Back in November, we put in a bed of garlic to grow over winter.  Neither of us have ever grown garlic before (as adults – my Dad planted some a few times when I was a kid).  The process was relatively new to us, but it turned out to be a fun adventure!

The garlic sprouted and grew over the course of the winter, and for the most part resisted being munched by gophers from below and rabbits from the top.  We lost a few of the starter cloves that we put in, but our resulting harvest was more than enough.  We pulled out four very perfect new heads, and three that we definitely kept in the ground for too long that had re-sprouted into what we refer to as “super garlic”.  Garlic is supposed to be harvested when the plant dies back, which never really happened with our super-garlics, as some of the outer cloves just kept growing!  Not ideal, but we learned for next year.

We pulled out the super garlic this weekend, and I have to say, it was very cool.  Each of the new sprouts had started to form new heads, each with up to 4 new cloves of garlic attached.  We probably could have separated these out and allowed the new heads to dry separately, but we decided to use these up quickly.  When we harvested them, we really weren’t sure if the newly sprouted garlic cloves had actually formed new heads like they did.  We also could have re-planted each new sprout and let them fully form new heads, but we are in the process of re-wiring our beds and planting for summer and decided that the garlic bed had it’s time for now. 

Upon breaking down our super garlics this weekend, the three plants resulted in about two cups of beautiful, fresh garlic cloves.  Maybe about 40 cloves in total, which is very cool.  Stay tuned to the next post to see what I made with our super garlics, and probably more posts after that since we have so much garlic to get through!