Plant · P-742

Garlic

Allium sativum

Garlic is a cool-season bulb crop grown from individual cloves rather than seed, with a long culinary history and an equally long medicinal one - traditional antiseptic and antimicrobial use now backed by research on slowing arteriosclerosis and improving glucose metabolism in diabetics. The bulb is the main yield, eaten raw or cooked, but the leaves, flowers and sprouted seed are edible too, milder than the bulb itself. What surprises most first-time growers is that it needs real winter cold to form a bulb at all - six to eight weeks below 40 F - and then waits for long summer days before it starts bulbing in earnest.