Every few years I permit myself to carry a bit about garden produce that is misunderstood. Judging from what I see at farmers markets, green garlic is misunderstood. Because here’s the important thing: green garlic is green. It is bright vibrant green and not yet yellow-green or beginning to yellow, and certainly does not show any garlic scape yet. If the scape has appeared, it is no longer high-quality green garlic, although soon the scape will become a tasty item. Green garlic is very delicious from the time the leaves first show up on the ground to the time that the leaves are large and developed and the stalk is elongating, but even the lowest leaves remain bright green and are not yellowing. For the most part, the white underground shaft will not show enlargement, but might be beginning to swell as you see in the five stalks on the right above. Peel off a couple of lower leaves, cut away the roots, and wash, and it is ready to use. The upper leaves are no longer of culinary interest, but by peeling them off you can get more tender stalk and still use most of the plant.
Now look at the stalk on the left in the top picture. It shows a definite forming bulb, but the leaves are still bright green with no sign of yellowing and there is no scape. It is still usable, and delicious, it is just a little closer to being mature garlic than the others. Your best kitchen knife is an extension of your hand, and will tell you whether it’s still usable. If the skin slices easily and finely without presenting any obstacle to slicing and is not at all papery, you will still enjoy eating it with the rest of the green garlic. Just slice the bulb part thinly and chop it up a bit, skin and all. Garlic is a true nose-to-tail vegetable and you can eat every bit of it, but each part has to be eaten at its proper time.
Green garlic is significantly more delicate than mature garlic, and you can use a lot more of it and achieve a very good flavor without an excessive garlic taste. I used all these stalks to make a pilaf with just over a quart of cooked basmati rice, and the garlic flavor was not at all excessive and the general quality of the pilaf remained sweet. Whatever you use it for, sauté the thinly sliced green garlic in butter or oil for 15 to 20 minutes over fairly low heat, until it is soft and tastes sweet. Watch carefully, because it burns easily, so don’t leave the kitchen. At the end of that time, proceed with your cooking as you usually would.
If you are interested in plant polyphenols, it may interest you to know that the green parts of garlic and the immature skin as shown in the bulb above contain a lot more allicin than the garlic cloves themselves. What this means in practice is anybody’s guess, but since I love green garlic anyway it gives me a good excuse to think that it might also be good for me. If you want to read a bit more about allicin, there are some references here. But please, rather than thinking that any one polyphenol is the answer, eat the widest variety of green vegetables that you possibly can.
The post below was one of my very first blog posts back in 2008, and it remains true that arugula is one of my favorite early spring greens and grows everywhere that it is allowed to seed, even in my high-desert climate. I still let it seed itself around in the way described below, but I also reserve a few square feet of bed space to grow it’s specifically for salads. Enrich the soil in the fall, and in late fall or early spring scatter arugula seed thickly around, scratch it into the soil surface or cover it with some compost, and water the area about once a week if you live in a climate as dry as mine. Bymid-spring it will be 4-5 inches high. To gather, hold clumps of leaves with one hand and use scissors to cut them off at the bottom of the leaf, leaving the stems behind. They will still be young and tender and will be quite clean because the closely spaced plants hold each other up off the dirt, so after a rinse and drying in a salad spinner or towel, they will be ready to eat.
In my view it isn’t worthwhile to try to get a second crop, because they are so closely spaced that they are eager to shoot to seed. I just dig up the area and plant something else. They are delicious with a good simple vinaigrette made with some garlic or green garlic and your best red wine vinegar and olive oil. Don’t forget the salt. Do note that once the dressing is put on it arugula wilts very quickly, so don’t dress it until the last minute before serving. If you are making a mixed salad and want to dress it ahead of time, combine the other greens, dress the salad, and toss in the arugula just before serving.
Once you have it washed and handy in the refrigerator you will find other uses for it, such as scattering around the plate to serve chicken or fish or nearly anything else on, or stuffing into pita with hummus and some tahini dressing. It is one of the joys of spring, so use it instead of those commercial salad mixes.
At times I’m very surprised by what grows well in my high desert garden. I wouldn’t have guessed that arugula would not only grow well but would naturalize and happily spread itself about. Arugula is my favorite salad green, and I’ve learned to love it for cooking too. Something about its tender nutty sharpness is like watercress gone to heaven. It likes cold weather, and manages with surprisingly little water.
