If you are looking for something to “spice” up your garden, Cathy Isom has another super easy kitchen spice to grow at home. That’s coming up on This Land of Ours.
Garlic is another super easy kitchen spice, like ginger, that can be grown at home with very little effort. And you might ask yourself why not? Since this piece of deliciousness can be added to your favorite sauces and other meals. It is a little different in that it comes in bulbs rather than as rhizomes.
If you’ve ever had a fresh clove of garlic for some time and then all of a sudden you see a little green sprout. Well then, you’ve started a new plant. They are actually two types of garlic. Softneck and hardneck. Hardnecks have a sort of core about which cloves grow. Softneck lacks a defined stem, instead of having more of a spiral of cloves.
Whichever you prefer to plant, you’ll just need a fairly deep pot, over a foot, with a twelve-inch diameter. And, like ginger, the soil, a potting mix, needs to drain well or the garlic will have rotting problems. Choose the largest cloves to plant, and cook with the others. Put your cloves three inches under the surface of the soil, pointing upwards. Make sure the soil stays moist but 
drained. The best time to plant garlic is around October and expect it to produce around summer when its leaves turn yellow.
To store garlic, keep it in a cool climate, preferably a dark place, which will inhibit mold growth. It will last well up to 4 months. A great place is a low humidity pantry or a cool, dark place in your pantry. You can continue the growing cycle each season to make sure you have garlic all year.
I’m Cathy Isom…
Share this Post