These are Elephant Garlic bulbs. Elephant Garlic is actually a type of giant leek that forms bulbs. I’m not sure it has the regular medicinal qualities of its more sharp-tasting garlic-brothers…. but I am sure it is a still a very healthy thing to eat. I’ve eaten a half pound or more of these at a time… roasted over fire, wrapped in foil and saturated with olive oil. I got the original bulbs from some fellow from whom I had purchased a Roto-tiller about 25 years ago. Ever since I’ve kept the original strain going. I don’t always harvest them yearly… I often let a single bulb grow into a clump for a few years…. Above is a sample clump that resulted from a single clove being planted some four years ago. I now need to break it apart much like you’d divide flower bulbs. These ones should have had this done BEFORE the rains came and got the roots going….
In the photos above we see the clump has been hosed off, to remove most of the soil, and let the roots separate more easily. Separating the roots is much like de-tangling long hair after a four day motorcycle ride.
In our area with the mild winters, it is usual to plant garlic in the middle of October, so I am two months behind. They’ll still grow well though…. and again I’ll likely not harvest in June when they haveripened. So they’ll grow on again for another couple of years in the new spots on two terraces on the hill side
This is how I load the bulbs into the soil…. I just raked the terrace of the excess brush, and then sliced into the soil with a flat spade, pushed it forward to open a little slice into which I dropped the bulbs. I then removed the spade, and pushed the soil around the growing shoot.After this they should be watered to let the soil settle around the newly disturbed and broken roots. Elephant garlic likes good soil…. In our area the garlic does pretty well with just the usual rainfall. It grows through the winter, and matures in the spring when the rains stop. As the early spring comes in, and the foliage starts to die all watering must cease. The bulbs should be harvested and stored in a totally dry, airy and dark location…. We don’t have much of a place like that, so I leave them in the ground where they can be dug as needed through the summer.
Once winter comes again, the bulbs remaining in the soil will start to grow new roots and then foliage…. this is the time you can’t eat the sprouted bulbs…. so if we do need garlic and don’t have any stored, I can harvest the occasional bulb with stalk…. they look much like a giant green onion or leek, slice nicely into a stir-fry or fresh salad. Later when the stalks have become more mature and starting to become pithy, the plants will put out their flower heads…. these can be eaten in several stages of growth….
So even though we only eat the garlic bulbs for half the year… we still get really fine eating out of the other parts of the plants during the rest of the year.
This is one of the clumps of garlic. It is at the stage where the flowers are dead, the stalk has decayed… and the bulbs are going dormant. At this stage they should not be watered anymore. But these ones were growing in the cactus patch, so they did get watered a bit each summer, and survived through well for four years.
This is how large these bulbs can become. This one was about one pound.
They only get this size when grown under optimal conditions. In this case I planted the largest bulbs at the proper time, in perfect soil… rich and loamy. I water a few times until the autumn rains came and kepot them moist through the entire winter….. then as March came, the rains stopped… the seed stalks were harvested as they came out to direct growth to the bulbs, and I did not water. When the foliage showed four or five leaves drying well on the plants, I took them all up and stored them away. But since then I’ve decided it is so much easier to let them store in the ground, grown in the large clumps. We can harvest a bit when we need some, and not haveto worry about a bunch of garlic stored in the attic. Less work, lazier, easier… the bulbs aren’t as pretty though. Grown in the clumps they do not get as large, and as they sit throughthe summer in the ground, they get stained by the soil, so they’re not as clean and pristine. Sometimes the bulbs will separate into the individual cloves, this will allow a lot of dirt to get into the bulb, reducing its use cooked whole in foil. But my stomach doesn’t know the difference.. they still taste the same.