Garlic and Elephant Garlic

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Garlic and Elephant Garlic

Colin Simpson, Oxted, Surrey

There are, in Britain at least, a great many misconceptions about garlic. These misconceptions cover all aspects of the plant - the types available, sources of supply and how best to cultivate it!

Types of and Cultivars of Garlic

There are two types of garlic, long and short dormancy. Shorts mature first and will store from harvest until Christmas - if you are lucky. Most of the cloves offered for sale in Britain, in greengrocers or seed catalogues, are shorts. Longs are rarely ready when seed merchants send their catalogues to press and are more expensive. Longs will store from harvest, in August or September, until the following spring. They are usually bigger than shorts and have more flavour.

Apart from using them as an early supply, for your own table or for the few chefs who like an early supply of home grown cloves, shorts are a waste of time to grow. Nevertheless, that does not stop them popping up in most seed catalogues -without any mention of what type they are.

Within these two types, shorts and longs, there are numerous cultivars. The best long is a cultivar called 'Christo'. When I grow shorts I use either 'Germidour' or Thermidrome'. (Marshall's 'Long Keeper' is, despite its name, a short.)

Verify Your Garlic

You should think of garlic as you would a quality flower bulb. The size and health of next year's bloom is determined by the growth of the bulb this year. So too, is the size and health of next year's head of garlic. It is simple logic to buy seed cloves from producers who have optimum conditions in their favour and it is essential that you plant healthy cloves. Garlic is prey to more nematodes and virus infections than the potato. It is tragic that the United Kingdom, which probably has the most stringent health regulations for potatoes, is currently ignoring the equally stringent EEC regulations on garlic. I am no friend of the EEC, but their rules on garlic are sensible. It is an offence to sell, within the EEC, garlic for cultivation which is not inspected and certificated as 99% virus and nematode free.

Many of the failures go onto the culinary market and, I fear, to seed firms ignorant of the rules. Ask your suppliers for a certificate - and ask which type of dormancy applies in the cloves they offer. Then watch them wriggle!

Only a very few seedsmen import selected and certificated seed cloves from central France. Anyone can do it and they are a mere fraction of the price asked for non certificated stock in seed catalogues - or at the greengrocer on the corner. For the commercially minded, certificated cloves cost £3.00 a hundred this year, delivered from France.

Elephant Garlic

Giant, or elephant garlic was re-discovered in 1941 by an American nurseryman, Jim Nicholls, who found it growing wild in the gardens of an abandoned settlement called Scio in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Scio had been colonised by immigrants from the eastern Balkans in the 1860s. The "herb", as it was regarded locally, was called Scio's Giant Garlic.

Nicholls collected about 12lbs of it and bred selectively from the larger cloves. Over a period of twelve years he established a large, very hardy, disease free strain which he started selling commercially in 1953, having registered the name 'Elephant Garlic'.

I believe that elephant garlic is the cash crop of the future. It is six times the size of normal garlic, but occupies the same amount of land and gives a yield of six to ten tons to the acre. It is slightly milder in flavour than standard garlic.

Quite a lot of entrepreneurs capitalised on it, so Nicholls now refuses to sell it to other commercial growers - or to export it. A very inferior strain is now grown commercially in Chile - Safeways sell it - but the heads (head is the correct term for a whole garlic bulb) have generally been treated with a chemical growth inhibitor.

Botanical Status of Elephant Garlic

The botanical status of elephant garlic is not clear. In the 1970s, one United States seed house claimed elephant garlic as their own, saying that it had been bred by crossing an onion with a leek. This is unlikely. It is a distinct type, although botanists are still arguing over its correct name. Martyn Rix regards it as a form of Allium ampeloprasum, the wild garlic from which the leek, Allium porrum, was derived. He describes it "as a native of the East Mediterranean, known as the great headed garlic... a hexaploid which forms large garlic like bulbs and numerous bulbils both around the bulbs and leaf bases." He also notes that it was grown in 17th century England, around 1650, by John Tradescant the Younger. I have no doubt that this is the cultivar re-discovered by Nicholls in Oregon.

However, the Oregonians differ from Dr. Rix. It has been classified there by Professor James R. Bagget of the University of Oregon as Allium scordoprasum. (Ordinary garlic is Allium sativum.)

I imported a few pounds of the best stock from the Nicholls family (quite legally!). This was tolerated as Nicholl's daughter, married a Simpson, no relation, and I have been growing it ever since. My family and local restaurants, consume most of my spare stock. This autumn I shall be planting several hundred cloves.

See Culivating Garlic & Elephant Garlic

This article originally appeared in the Members Bulletin, the journal of the National Vegetable Society, which is sent quarterly to members. You can Join the National Vegetable Society here

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