Wild Garlic

Unusual plant with white star-like flowers and where the leaves and flowers can be used and the bulb left for another year. The flavour is far more subtle than a true Garlic bulb and has many culinary uses.

Growing Wild Garlic

Unlike common cultivated garlic, it is the leaves and flowers of Wild Garlic, or ramsoms, that are eaten rather than the bulbs. The taste is more delicate too, similar to the flavour of garlic chives. Wild Garlic is one of the very few really shade-tolerant vegetables.

The leaves and flowers of Wild Garlic can be added raw in to salads or lightly cooked in pasta and risotto dishes, although over cooking will quickly diminish the depth of flavour. Wild Garlic leaves are most flavoursome harvested in April or May before the flowers appear, although the flowers are delicious too, especially so when used as a garnish over tomato salads.

Wild garlic will tolerate growing in the open, but as soon as the Spring sunshine warms up the leaves will burn off and it will retreat to its bulb. It is worth growing some wild garlic in the deepest shade you can find,where it should remain productive until midsummer.

Wild garlic can be raised from seed or grown from bulbs. The bulbs do not store like those of cultivated garlic, they dry out and die quite quickly if they are not stored moist but do transplant very well in the green, or whilst the bulbs are growing.