Elephant Garlic Planting

[benboo]

I pulled up my elephant garlic this month, and now I have dozens of hard-shelled little bulbils. I am not exactly sure how to plant these, because they are not anything like the top setting onions or garlics.
I am assuming that it would be safe to plant them now, because when the garlic is pulled there are always some bulbils left behind. How do you usually plant these?

[Walk]

We don't bother with the small bulbils as they take more than a year to size up to anything. We eat them if we run out of all other garlic, or use them in next year's pickles. If you cut off the root end and use a nut cracker, you can get the very hard peel off. They store for well over a year in their hard coating.

[mountaindweller]

Do you use the small bulbils without peeling? Actually that is a very good idea. I plant elephant garlic too, mostly in the ornamental border but it is not hard shelled here. I don't know what variety it is, but it has huge bulbs and they are very easy to peel and chop.

[Walk]

The regular cloves of our elephant garlic have skins like a normal hard-necked garlic and are quite easy to peel. It's only the little bulbils that are hard as rocks. The only way we've been able to get them peeled is to first semi-crush them, either with a nut cracker or maybe putting them on a cutting board and using the bottom of a frying pan. Once the shell is broken, the little garlic pearls come out quite nicely. I usually throw them into a bowl at harvest time and forget about them until the next harvest or until I make cuke pickles when I add several peeled bulbils to each jar. I did try planting them one year and by harvest time they had only about doubled in size. They were so small that they were hard to tell from grass and weeds. I figured that in our garden they would probably take 2 or 3 years to reach maturity.

[benboo]

I figured that they would take way too long to reach maturity. I just feel kind of bad not planting them. I guess I will just replant some large cloves and rounds for next year and eat the little bulbils at some point.

Thanks

[paquebot]

They aren't bulbils, they are corms. Elephant garlic doesn't produce bulbils but Babington's produces both. When corms are planted back, first year generally produces on a round up to 2". Those then become much larger bulbs than if grown from a single clove. I have found that sometimes they will remain dormant for an entire year and unexpectedly come up the following year. Then they are a weed if something else was expected.

Martin

[stone]

Aug 4, 2012 0:21:25 GMT -5 paquebot said:

When corms are planted back, first year generally produces on a round up to 2".

This is my experience as well...
I get a large single clove, This is even better than a bulb!

[Walk]

Thanks for straightening out the terminology Martin. I have inadvertently had the dormancy issue show up when small elephant garlic plants appear in an area that has not had garlic for a couple of seasons. It's sometimes hard to find all the little corms when digging.

[James]

I plant the corms in the fall when I plant the cloves. If they grow they will make a round, usually about an inch in diameter. If they don't grow, nothing lost.

[robertb]

You can grow the corms on to a new bulb, but it takes a couple of years, and I don't bother. As others have said, they form a small single bulb the first year.

[steev]

You could sell the corms as "Himalayan Sacred Garlic", touting its wonderful health benefits. Of course, that's been done already, but maybe not recently enough, so there may be a whole new crop of, um, "clients".

[raymondo]

What about "Ladakhi Monk's Garlic"? I don't think that name's been used yet! You could have a great story about how the Kingdom of Ladakh remained isolated till well into the 20th century and the Buddhist monks grew this garlic in their monastery grounds and added it to their daily meal of barley gruel and how they're nearly all centenarians ... Wow, I think I want some!

[raymondo]

I've just pulled a few of my elephant garlic plants and have a dozen or so corms. I normally p[lant garlic around the autumn equinox (March for us). Should I plant these at the same time? Is the onset of cold weather enough to break dormancy or should I split their hard cases somehow?