We love to share what we love... and we love garlic and shallots! You'll find gorgeous seed garlic & shallots listed here every late Summer/early Fall. And don't forget the fertility... our Organic Garlic and Shallot Fertilizer has specially blended diverse amendments to feed both our soil and our alliums, and in turn, us!
Transcript: Elephant Garlic! My entire life I thought here we are zone 5 way too cold to grow elephant garlic that’s what I’ve heard. And so this last fall we decided to plant some because we’re constantly pushing the envelope here at Fruition Seeds to see what is possible. And indeed sometimes general knowledge is generally correct, but sometimes it’s very incorrect and we just take everything with a grain of salt and want to experiment explore, push the boundaries, push the envelope, so yes, we planted elephant garlic last fall.
So, elephant garlic, totally different genus species than classic garlic. It’s more closely related to leeks. And so as a result, among other things, it’s not as cold hardy. So we mulched it really well. Perhaps you can see we have some lovely rye straw mulch that we mulched it so that protects it more in the winter to be sure that it doesn’t frosty heave as readily and it’s started growing first thing this spring and it’s been going gangbusters.
And it is so beautiful. They’ve just started to put up their scapes. Of course, they’re not exactly typical scapes; they look exactly like what leek flowers look like almost exactly like what a leaf flower would look like. So here is a garlic scape. And yes, it classic garlic scape. And here are just emerging, they’re super straight, they have these wonderful little caps on them. And these leeks, these elephant garlic would actually create true seed where the scapes of garlic itself true garlic will only create bulbils, these tiny little vegetative clonal reproductive bitlits that there’s no sexual pre-production, it’s all vegetative. So they’re exact clones and garlic of the parent where there’s actual male female gametes in the elephant garlic same as leeks. And so these would create true seed, but we’re not going to let them grow true seed. We’re going to go home and eat them along with our garlic scapes because we want them to be focusing on making a great big beautiful bulb under the ground.
So yes, you can harvest these just at the same time as you’re harvesting your classic garlic scapes and they’re delicious Of course, elephant garlic tastes really different than classic garlic a tastes very much like more mild more like a leek and the greens are tastes much more strongly of onions themselves rather than garlic. So you’ll find as you chop these up, the stems are a lot more fibrous. Then a young tender stem of a garlic classic garlic but that’s why we harvest them really young and yes are going to be enjoying them tonight.
And I cannot wait for you to enjoy growing your own elephant garlic as well friends and I wonder what else I love. I think I’ll spend the rest I know I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering what else do I think is unreasonable to grow. And granted, I’m not about to start coconuts. But I love pushing the envelope of what we grow and challenging those assumptions. And I hope that you challenge your assumptions in your garden, in your life in our world, and together we will grow a more abundant delicious world together.