First, get your seed. I don’t recommend the wild-type often sold as “sylvetta” because the leaves are small leading to low yield, and in dry conditions it can get too sharp to be pleasant. Try to get the type designated as ‘cultivated” or the named variety Apollo, although the latter lacks the frilly leaves that make such a nice show on the salad plate. In winter or very early spring, scatter the seed in drifts on prepared ground and rake them in lightly, or scatter them in prepared containers and scratch the seed in a little with your fingers. Water occasionally and keep an eye out. Early in the spring, you’ll notice the little plants struggling up bravely. Give them a little water when the soil is dry, and thin them out to stand about 4-6″ apart. Throw the washed thinnings in your salads, of course. When the plants are about 6″ tall, harvest them heavily for salads, but don’t cut the crown or pull the roots up. Use dressings containing nut oils and good olive oil. Never dress the arugula more than a couple of minutes before eating, because it wilts easily. Eventually the plants will start to bolt to seed. Do nothing to stop them. The next phase of the arugula season is starting.
The maturing plant will now stand about 2 feet high, with small clusters of buds. It’s perfect for cooked greens now. Leave one or two plants to bloom and make seed, and cut the rest down to about 3″ high, and bring the cuttings into the kitchen. Pull off and save all leaves, and break the bud sections off wherever the stem will snap without resistance. These are your cooking greens. Wash them carefully. If you want to use the large stems that are left over, cut them in cross sections no more than 1/4 inch long, because they contain strong stringy fibers. I compost them instead of eating them. Blanch the washed greens in a large quantity of rapidly boiling water for 1 minute, no more. Drain and proceed as desired toward dinner. They have a flavor a little like broccoli rabe, and I love to eat them with pasta. See recipe below, or go to the categories in the sidebar, and click on “greens.”
Now, what about the plants you left alone? They will develop into great wispy clouds of small white flowers, a little like annual baby’s breath. Bees adore them. Then they’ll set hundreds of tiny seed pods. When these dry out, let some spill around the mother plant (which can now be pulled up, and should be, because it looks pretty scruffy by now) and toss the rest around wherever you want more arugula. Usually these seeds will be dry and ready for seeding in late summer, will sprout by September, and will be in the salad stage by late October. Leave them over the winter, and the cycle continues.
Pasta with cooked arugula: For two hungry people, or four if using as a first course, Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Meanwhile, chop up a slice of good pancetta about 1/4 inch thick into 1/4 inch cubes (or chop up two slices best bacon, if you don’t have pancetta, but the pancetta is better here.) Render the little cubes in a skillet over medium heat until the fat is released. Don’t drain off a single drop of it. Toss in two cloves of garlic, chopped, and stir briefly. Add half a teaspoon or so of red pepper flakes, stir in, and immediately pour in half a cup of good dry white wine. Boil vigorously for a minute, add salt to taste, and take off the heat.
Meanwhile, your big pot should have come to a boil. You did salt it, didn’t you? Few foods are worse than bland pasta. Throw in half a pound of good pasta. Whole wheat pasta is good here if you like it, but get a very good brand or it can be gluey and awful. When the pasta is about 2 minutes short of done, ie there is a bit of white core remaining when you cut or bite a piece, throw in the arugula greens, stir them in, and continue boiling until the pasta is done to your liking. Drain the pasta and arugula together, toss them with the pancetta mixture, and toss in a generous cup of the best Parmesan you can get, grated. Plate the pasta, grind a little pepper over the whole, shave a few artistic slivers of Parmesan on top, and bear to the table.
A vegetarian version can be made by starting with 1/4 cup of butter in the hot small skillet, stirring in a teaspoon of chopped fresh rosemary and two teaspoons of fresh thyme leaves with the garlic, and proceeding as above.
Glorious spring is here. There are no leaves on the trees yet, but the fruit trees are starting to bloom, and the perennials are starting to show up. Green garlic is always the first vegetable of my gardening year, and it’s one of the most welcome. I have seen “green garlic” in stores and farmers markets that was an elongated stalk with an actual bulb of garlic, and that isn’t what I’m talking about. At that age, the green parts are too tough to be of any culinary interest. The green garlic that I relish is tender and sweet. I grow my garlic in permanent beds that are enriched every fall with top-dressings of manure but are no longer ever dug. There are three sections. The first and largest section is planted in fall with seed garlic of whatever type seized my fancy when the catalog arrived. The cloves are pushed down through the mulch into the rich earth below. Spacing is about 8”x8”. Once planted, the bed is topped with some mixed alfalfa and manure from the goat and chicken areas, about an inch thick, with a thin cover of grass clippings or similar over the top. By mid-March it looks like this:
This bed will be harvested as fresh bulbs in summer and replanted in fall.
