Reflecting on a garlicky summer - Viki Mather

My garlic grew taller than me this summer. Long, slender “flower” stalks rose to the sky, bearing clusters of tiny garlic clones at their tips.

A couple of little purple flowers tried to squeeze out between the fat little clones. These never get fertilized, never produce a true garlic “seed.”

However, those tiny bulblets at the top of the garlic stalks serve the same purpose. Plant them, and within a couple of years, new garlic cloves will form in the earth.

Two years ago, I planted several dozen of the largest top sets in two of the raised beds of my garden. Most of them grew from a top-set bulblet of a quarter inch in diameter to fat bulbs now an inch in diameter.

I left most of them in the original bed to grow for another year. The variety of garlic that I grow nearly always will produce full, large-cloved sets in the second year.

When I pulled the two-year-olds up over the past few weeks, they proved to be well worth the two years in two raised beds in my garden. Most of the bulbs are at least two inches in diameter, some are nearly three.

Garlic is usually grown only from the bottom cloves. These are separated, placed at least eight inches apart, and covered with just an inch of soil. I plant them in late October, but some people plant them in September.

If they are planted well before the ground freezes, they will begin to grow in the fall. Some say this gives them a head start for spring. Perhaps it does.

The garlic I left in the ground last August to grow for the second year, did put up little green shoots last fall, and it was ready to harvest just a bit earlier than the regular sets I planted in late October last year.

Both beds produced really beautiful large garlic bulbs.

In the middle of June, the garlic plants started to send up the centre stalks. Traditionally, these are broken off as soon as they appear so the plant’s energy will go into the bottom cloves. I usually break the tops off at least half the garlic plants. When they are young and tender, I use them in soups and sandwich spreads.

I always leave some of the tops to mature so I can plant them. I let the top sets on the largest plants grow because they produce the largest bulblets, and they will still produce a large bottom set of cloves.

Keep in mind that while all the hardneck varieties of garlic will produce the little top sets in the summer, only those with just a dozen or so fat little cloves in the topset will produce new, big cloves in two years.

If the top sets are tiny, it may take five or six years before new, and small-cloved bottom sets appear.

I hope you got out to the Garlic Festival in Sudbury this past summer, and bought fresh Ontario garlic to get you through to next summer, and maybe even plant a few of the bulbs this fall in your own garden.

Viki Mather has been writing for Northern Life since the spring of 1984. During 2011, she takes us back to some of those older writings as she prepares to publish a book of “In the Bush.” This article was originally published in the summer of 2001.