The Stinking Rose

"The Stinking Rose", aka garlic, is one of our favorite seasonings to add to dishes. It is very flavorful and has been shown to have great health benefits. These benefits increase if you let the garlic sit after being crushed or chopped before cooking. Allicin is a sulfur compound that remains intact for 2-16 hr after being released. Garlic can help improve iron metabolism and a good source of selenium. There may also be cardiovascular benefits associated with consuming garlic. For more detailed information I have included a great website that details some of the health benefits of garlic.

Garlic bunch

Clove with narrow side up

We planted an entire garlic bunch in our front garden near the herbs. To plant the garlic the bunch had to be broken up into individual cloves, but you leave the husk on. Each clove was planted pointed up (wide end down, pointy/narrow end up) about 4 inches apart and a couple inches deep. Nate ended up ordering a garlic bunch from Amazon, our natural go-to! The kind that we bought was organic and intended for being grown in a garden.




  

Garlic garden - sprouting

We planted four rows with about four to five cloves in each row.

Garlic plant - small sprout

Now that every clove has sprouted, I needed to figure out when we can harvest! After reading multiple websites, I realized that we may have planted the garlic a bit late in the season. However, it seems like they are sprouting and growing as expected.

The sprouts start to turn yellow and fall over and you want to harvest before the plant gets dried out. I took pictures of our garlic garden and you can see from the photo that each of the cloves have sprouted. The bottom has started to yellow and so I thought that maybe the garlic was almost ready to harvest. I pulled one out to see how far along the plants are - and you can see from the photo they are not ready yet :-) I will still keep an eye on the garlic throughout the summer and I imagine that towards the end of the summer or maybe early fall we will have some garlic to cook. It will be really nice to be able to just walk out to the front door and pull a bunch out for cooking.

My next post will likely be about cooking green tomatoes. We found a recipe for fried green tomatoes and since we have a handful of medium-sized green tomatoes I figured I could try making the dish this weekend.

Websites:
Health benefits of Garlic: http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=60
Growing Garlic: http://www.almanac.com/plant/garlic