Eating garlic greens

 

We plant garlic every fall (upper NY) and harvest it the next summer.

We do not let them develop seeds at the top of the stems that develop (cut
stems off).

But somehow new garlic plants show up in the garden.
Some surprisingly far from the planted ones.

Don't know where the seeds come from or how these plants get started.
No one near us also plants garlic.

So we have these garlic's growing that we do not need and I had heard that
the greens can be cut up and cooked with eggs.

Has anyone heard of that?

What I was wondering was: do people include a lot of greens or is just that
they add a small amount for seasoning.

Or maybe I misunderstood and they use the cloves (not using the greens at
all.)

Or maybe there is another use for the greens.

Thanks

 



First, garlic usually doesn't grow from seeds*.  But the little bulbils on
top of the scape sure do.  If you manage to find them all, you're a better
gardener than I!  And I always manage to miss a few bulbs at harvest, or
leave a broken off clove about, so there are always a few garlic plants
where last year's grew.

But to get round to your question, garlic greens are just fine in
stir-frys, chopped up in eggs, or whatever suits your fancy.  I know a
commercial grower who has a nice secondary marked in garlic greens... he
just throws the leftover cloves that were too small to plant willy-nilly in
a bed to produce greens, usually several cuttings before they run out of
energy.  A nearby Asian market is happy to get them!

Those scapes make nice pesto; I freeze a bunch in plastic ice cube trays,
then bag the frozen cubes for future use.


Gary Woods AKA K2AHC- PGP key on request, or at home.earthlink.net/~garygarlic
Zone 5/6 in upstate New York, 1420' elevation. NY WO G

 



*But you probably knew that.

(Sorry I forgot this at the end of my previous post)


Gary Woods AKA K2AHC- PGP key on request, or at home.earthlink.net/~garygarlic
Zone 5/6 in upstate New York, 1420' elevation. NY WO G

 

On Fri, 09 May 2008 12:46:50 -0400, Gary Woods wrote:


I didn't know that.  I always grow my garlic from gloves.  The ones I
saved from before, or more from any random source.  I thought that
farmers would do seed because I thought it would be cheaper.  After
seeing your post I put "garlic seeds" though google and now I don't know
what to think.

stonerfish

 



The short version:

Garlic gave up sex long ago, and doesn't produce true seeds, so what you're
doing in planting cloves is how garlic reproduces.  Hardneck garlic puts up
scapes with a bunch of "bulbils" on top, usually at some cost to the main
bulb, which is why we cut them off.  You can let the scapes go and plant
the little bulbils, but it will take more than a season to get full-sized
garlic bulbs.  Growers sometimes to this to avoid soil-borne diseases if
this is an issue with the original stock.
There has been a lot of research the past few years, and garlic can be
persuaded to produce true seeds... more of interest for producing hybrids
and other genetic tinkering; I don't know (or especially care to) the
details.
Shameless plug:  google "garlic seed foundation."  They're good folks.

Oh yeah:  Asian cooks are often happy to get garlic scapes for cooking.
Cut them before they start to curl to keep as much energy as possible in
the main bulb, as well as to have nice tender stems to stir fry or make
pesto.


Gary Woods AKA K2AHC- PGP key on request, or at home.earthlink.net/~garygarlic
Zone 5/6 in upstate New York, 1420' elevation. NY WO G