Hi. I’m Dave Epstein. This is Growing Wisdom. And as you guys know, I’m a big fan of container gardening. And today, we’re going to talk about planting some garlic in containers. It’s very easy to do. Get your container. Be sure that it’s about ten inches deep at least. I like to have the containers fairly deep for the garlic. We’re also going to plant in this container some carrots and a little bit of lettuce just because we have the room.
But the main purpose of the video is to talk about the garlic. Garlic is a bulb. When you buy garlic in the store, you’re actually buying a bulb. So to get a bulb, you plant a bulb. We’re actually planting one large clove of this extra mild elephant garlic. This is one clove of garlic and it should, if all goes according to plan yield one humongous garlic bulb later on in the season.
Garlic takes quite a long time. I like to do it in the containers because I could control the environment a little bit better. I find it’s less susceptible to some of the bugs and some of the diseases that the garlic might get. Make sure that the bulb tip is up, and you can tell the tip because that’s the pointy area. It’s the thinner area. The bottom is where the roots are going to come out. This is the bottom. You plant that in the container with 4-6 inches of soil, cover it up and you’re done. It’s that simple.
Now garlic takes quite a while. As the garlic begins to grow, you’re going to notice the green almost chive like shoots coming out of the top. You can use some of those in cooking as it’s beginning to grow. Don’t use too many however or the bulb would be quite small. Eventually, it’ll begin to flower. You want to remove that flower so that all the energy goes down into the bulb because that’s what you want to harvest. So garlic is a unique little vegetable because you can use all sorts of parts of it. You can use the flowers if you want to let them go for drying, you could use the tops for eating, or of course, you can use the bulbs for cooking.
For Growing Wisdom, I’m Dave Epstein.
