One of the first signs of spring in the garden is the garlic planted the previous fall. Snow may still be sprinkled throughout the yard, but those determined green bursts have broken through the soil. Growing garlic is satisfying in so many ways. Typically I forget that I planted something in the fall that will emerge in the spring, so the green surprise is always a welcome confirmation that winter is finally over.
The great thing about this harvest is that it comes twofold ~ scapes and bulbs. Garlic scapes are stunning in the way they curl out of the green tops of the plant. They are a delicacy, only experienced for a couple weeks out of the year, yet useful in any dish where you would add those trusty white cloves. Just finely chop the green scapes before cooking and enjoy!
When I first added garlic to the garden I actually stumbled upon plants in the spring at Gardeners Supply, which is not the typical way to start experimenting with this crop. The more conventional route is to purchase seed garlic, which you plant in the fall. You can then use cloves from your own harvest as seed to increase your yield the following year. It's amazing to see how one clove planted in the fall can turn into an entire bulb the following spring. Starting with six plants three years ago, we have built up to 35 this year. We diversified our crop with three rows of our own started from those original six plants and two of a Turkish Red variety from Green Mountain Garlic.
Harvesting garlic typically happens in the late summer once the bottom few leaves have turned yellow. It is important to hang your bulbs in a dry area for two to three weeks before using it for cooking. Once dry, storing bulbs is pretty simple, just keep them in a brown paper bag in a cabinet and they will last you the year until your next harvest (if you can keep them around that long).
My husband and I joke that the reason we rarely get sick is because of how much garlic we consume. It is multiple cloves daily. When a recipe calls for two cloves, we add eight. My coworkers swear my garlic consumption isn't an issue, but I wonder just how polite they are being. Studies have shown that garlic consumption has been linked to lower risk of cancer in the prostate, stomach, colon and breast. However, if you are looking to fight off cancer with a clove a day, make sure to let it rest on your cutting board for 15 minutes after you chop. Exposure to the air gives the anticancer agents a chance to form before they hit the oil in your pan. The sulfur compounds in garlic produce a very healing gas, which when released by our red blood cells help to keep our blood pressure under control. Keep calm and grow more garlic.
There are tremendous cardiovascular, anti-inflammatory and anti-viral benefits to garlic consumption as well. It's basically a rock star when it comes to health-supporting foods. I suppose that's why Hippocrates, our Father of Western Medicine, was known to prescribe garlic to treat a diverse array of medical conditions. I justify my excessive garlic consumption knowing the health benefits, but I do wonder if this stinky little addiction of mine may have played into the location of my office at work. Is it a coincidence that spend my 9 to 5 tucked away in a corner of an otherwise open floor plan?