Garlic Brain Planning Ahead: A Green Garlic Bed?

After planting the largest of the exterior cloves of my largest seed garlic heads, I was left with a hundred or two of the skinnier interior cloves.  I thought about planting them “normally” as I did last year, but part of the overkill last year was to improve the size of each season’s heads by replanting only the “largest of the large”.

The problem is that I just can’t make myself throw seeds out, and these interior cloves are still “seed”.

So it dawned on me I might purposely crowd these in a densely planted bed to create a nice crop of  “green garlic”.   Next spring, just before the garlic begins to bulb up in earnest, the plants will be ready to pull, similar to green bunching onions or baby leeks.  Less pungent than mature garlic but still interesting enough for a variety of applications?  Good enough for me (and not a space hog.)

More here: NY Times Health section : Green Garlic

After separating all the cloves of the seed garlic, I planted smallish plots (maybe 2’x2′ max), by dumping a bag of odd cloves out:

Then aligning in a tight grid that used only enough space to absorb the surplus cloves, sort of like this:

The end product became cloves planted on maybe a 2″ grid spacing vs the 6″+ grid I used for the cloves planted to grow full heads. Will it work?

Come see me in April and I’ll share if it does.