Even with all the different flowers blooming in the garden I am still fascinated by the garlic.
We grow several different types including this subspecies: Ophioscorodon, with its wonderful, characteristic 270 degree curl. It’s a very useful plant with its attractive blue green foliage, unusual flower spikes and edible bulbs and flower tops or scapes.
It is also an insect repellent so we grow it all over the gar5den. One of my favorites is a “top setting” variety that produces small cloves instead of flowers; these can be picked and broadcast over wide areas. Interestingly, the cloves are not true bulbs, but clusters of leaves. Another oddity is that they are planted in late fall for harvest the next summer.
We’re working on reaching garlic self sufficiency but we use so much it’s hard to do. We use the dried cloves in many dishes and put the scapes in the blender with olive oil for use in cooking or whatever. One of my favorites is a piece of toasted sour dough bread with a little olive oil and butter rubbed with a fresh clove of garlic; the bread acts like a grater and it produces the wonderful garlic bread.
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