Bunched Green Garlic

Green, or ‘wet’ garlic is the fresh kind with green tops and a milder nature than the cured bulbs your kitchen counter would be incomplete without. It’s one of those seasonal treats you only see at farmer’s markets or in your locally sourced veg box! You can use the whole thing, including the flat leaves, just as you might Spring onions, either raw or cooked, maybe in a Persian noodle soup (Aush reshteh) or in scrambled egg/tofu (Harry likes it in ramen).

To grow it, we separate hundreds and hundreds of garlic cloves, a fiddly and rather daunting job done in late winter and resulting in numb fingers and sleeves that absolutely reek! We then give these a soak while we create furrows along our beds for them to be poked into, root side down, and then covered up with soil. All we do then is wait until, sure enough, little green shoots appear and it’s time to hoe in-between the rows. They’re ready to harvest just as we enter the ‘hungry gap’, which is really very handy indeed and always makes us pat ourselves on the back for having planned ahead last year.