast and light-years distant from anything rosaceous.
So why is it called the stinking rose? No one knows, though it may be a mistranslation of the ancient Greek name for it. In my opinion, a clear-headed analysis reveals nothing rosy about it. Stinky? Well. Toss your own homegrown garlic into a skillet with good-quality olive oil and see what you think.
Long fabled as a vampire repellant, garlic has an obvious quality that may be effective. It’s hard to find vampires to test this, though, except in Hollywood.
A more relevant piece of folklore says that garlic is “as effective as 10 mothers” at fending off amorous young ladies for those who have eligible bachelor sons. It’s probably easier to test that.
Garlic’s healthful properties range from immune-boosting to cancer prevention to curing the common cold. It lowers blood pressure, prevents flu, eats up cholesterol, and is, all told, a miracle food that may promote life past 100 if you eat two bulbs a day. Don’t do that, though.
Elephant garlic is not garlic. It’s a shallot that some like because it is milder and has larger cloves than the genuine article. In other words, it’s Wonder Bread. If you want to grow an imposter, I can’t stop you. No one has any idea whether elephants actually like it.
