I love experimenting in the garden and few things are as easy to try as garlic.

I’ve been growing garlic for years, some successfully, others, not so much. I used to always just grow it outside and let Nature take course. Now, however, things are different. Now I plant outside as well as in the polytunnel.

You can, of course, just plant out your garlic bulbs in October/November and forget about them.

You can also chit them in water so they start to grow before you even get them into the soil. I talked about that in a previous post.

But have you ever grown garlic, let your scapes go to flower, where they produce tiny little bulbils – mini garlic cloves if you will – and thought ‘I wonder what would happen if I planted them?’

Well I did. I took quite a lot of them and planted them out some time ago. I waited patiently and nothing happened. So I waited some more and something did happen! To be clear, this isn’t a fast way to grow garlic, just the opposite. Doing it like this will take about 2-3 years before you get bulbs but if you want a LOT of garlic and have space to just leave them in? Well, that’s a different story.

Currently I have several trays in the polytunnel but I plan to find a corner on the allotment – probably where I have my garlic growing just now! Once I plant them out this Autumn, I can leave them there to grow, swell and divide for several years. I’ve never done this before so I’m very interested to see what sort of harvest I do get.

To give you an idea of their growth so far, I’m including a very short video I did on YouTube – I couldn’t help but be excited when I saw they were actually growing. Out of curiosity, has anyone done this before? If so, what were your results like? And if you’ve never even thought of growing your garlic like this – would you consider trying it this year? I think this type of planning could save us a lot of time in the future!