How to grow great garlic the way grandma did
I learned my gardening skills from my Italian grandmother, who created many sprawling gardens. Her inspiration helped me decide what I would grow in my own garden. For eye appeal, the garden would have many flowers, but more important, it would have herbs to provide my family with curatives.
One of the essentials for this purpose is a bountiful plot of garlic. My grandmother believed that the aromatic garlic clove was meant to be appreciated and enjoyed passionately. Most backyard gardeners are well aware of this bulbous perennial's reputation and attributes. They also know this fragrant plant has one of the garden's prettiest blooms. A relative of the lily, it has huge ball-like blossoms made of hundreds of tiny lavender blooms that -- like the bulbs -- are rich in sugar and pungent.
With little attention, garlic returns year after year. Ancient Romans believed strongly in its powers, attributing more than 60 medical cures to it. They believed that eating garlic made their workers strong and their soldiers brave. Medieval ladies ate it to make their skin more beautiful and smooth. People have used garlic to treat toothaches, sore throats and earaches and even to ward off snakes, witches and vampires. From my grandmother, I learned that there are two main kinds of garlic.
Actually, there are three, but she didn't care for the third variety, known as elephant garlic, Allium ampeloprasum, a plant with enormous cloves but little flavor. Grandma preferred to grow the common garlic, the white-skinned supermarket type, plus the silver-skin types generally used for braiding and available at farmers' markets. Cultivation: Garlic grows best in loamy soils that are fertile and high in organic matter.
My grandmother made her own potent compost from garden debris and kitchen scraps. She said anyone who can grow onions can grow garlic because the culture is similar. Garlic does well with high amounts of fertilizer, and Grandma was a stickler for keeping the garden soil well nourished and moist. She believed that dry soil was the cause of irregularly shaped bulbs and that heavy clay soils would also create misshaped bulbs and make harvesting difficult.
She faithfully added organic matter, such as compost, to the soil every couple of months to keep it soft and crumbly. I plant rows of garlic cloves 3 to 5 inches apart in an upright position at a depth of 1/2 to 1 inch. Setting the bulbs in an upright position ensures a straight neck. Be sure to allow 15 to 20 inches between the rows.
Don't divide the bulbs into cloves until you're just about to plant because early separation results in decreased yields. Ideally, the soil is deep, fertile and well drained with a rich mixture of compost and a good dressing of a general garden fertilizer when sowing. The lengthening days of spring are the signal for the undeveloped side buds to start forming into cloves.
Garlic can be planted in autumn or early winter. In warm climates, garlic planted in autumn will remain dormant for a few weeks, then develop roots and a shoot. With the onset of winter, growth is fairly slow. The cold is needed to initiate the side buds. If the garlic sprouts have emerged, they will survive freezes and snowfalls, but they should be mulched heavily for protection.
Garlic varieties do adapt to a range of day lengths and temperatures, but don't expect all varieties to do well in our area. Rocambole garlic is a tougher culture that can handle a variety of conditions. And, in hot areas, the 'Creole' silver-skin types are far more reliable than most others. Harvest: The garlic plants are ready to harvest when the foliage has died off or mostly died off.
Rocambole is usually ready to harvest a month or so before common garlic. Garlic stores well in a wide range of temperatures, but sprouts are produced most quickly at temperatures at or above 40 degrees. The humidity in storage should be near 65 to 70 percent at all times to discourage mold development and root formation. Uses: I grew up in a family that used garlic both as a seasoning and as a medicine for just about everything.
I remember an old recipe Grandma concocted for us kids every time we had a bad cough or cold. First, she sliced an onion into a pot of water and measured a large spoonful of sugar and honey into the pot -- and here's the important part -- she threw in a handful of garlic. She boiled this on the stove until it formed a syrup.
It took some doing to persuade me to swallow this stuff, especially during the flu season, when Grandma insisted on giving us kids a big spoonful of this mixture before we left for school in the morning. We didn't catch cold that year -- possibly because our breath was so strong no one dared get close enough to pass on a germ. (Hint: Parsley is a good remedy for garlic breath. Also, rubbing your fingertips over stainless steel or rubbing fresh coffee between your fingertips will help remove garlic's lingering odor.)
Hippocrates and Galen spoke highly of garlic's attributes, but it's only recently that modern medicine is rediscovering the curative powers of this plant. Researchers are finding that garlic contains allicin, an antibacterial agent. Many people use garlic to treat the cold virus, diarrhea and poor blood clotting and to lower blood pressure. As a kid walking home from school, I could detect the aroma of garlic coming from Grandma's bubbling saucepan halfway down the street.
And when I opened the kitchen door, the overwhelming aroma surrounded me like a warm hug. There are a lot of things that link me to my past, but few rekindle memories as quickly as the smell of garlic sizzling in a frying pan. To this day, whenever I smell the aroma of freshly diced garlic, I'm reminded of Grandma and her warm, cozy kitchen. It was there that her wonderful recipes all began with the dicing of her fresh garden garlic. Garlic's aromas and flavors satisfy both my biological and psychological needs.
It never mattered what time of day or night I visited my grandma's house, she'd fly to the stove, pour olive oil in a pan, toss in several garlic cloves and the cure for everything from heartache to hunger was about to be served.
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