The clement weather over winter has been beneficial to a number of our plants .This unbelievable sight of wild garlic takes your breath away. Its a heavy scented carpet of white flowers stretching as far as the eye can see in Dorset woodland. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...oming-wooded-areas-shaded-verges-England.html
What a delightful sight. I'd love to walk in and through carpet of foliage! These type of allium which leaves can me dried, preserved and eaten! And the flowers exude fragrant smell, too! Excellent place to engage in some photography sessions, too.
My local fruit and veg shop has had wild garlic for about the last four months - it seems to be a good season here in Scotland. I've been using it all the time. You can cook it like spinach, use it as a salad base, pop some in a sandwich or even just chew a bit now and then. This house is also free of vampires (save for the odd vegetarian vampire duck).
Do you mean to say that plant with white flowers is the wild garlic? And that the cloves in the roots are edible? Wow, this is the first time that I've heard of such. What we have here, as I had posted in the other thread, are the wild cucumbers and wild passion fruit. They are both edible and quite nice to eat although only a few people know about them. The wild cucumber are now fruiting, as big as the small plums. I wish I can go to the UK and see and feel that wild garlic. I'm really amused because of the white flower. It looks more like an ornamental plant than a food ingredient.
It's getting quite late in the season for it now, so the leaves are becoming scarcer. Still, the whole thing is edible and the stalks are very succulent. There's no harm in eating the flowers, either.
Can garlic grow in such a big bunches in the wild? I mean of course at the farms where they farm them industrially there might be big spots full of garlic but in the wild.. That is just beautiful. Hope I could visit that place one day.
In Asia, they have grown garlic chives for hundreds of years, and it is a perennial plant that comes back each year. I found some on ebay and ordered some seeds, and will be planting them once the seeds arrive. I wanted some of the green onions that are perennial because we use the green onions in so many things that we eat, from soups to omelets to sandwiches and salads. I buy them all the time, and regrow them in a jar on the windowsill to make them last longer. My mom used to have chives, and they came back each year, and she also had a kind of onion that made little bulbs on the top, and you could grow more by taking the bulbs off the top and planting them. I decided that something on this order would work for me, so i started browsing on ebay, and i found bunching onions, which are supposed to be just for the green tops, as well as the garlic chives, which are similar to regular chives, but grow up to 2 feet tall, and also have a bit of garlic in the flavor. I ordered seeds for both and am going to see how well they grow, and hoping we will have lots of green onions by this summer.
Our chives have come up, some through the snow cover already. Chives are our first spring crop. Rhubarb has shown signs of life as well where we can see it, but it is still a long way from harvest. I have bunching onions--3 different types--in a flat in the attached greenhouse and some storage onions started as well. Wife planted onion sets in the big greenhouse, but no signs of life there yet. Lettuce and miner's lettuce are coming up. Regular garlic is still under the snow, as are the Chinese/Garlic chives.
I made the mistake of planting garlic chives in my garden prob 10 years ago …. Think it must have been a wild version even tho I bought it in a punnet from garden centre @Don Alaska and I’m still digging them out where I planted them and areas in the lawn 20 foot away from where I planted them ….they either drop seeds or the roots spread that far . As soon as we get winter rain they will start coming up in the garden again , which is under my plum tree . I dug quite a few out last week but had to soak the ground first it was so hard and dry I use a long thin trowel to dig them out as I try to get as many roots as I can We are yet to get any RAIN this year, it’s been very dry In the lawn 20 foot away from where I planted them
Our climate is much different than yours @Kate Ellery, but, like mint and other things, it can get invasive.
A bit about our climate @Don Alaska Copied Climate of South Australia South Australia is the driest of the Australian states. Only about one-fifth of the area receives annual precipitation of more than 10 inches (250 mm), and less than half of that has more than 16 inches (400 mm). The higher rainfall occurs along the southern coasts and the north-south-trending mount Lofty and Flinders ranges. The highest falls occur near Mount Lofty (47 inches [1,200 mm]), and the lowest occur in the vicinity of Lake Eyre(6 inches [150 mm] or less).
Oh, I realize it is dry there, but you are not buried in snow for 8 months every year. Much of Alaska is a sub-arctic desert due to low rainfall as well, but there is permafrost that fills ponds throughout the tundra and re-freezes every winter. It never really thaws completely.
No I don’t think I’d like that sort of climate , @Don Alaska I grew up in a very similar climate to SA …… in New South Wales 500 miles from South Aust capital city ( Adelaide ) where we only got rain about twice a year I’ve never seen snow Don ….on very rare accessions the Adelaide hills will get a light sprinkle but it melts before hitting the ground
One of the YT videos that I watched said to trim the flowers before they go to seed, so that they do not spread. I am going to put mine in a tire planter and let them spread enough to fill the container. Besides being a very healthy food that we add to almost everything, I read that they are also anti-parasitic, and they use them in Asian countries to help get rid of parasites in the body. If the spread into the yard , they will just get mowed when Bobby mows the lawn, so they are not likely to grow all over. The ones we do not use fresh, I will dry and put in a jar for winter use. I am really looking forward to having these. How do you use yours, @Don Alaska ? I think that this is one of the foods sold at our Korean store down the road, so I might be able to sell excell to them also, if my plants spread into a larger area.