Green Garlic is a Gourmet Delicacy You Need to Plant This Spring
Green garlic (also called spring garlic or baby garlic) is simply a young, immature garlic bulb that hasn’t yet divided. It looks like an overgrown scallion or small leek, and in fact it tastes like a cross of the two, with a heady essence of garlic.
It’s a vegetable in its own right and if you happen to come across green garlic, consider yourself lucky—its season is short and it only appears through spring while supplies last, since it’s often a secondary crop.
But at home, you can grow green garlic as a staple crop, and it’s ready in half the time as regular garlic! (That’s right… no need to wait upwards of 9 to 10 months before you can harvest.)
Commercially-sold green garlic are actually thinnings from a farmer’s garlic field, planted in the fall and pulled in early spring to ensure a productive harvest for the rest of the crop.
In a home garden, however, green garlic is a crop that can be planted in spring and harvested in summer.
In my experience, I can plant garlic cloves in spring and pull the young plants at the same time my mature (fall-planted) garlic is ready for harvest in mid-summer.
This is one of the benefits of spring-planted garlic. Not only do you get a completely different crop that you can use a different way, but because you don’t have to wait all season long for the garlic to grow, spring garlic is a good way to fill up that odd patch of soil in the garden.
As soon as the ground warms up or thaws in spring, you can stick a clove from your seed garlic here and there, wherever you find space: around your tomato transplants, next to the carrot bed, in the middle of your salad greens, and in spots where seeds never germinated.