Garlic Harvest: My Favorite Edible Medicinal Plant
Garlic (Allium sativum), is hands down my favorite thing to grow. When I sold my house years ago I literally put in the contract that the move in date could not happen before my garlic harvest came out. Garlic is a fool proof crop that gives you serious dividends. From one clove you get an entire head of garlic. From one head of planted garlic you can often times get 6-9 more heads of garlic.
Garlic is not only relatively pest free, but even tells you when it’s ready to harvest by the leaves starting to turn yellow and die back. Everyone knows that garlic is delicious in just about every savory meal. I could eat garlic at every meal. And I do quite often.
Medicinally garlic is great for your heart and antimicrobial. Honey infused with garlic is great for supporting your body in fighting infections. That maybe why I almost never get the back to school or winter time colds my friends get.
How do you grow garlic? You choose the biggest heads you have and break them apart into individual cloves. Then you choose the biggest cloves and plant those. Watch out for any cloves that have two cloves inside their paper cover. Those won’t grow as big of heads of garlic. Next prepare you bed with lots of nitrogen rich material, garlic loves nitrogen. Dig a 2-4 inch deep hole, stick the garlic in it pointy side up and then cover the whole. Once you’ve planted all the garlic mulch it with a thick layer of leaves, or bark or even shredded corn stalks. This will protect the garlic and keep it from coming out of dormancy too early.
In most places you’ll want to plant garlic between October 15 and November 15. Of course if you are in Alaska you may need to start in September or in Southern Arizona you could plant as late a December.
Harvesting garlic is such a fun event. It never gets old even after 15 years doing it.
Scroll through the gallery to see how the garlic went from being in the ground to dried, cured and processed for storage.
Here’s my recipe for garlic honey.
Do you grow garlic? Do you love garlic as much as I do? Share in the comments below what varieties of garlic you grow.
