Kitchen Gardening

Indoor Gardening with Garlic Greens

Come grow with me! Summer gardening is over, so let's move our gardening indoors and grow some garlic greens together.

Let's take our vegetable gardening inside! All you need is a container, potting soil and garlic cloves to grow your own garlic greens indoors.
Photo/Illustration: Jodi Torpey

In March I invited vegetable gardeners to join me in a project to grow a crop of microgreens indoors. Those who planted their seeds at home at the same time as I did, saw their seeds sprout and start to grow in about two weeks.

They were also ready to start harvesting and eating their mircrogreens in just a few more weeks.

For the fall season grow along, I thought it would be fun to plant grow a batch of garlic greens indoors together.

This planting-and-growing project is an easy way to bring gardening inside. Even though this indoor vegetable planting won’t result in any heads of garlic, you’ll have fresh garlic greens in just a few weeks.

The cloves will sprout and send up tall shoots of garlic greens that you’ll be able to harvest at least twice before the cloves are spent. Then you can plant again.

The greens add delicious garlicky flavor to fresh salads, stir fry dishes, or serve as a substitute for chives or scallion leaves in recipes. These greens have a flavor similar to garlic scapes, those tall flower stalks that sprout from hardneck garlic plants when growing in the garden.

To start, you’ll the need a few supplies:

  • Container of potting soil
  • Saucer to catch excess water
  • Garlic cloves of any size (a great way to repurpose old cloves)

Instructions:

  1. Fill the container with potting soil; add water to moisten the soil.
  2. Separate the garlic into individual cloves; leave skin on
  3. Push each clove into the potting soil, about two-thirds of the way in, pointed end up
  4. Arrange the cloves in any way you’d like: in a circle around the edge of a round container, in rows, or create your own planting design.
  5. Water in; place the container in a sunny window.
  6. Keep soil moist.

If you plant and grow along with me, you’ll start to see your garlic cloves sprout in about a week or so. For added fun, please post updates and pictures of your garlic-growing progress!

View Comments

Comments

Log in or create an account to post a comment.

Related Articles

The Latest