Growing Garlic

Source Used: A                

Three Most Interesting Points:

1.       Garlic skin is apparently difficult for the author to remove. I can’t help but chuckle a bit. It’s exceedingly easy once you get the hang of it (or crush it with the flat side of a broad knife). So there goes the advantage he stated for the hardneck garlic! I do wonder what the scape looks like though; it sounds interesting.

2.       In order to find out when the garlic is ready, one looks at how dead the sheaths are? That’s both morbid and fascinating. But I guess that’s the whole Circle of Life thing – something has to go for something else to have a chance. In this case, I guess I would take the bulb over the top of the plant.

This, right here, was probably one of the bigger influences on my childhood.

3.       Heat can make seed cloves mature into mutant garlic with only one huge clove. I … would like to see that.

Question: With fruits and herbs and potatoes and carrots I understand how people came to eat them: fruits look good to eat, herbs smell divine, and other root vegetables you can basically pull straight out of the ground and eat. But I wonder how we first got around to using garlic? It smells (and is much better cooked) and needs to be dried before usage. I wonder who it was that first decided “hey, I’m going to take this smelly white lump, dry it, and then eat it”?

Growth cycle? What’s that?

To Look For: If we’ve got the hardneck type of garlic, I’d love to see what our serpent-like scape looks like.