A clump of leek bulbs striving to reproduce.
Here's what I found about a foot down. Numerous leek bulbs, all the way from small onion-sized to thimble-sized, full of vigor and sprouting. Not at all expired! I broke up this clump and saved the largest bulbs for cooking.
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Leek bulbs seem a lot like shallots. They're very delicate and best eaten cooked rather than raw. To the right, a couple of jalapenos and tomatoes All went into a chicken soup. |
The smaller bulbs I gave away at my yoga class, along with advice that they could be planted now in the deep trenches advised by gardening gurus. Truthfully, I haven't found any info about planting leek bulbs, just info for sowing seeds or baby leeks. But why wouldn't leek bulbs work? I plan to dig up another clump and establish a real leek bed, trenches and all, before the rains begin. That means I need to hurry. Wet weather will arrive any day now. I'll have to wait til spring to see the results, but waiting and patience is what gardening is all about, especially in November. |
Hi Mary,
ReplyDeleteI think the bulbs will work fine. The plant is trying hard to reproduce itself, in this instance by cloning (so all bulbs are actually copies of the parent plant) and it will sprout and make a new leek and leek bulblets again. Most commercial leeks are seeds-to-stalk plants mainly because we want our plants uniform. Interestingly, they're not copies but new plants with their own genetic makeup. Anyway, I consider the whole plant fair game, including the bulblets...they can be quite mild, like their close relatives elephant garlic.
have fun with them!
Thanks for your thoughts, El. I may have to wait til spring to plant the bulbs as it's raining in Southern Oregon now and will be for a few days/weeks/months. Sigh. MK
ReplyDeleteI'm curious how your leek bulb experiment went. We've got tons of bulbs, and would like to plant them out to harvest as normal leeks (ie, not for the scapes, flowers, or more bulbs). Any advice about timing for this? Last year it seemed to me that the bulbs did not keep well at all, so I'm not sure about holding them over till spring. If I plant them now (late Aug. in Puget Sound, WA), might they produce harvestable leeks by late winter/spring?
ReplyDeleteThanks!!! I'm so surprised there's so little info about this online and in print...
Since elephant garlic is a leek variant, I looked it up and found this on wikipedia:
ReplyDelete"The mature bulb is broken up into cloves which are quite large and with papery skins and these are used for both culinary purposes and propagation. There are also much smaller cloves with a hard shell that occur on the outside of the bulb. ****These are often ignored, but if they are planted, they will the first year produce a non-flowering plant which has a solid bulb, essentially a single large clove.*** In their second year, this single clove will break up into many separate cloves."
Hope that answers my question!
I just wrote a lengthy response to the above comments and lost it. Damn!
ReplyDeleteLeek surprises: the big picture of purple flower heads on my blog heading is of leeks. I had leek clumps in the ground for a couple years. I broke them up, planted the biggest and best, gave away the rest and tossed the rejects aside. The bulbs I planted produced huge flower heads on tall stalks. A couple months later, the faded heads are busy into seed production, have lost their lavender color, but are still handsome. The rejects tossed aside? They took root and there are still a few blooming!
Yoga teacher planted a mess of bulblets to stabilize a bank. Those babies came up and are doing the job, she reports. She'll leave them alone and see what happens. I'm into her camp. We grow so many onions and garlic that I'm more interested in flowers than more onion-type crops. I suspect that next year we'll see lots more, but smaller, flowers.