Growing garlic indoors.

Newsgroups: alt.folklore.herbs
Subject: Re: Grow Garlic Indoors?
From: Geri Guidetti <arkinst.concentric.net>
Date: 11 Mar 1996 18:57:19 GMT

>I have just started learning how to grow herbs but I may have chosen the wrong to begin or the wrong kind of herb for a beginner. Or maybe simply the wrong approach?
>Some garlic that I had bought for cooking sprout so I put them in water to let them root. I transfer them to a 5"(approx.) deep pot when their shoots were about a foot tall. It was tragedic afterwards: The poor plants died when it was just over 2 weeks after the transplant.
>Anybody out there can give me some advice?

The reason your garlics died after transplanting them to a pot AFTER the shoots were a foot long is because they had used up all of their food reserves present in the clove to put out that shoot. No doubt you saw the fat, stubby beginnings of roots at the root end. Next time, just take a few cloves of garlic, sprouted or not, and push into soil just covering their skinnier tops (i.e., stubby root/fatter end of clove down) In no time it will sprout roots and tops. You can snip the green tops for really fresh herb additions to salads or eggs. Just don't take too much of each top at a time. Let them grow on a sunny patio or in a sunny window to keep regenerating new tops. Or, let them be until they divide into many new cloves just under the surface. If you grow them too close, you should only expect to get tops which are nice enough, thank you.

And yes, folks, the cloves of garlic you buy at the grocers ARE the same as the expensive ones you buy from seed catalogs. Find nice heads that you enjoy in the supermarket, break their heads into separate cloves, and plant. To get full-size heads from each clove, you will need to plant them in late fall of the previous year. Spring planted garlic grown in temperate climates yield small heads of many small cloves. Usable, but not big and juicy. Tops, of course are alway usable.