Gardening And Green Garlic

Green garlic, potatoes, carrot from our last harvest beginning of December.

I took advantage of some recent warm weather to do our final harvest and close up our garden for another year. It was easy as there were only a few carrots, potatoes, beets, and our immature garlic. 

What also made it easy is that for the past 2 seasons we have not been cleaning our garden in the fall. Now we are done after we harvest, leaving the messiness to clean in the spring. 

From what I have read, insects find an uncleaned garden a more welcoming winter haven with lots of places to take shelter from the cold. I don't mind waiting until spring to do the tidying up after the winter residents have emerged.

Our crop of green garlic frozen for storage.

The most experimental part of our garden this year was planting our garlic late. Very late. Well into June late. We were not sure how it would turn out, but could not contemplate our garden without it.

The last time I posted about our garlic experiment, a reader (thanks, Alex) commented that green garlic was very good. We had never heard about eating garlic in this stage before, so this tip expanded our minds, our diet, and our garden.

We pulled up all the immature garlic and processed it. The top green parts we cut and froze. The bottom bits were baked, cooled, and then frozen with the greens. 

Some parts were baked to brown and crispy, and WOW were those bits tasty.

Initially everything went into a ziplock bag, but it still smelled strong (and by strong I mean yummy) in the freezer. I transferred the contents into two 500 ml canning jars, and this eliminated the odour leakage.

We thought we wouldn't be able to store garlic this year, because we did not get mature bulbs we could cure and hang in our pantry. We were wrong. Green garlic is great, and we have a quantity that should last a while.

For a moment I thought we might actually have to buy some from the grocery store. 

Not just yet. Garlic independence is still ours.