The year of tiny garlic
9:25 AM Sun, Jul 29, 2007 | Permalink
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"Have you pulled your garlic yet? You should," asked my colleague Sara Cooke Friday. She had given me bulbs from her husband's garden to plant last fall, and periodically checked in to see how they were doing.. "I pulled one up the other night, but it was small, so I put it back in," I said. "Pull it now. My husband's got his all out," she said. "They're tiny this year. We think it's because the winter was so warm and they sprouted." Indeed, they had sprouted shortly after planting in October, and grew and stayed green well past Christmas. The sprouts were about 5 inches high when the freeze finally went deep in late January. The very tips yellowed. Then growth resumed in spring and all looked wonderful as they grew. So it was disappointing to pull up such small bulbs. Had Sara not assured me this was widespread, I would of course have thought it was my fault, bad gardening. (Now I'm sure I'll hear from readers with gargantuan bulbs, and it will turn out to be my fault.) Yesterday, the family spontaneously gathered on our porch around dinnertime. We were chatting with daughter and grandson when my brother arrived with tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant and green beans. He has full sun in his yard, and a neighbor plants and shares there -- all he has to do is water. Another neighbor wants to use his sun, too -- soon he'll be hosting the shady city neighborhood's community garden. Inspired by this bounty, and by steaks ready to grill, together we gang-tackled the harvest of tiny garlic, incidentally pulling weeds that looked like garlic but weren't. (Today I'll fill the space with extra pepper plants currently doing not much in pots.) We have probably waited a bit too long. Some of the garlic sheathes have shedded. A few broke off on the way out of the soil, and it is those you see in the blue colander above. This hardneck Rocambole garlic is delicious -- strong, with a creamy texture, easily sliced very thin. I understand why it's considered gourmet garlic, superior in flavor to the softneck garlic in stores, which is more widely grown commercially because it keeps well, which this doesn't. But these petite things are a far cry from the big beautiful bulbs I began with. "Next year," Sara promised. "Just save some heads and plant the cloves in the fall and next year they'll come bigger, if the weather's normal."
We'll give some away, of course. Then I'll dry what's left for a few days, braid them, and, come October, plant cloves again. Some I'll put up for later. A page titled Preparing and storing garlic at The Garlic Store warns, "NEVER allow garlic in oil to sit at room temperature. It is a hotbed for botulism. Keep it refrigerated or frozen at all times." At the bottom of that page, suggestions, Using a food processor, I simply pulse until the garlic pieces are the size I want, making sure that I don't place too much garlic in the processor at a time in order to avoid too great variation in the size of the pieces or the garlic turning to mush. Some then wrap the chopped garlic in small packets of plastic and freeze them. You can also add oil to the garlic mixture, 1 part garlic to 2 parts oil, and freeze it in a container or - as I prefer - in ice cube trays. That makes it easy to pop out the garlic you need.... Would I hope for a harsher winter so we'd have bigger garlic? Of course not. 
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What happens if you just leave some garlic in the ground for next year? I am not sure what "Some of the garlic sheathes have shedded." means... Thanks.
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Kat, you asked, "What happens if you just leave some garlic in the ground for next year?"
Found this:
"If you leave the bulbs in the soil they will start to re-shoot, when this happens you will loose the bulb that it shoots from, it would be best for you to pull all the crop up and start fresh using your own clove stock. "
The center will rot, just like garlic that sprouts in your kitchen in the spring.
Each leaf above ground is the white papery layer on garlic you buy. Peel that back and you have the cloves.
Leave it in the ground too long and you'll have naked garlic, without sheaves. It's perfectly good, but it won't keep.
When I planted the individual cloves, sometime in October, they sprouted immediately. I'm wondering if I should wait a bit longer this year.
Like other spring bulbs that need a cold period, you want them to stay down there and go dormant for winter.
One year, maybe 15 years ago, I still had some unplanted spring flower bulbs in late November. The ground was frozen hard, but I'd carelessly left a tarp on one sunny spot. The ground wasn't frozen under that, and I put those bulbs in Thanksgiving morning.
The only indicator of winter I have is whether the squirrels strip the berries off my giant old holly tree. Bad winters, they take them all. Last winter, they left most of them.
Maybe come October I'll ask you all to help me pick a date to plant the garlic, based on the latest scientific data, your aching back, astrology transits and your own squirrel oracles.
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More: Found this discussion. The questions comes from New Mexico in mid-march.
Q.LAst year I planted a row of each with plants purchased from Gurneys. We had a family emergency and the garden was left to basically die off. Now I am getting ready this year and am cleaning it out etc and notice that bot the onion and garlic that were left in the ground are "growing".,,,, nice green shoots form both... do I leave them or tear themn out and replant with new?
have no clue...
A. The garlic bulb consists of cloves that each grow a new plant the following Spring. You could carefully divide these and plant them several inches apart. If you do this now, you will have a nice round garlic bulb for each plant. If you leave them to grow in a clump, each bulb will be smaller and misshapen. You need to divide soon if you want each plant to recover from transplant shock and have time to develop properly.
I don't know about the onion.
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Should the garlic cloves turn green in color while acidifying in vinegar?
Thanks
Sal
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Sal, it's common and okay. Check this out:
When Garlic Turns Green--and Why; Pungent Words from Harold McGee on the Science of Cooking
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