It's time to plant garlic. It overwinters beautifully and then shoots up lovely, tasty greens in the spring. Even the scapes [flower stalks] from the hard neck varieties are delicious if you get them young. I planted some last year that I took from the big bag o' garlic that we get from Sam's. Nothing fancy. They grew and I harvested small heads in May that I used for Honeyed Onion Garlic Jam. OMG. Fresh garlic - even the little heads that I got - is darn good!
I decided to get some better garlic to plant this fall and was surprised to see how many varieties are out there. I got mine from Urban Farmer. I decided to go with the elephant garlic because the heads get big. I figured that even if mine don't get as big as theirs, at least they'll get bigger than the little bitty ones that I grew this year.
So, I ordered 8 oz., which I thought was going to be way too much, but which turned out to be only 6 gigantic cloves when they arrived. Gigantic. As big as a whole head of the other stuff. Soooo. I'll be planting that and some of the little stuff, too. The soil in the garlic bed is pretty sandy and hasn't been amended much in the last couple of years, so I'm thinking maybe it's time to mix in some chicken dirt and boost it.
