Green Garlic: What It Is and How to Cook With It

Baby garlic (also called spring garlic) is a farmers' market specialty and its availability is short-lived. But, you can grow green garlic at home and harvest it in half the time as regular garlic!

It's a beginner-friendly crop that's easy to plant and easy to care for.

Here's how you can add this culinary delicacy to your own garden.

Commercially-sold green garlic are actually thinnings from a farmer’s garlic field, planted in the fall and pulled in early spring to ensure a productive harvest for the rest of the crop. In a home garden, however, green garlic is a crop that can be planted in spring and harvested in summer.

In my experience, I can plant garlic cloves in spring and pull the young plants at the same time my mature (fall-planted) garlic is ready for harvest in mid-summer. This is one of the benefits of spring-planted garlic.

As soon as the ground warms up or thaws in spring, you can stick a clove from your seed garlic here and there, wherever you find space: around your tomato transplants, next to the carrot bed, in the middle of your salad greens, and in spots where seeds never germinated.

How to use green garlic in the kitchen

There’s no curing required of green garlic; it’s meant to be eaten fresh, like a leek or green onion.

Green garlic is one of many plants in the garden where you can eat the entire vegetable, from the leaves (stems) down to the bulb. Cut into the white bulbous end and you’ll find it smooth and juicy; but honestly, the green leaves are my favorite part.

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