Kitchen Garden Forum

Hi there garlic lovers.
I've never tried growing elephant garlic. Is it stronger or weaker flavoured than non elephant garlic or does it improve the memory? Can anyone suggest the best place to buy the cloves for autumn planting.
Ta

Hi GreganLiz

Elephant Garlic is actually from the leek family and is milder than "proper" garlic; not sure about memory help, I can't say it's done much for mine

I buy my elephant garlic from the Isle of Wight Garlic Farm http://www.thegarlicfarm.co.uk

I planted some garlic around my garden when i first moved in about 4 years ago. Some grew, some didn't but because i didn't know the best time to harvest it i left it be. It now keeps popping up year on year. It's no bad thing as it's under the climbing rose so hopefully it's keeping the bugs off but i'd now like to harvest it.

My question is will it still be okay to harvest and when would be the best time to do it?

The garlic i set in october has just started to come through, i thought it had rotted with all this wet weather.

I planted some garlic in early November as usual and it's only recently come through. I planted autmn garlic a year ago which was excellent. I also planted some in March which was supposed to be planted in Spring. I was very disappointed with it so am going to plant it again this year round about now - when it stops raining! I'll be using some of what I grew last year so it will be interesting to see if there's a difference.
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Granny

A little earlier this year we discussed options for sowing garlic, including starting in compost and transplanting later.

Here's a picture I took back at the beginning of March of some garlic started in seed trays last Autumn. As you can see, they produce a lot of root growth, even in only 2 inches of compost. This was at the point of planting out:


I currently have some Longor shallots that I did the same with in March (because I hadn't yet cleared the ground for them).