Growing garlic

This is a story about my husband Larry's garden. Larry is an incredible gardener. He's been gardening since he was 5 years old, and he started a vegetable garden in our back yard as soon as we moved into our house in April, 1986. Eventually I asked him to please make the garden organic, and he did.

A number of years ago, a friend who also had a vegetable garden moved away, and before she left she dug up some of the garlic from her garden and gave a head to each of her friends. Some people ate theirs, but Larry planted his, and every year he harvested a few heads of garlic and used them in salad dressing, remembering to be grateful to the friend who moved away. He could have grown them outside the garden fence, because deer don't like garlic, but he kept them inside the fence with the other vegetables. They didn't need full sun, which was convenient.

Meanwhile, I was washing and cooking the collards, kale and broccoli that he brought in from his vegetable garden on summer days (among many other vegetables), and I was getting frustrated with the aphids. Aphids are tiny soft-bodied insects that live in large colonies, and the ones I found on these veggies were gray. I could wipe them off of flat leaves, but it was harder to wipe them off the curly kale leaves and impossible to wipe them off the broccoli florets. I complained, but I didn't want pesticides sprayed on the vegetable garden, so for a while we were at a loss as to what to do.

Then one day Larry read that aphids don't like garlic. He divided up the small clump of garlic plants growing in his garden and put one on either side of every broccoli, collard and kale plant (see first photo). The garlic and the other vegetables happily grew together, and just as he had hoped, there were no more aphids on the vegetables. In the middle of the summer the garlic leaves die back (and the plants temporarily go dormant); that is the time to harvest the heads of garlic. Larry now harvests enough garlic to last us for a year--he keeps the heads on a tray in our basement, which is cool and dry and fairly dark for most of the year. We make it last by choosing any cloves that look like they are starting to sprout and using them first. He still has loads of garlic plants left in the ground to protect next year's vegetables from aphids, and the following spring he digs up buckets of garlic plants to give away to friends who might want to grow some. And armloads of garlic plants even end up in the compost pile (see second photo)!

A few years ago we heard about a vegetable called garlic scapes (see third photo). They are the stalk that the garlic plant sends up every year around Memorial Day, which produces miniature garlic bulblets that drop off into the soil. These are not flowers. They are another way for the plant to reproduce. As the stalks grow, they start to bend (see fourth photo). Some stalks bend into a loop and some just curve, but as soon as they start to bend they should be harvested and eaten. In fact, they should be cut off even if you don't want to eat them, since the plant will expend energy to grow and mature the bulblets, and the real, underground garlic cloves will therefore be smaller if you don't remove the scapes. We usually cut them into inch-long pieces (see fifth photo) and saute them in butter or olive oil and just eat them, but there are other recipes available. Harvest scapes as soon as they start to bend, because if they get too old they are very tough. We freeze whatever we can't eat and have them several more times during the year.

So, from a gift of one head of garlic and one simple organic pest control scheme, we now get enough heads of garlic to last for the year, several meals of garlic scapes, and aphid-free vegetables. How's that for a success story?