The second bed, shown at the top of the post, was created by planting whole bulbs in late summer one year when I had a ridiculous excess. They were spaced 8” apart each way, and top-dressed with rich stuff as described above. In mid-March I start harvesting big luxurious bunches of green garlic from this bed. I dig each clump carefully with a thin-bladed trowel as I need it, taking care to leave one large plant with its roots undisturbed and tucking the dirt and mulch back in around it and water it to resettle the roots. This stalk will produce a garlic bulb, which will be left in place to become next spring’s clump of green garlic. There is technically a bit of digging with the trowel in this patch, which is why I call my methods semi-permaculture; I am not interested in tedious arguments about what constitutes “true” permaculture, I’m just interested in good food and good soil.
The third patch is truly perennial and the roots are never disturbed. It was started by planting a few whole bulbs of garlic in fall and just leaving them in place for a few years. Treated this way, they produce thick clumps of tender thin leaves every spring.
I cut the leaves and slice them finely crosswise to make “garlic chives,” sweet and delicious with a sublime essence of garlic. When I sauté’ chopped green garlic stems and leaves from patch #2 I often add a handful of chopped leaves from patch #3 after cooking is completed for a “pop” of garlic flavor to freshen the effect. The flavor is mild overall, and I love sautéed green garlic as an omelet filling, maybe with some crumbled feta if I’m especially hungry.
Green garlic is wonderful in early spring, tougher as the days grow warmer, and by early summer is not of culinary interest. I harvest pounds of it in its glory season, sauté in olive oil with some salt, and freeze it to eat later. It’s delicious in greens mixtures and terrific tossed with homemade egg linguine and some very good Parmesan. You can click “greens” in the sidebar for other uses, and there is a little more about it here.
I have been asked if viruses will kill my permaculture garlic beds eventually, and I really wouldn’t know. So far they’re doing fine. I guess if that happens I’ll start over in another part of the yard, but meanwhile I’ll have enjoyed years of largely effort-free harvests.
I have written a lot about foraging at various times in the past, but it occurs to me that there was never a better time to bring it up again. And if you are not willing to commit the time to learning foraging in general, then learn two weeds: amaranth and lambs quarters. These two are worldwide and ubiquitous, mild-flavored and easy to use, and in warm weather they are nearly always somewhere nearby.
The botanical names are Chenopodium berlandieri for lambsquarters and Amaranthus (various species) for amaranth. You can see them above coming up in a pot near my porch, lambsquarters toward the top of the photo and amaranth further down, and they come up everywhere that I water a piece of soil. They both get huge but are best when young and tender, and both are available from May to August. Both have mild flavor and are a reasonable substitute for spinach. Both are nutritional powerhouses. And both need to be carefully identified if you aren’t familiar with them, as does any unfamiliar food.
This is the book I recommend as your first foraging book, because the plants are widely available, Dr. Kallas is an acknowledged authority, and the information on identification is impeccable. Get your IDs down cold. Not because there are any poisonous look-alikes, but because it’s the right way to approach foraging. The book also contains excellent information on kitchen preparation and cooking.
Now that you know exactly what plants you are dealing with, how do you want to prepare them? The possibilities draw from all the cuisines of the world. I love greens as a simple stirfry with some ginger and oyster sauce to be eaten with rice or by itself, and I make gallons of the Greek mixture called Horta, flavored with garlic, herbs, and black olives, to keep in the refrigerator or freezer and eat by itself on a piece of sourdough bread or baked into a quiche or hortapita, or any other way. Horta also makes a great base to land some fried or hard boiled eggs on, and is a good side dish for nearly anything. Smoked pork has a magical affinity with greens, and some ham trimmings or meat pulled from a leftover smoked rib is a great addition to greens sautéed with onion and garlic. Rick Bayless has published some tasty variations on a theme of greens tacos (here’s just one) and he uses chard or spinach but using your own weeds is an easy substitution. Combinations of greens and beans or chickpeas are classic. Pile seasoned horta into salted zucchini shells with some feta or Parmesan and a topping of pine nuts and bake until done, serving with or without seasoned tomato sauce. Or click the “greens” heading in the sidebar of this blog for more greens talk and recipes.
When I gather a bunch of greens I try to wash them immediately and, if possible, blanch them briefly or stir-fry in neutral oil just until wilted down, so that they use minimal refrigerator space and are ready to use in seconds when a quick meal is needed.
Be aware that both these plants can get enormous, up to ten feet in good soil, so grab them young if you want to grow anything else in that space.
My urban homestead 