Preparing for Green Garlic

This week I'm sorting through last year's crop of garlic, to make sure what's left is still sound. It's about now that stored garlic remembers its previous life out on the plot and prepares for the next growing season by starting to sprout.

As the growing weather was poor last year, many of my bulbs are smaller than usual and quite a few of the cloves have been fiddly to deal with for cooking. I still have plenty of bulbs left, so I had a bit of a 'why on earth am I putting up with this?' moment and decided to separate out the larger cloves. As you can see, there's some smaller cloves left over.

I remembered my 'accidental' green garlic from way back and so I've sown these into various pots. The idea is I'll have 'clumps' of green garlic in a few weeks time which can be used for stir fries, stews and flavouring salad dressings. They're too small for bulb growing as little cloves in turn beget little bulbs. This approach means we'll have some fresh garlic stems to use ahead of the main crop of bulbs.

Also NAH will be pleased as there's no more fiddly cloves to deal with when he makes our regular Thursday night curry. Harvesting trendy green garlic and a happy NAH - that's win-win all round :)