For some reason fall planting garlic around here is insanely expensive, like $30 to $50 per pound. I really don’t understand why it costs so much, seeing as regular grocery store garlic can be had for pennies per pound. Maybe the varieties are super special? I don’t know.

Anyway, when I moved here there were a few garlic plants growing here and there, I didn’t know what they were until they started sending out scapes. I left them alone and they developed garlic bulbils, which I’d never seen before. They kind of look like tiny garlic bulbs, hence the name.

So I had a handful of bulbils and I thought I would give them a try. I popped them all into a pot around September, and they did very well. Sending up long green shoots and filling out the pot with plump, white garlic-scented roots.

Since we still haven’t had a killing frost here on the island, I wanted to get them in the ground to see how they’d do over winter and come spring. I was able to put in 45 young plants today along with a bunch of chamomile that had sprouted alongside them in the pot.

Not a bad upgrade from just a few wayward plants. I look forward to seeing how they taste compared the fancy kinds. Garlic is pretty much garlic, is it not?