For many years I have grown elephant garlic in my garden.  Elephant garlic is said to be more closely related to the leeks than to the garlics, but it tastes like garlic, although milder than most garlics.  The advantage of elephant garlic is that the cloves are very large, which makes it easier to prepare.  Skinning a bunch of small garlic cloves is a pain in the arse.

    I used to grow both German red garlic (which produces good sized cloves, not as big as the elephant garlic, and has more zest than the elephant garlic), but lost the German reds one winter.  My wife was about to prepare a bunch of chopped garlic and she asked me which ones she should use.  I told her "the small ones."  What I wanted her to do was chop up the smallest of the elephant garlic and/or the smallest of the German red, saving the larger bulbs for planting next year.  What she did was to chop up all of the German red garlic.  Damn!

    Here in eastern North Carolina I plant elephant garlic from September to January and harvest it in late spring or early summer.  This year (2005) my harvest was very poor. Not having many nice bulbs, I decided to plant one row with cloves and rounds and the other row with bulblets.  In the photo below you can see at the top one bulb (comprised of several cloves surrounding the central stalk).  Usually my bulbs get larger than this.  To the left you can see one clove and to the right one "round."  A round is not divided into cloves.  It can still be eaten -- in fact, it has a sharper taste than the mature cloves.  At the bottom you can see several bulblets.  These form around the base and outside of the bulb and can be used to grow new plants, if you are patient.  I usually throw them out into the ditch bank and some of them sprout there.   I allow those "feral" plants to bloom -- the flower is quite pretty and attracts lots of pollinating insects, especially bumble bees.

    When I started making this page I could not remember what the bulblets were called and was unable to find it on the net.  I remembered that John Mertus had posted several messages about garlics years ago, on the GARDENS list on BITNET.  I found one of those messages in my filing cabinet, noted that it was sent from a VM at Brown University.   I found his current email address at Brown University and asked him about it.  He wrote back and advised that they are called "korms."  That enabled me to find some discussion of them on the net.  At Garden Web I found a discussion of whether they are properly called "korms" or "bulblets."  The consensus was "bulblets."  I also learned that they take two years to form a full bulb (one year to form a round), and that they should be nicked and soaked prior to planting.  I did not knick and soak, but hope they will sprout anyhow.

    The garlics in my garlic have spread beyond the garden to the branch of the bank that runs alongside one side of my property and into the neighbor's yard across the branch.  I remove the flower buds of the garlics in the garden, but those on the bank are free to bloom.  Pollinating insects, including bees and butterflies, are fond of them.  Here are a couple of photos of them in bloom:

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This page most recently revised on 1. June 2008.