Zombie Garlic and Other Spring Surprises!

In my homestead-style gardening class at the local community college, we talk a lot about resilient plantings for your food garden. Garlic is at the top of the list!

Garlic that will not die!

A couple of years ago, one April day, my husband John stuck some shriveled garlic cloves into a neglected bed. I’m sure the soil had very little fertility—rife with weeds, the bed hadn’t had any compost on it for two or three years. 

Predictably, the garlic didn’t get very tall and the heads didn’t develop. We wrote it off as an experiment and moved on. 

At one point, I wanted to use the bed for something else. To smother the garlic I first laid a sheet of steel roofing over it, and after pulling up the sheet, set a layer of thick cardboard over the bed.

This garlic, you understand, was completely covered up for months on end.

Catching up on garden tasks this week after a freeze, I discovered the garlic is happily sprouting! The sprouts aren’t at all sturdy, and I’m sure the roots won’t really develop proper heads. But who knows…I’ve only got 4 garlic heads from last summer left in the pantry, so I just might use the undersized roots of this never-say-die garlic to flavor soups and stews!

Meanwhile, over in my real garlic bed, they’re going great guns. A dozen or so shoots got hung up in their winter mulch, so I poked around, found the tops, and freed them from the mulch. These shoots had gotten a bit yellowed, but they greened up in two days.

Yesterday, I had my eye on a blackberry crown in a flowerbed, whose canes were over six feet long. I got out my spade fork to make short work of it—and saw some tiny green shoots among the black-eyed Susans. I poked a bit at them too, and low and behold—they were daffodils that I thought had been choked out years ago!

The round leaves on the right are the invasive black-eyed Susans

Black-eyed Susans, you understand, develop below ground into a super tough mat of roots and runners. And oh my goodness, this bed was wall-to-wall with them. What seems miraculous that these little daffodils had actually survived, enough to keep sending up shoots.

I got to work and pulled out the tough little black-eyed Susan crowns surrounding the daffodils. Once exposed, my daffodilly shoots were somewhat yellow too, but it’s amazing how resilient daffodils can be—like the garlic, these little shoots greened up in no time flat.

My hands, dealing with the wiry black-eyed Susan roots, are the worse for wear… but I have hopes the daffodils will gain enough strength to flower—if not this spring, then next!

True, you can’t eat daffodils—but their flowers are one of the first springtime plants to provide food for pollinators. 

One unwelcome discovery this week: I learned why you don’t transplant small plants in the middle of winter. Two words: soil heaving. 

This past November, we got a hard freeze just after Halloween—so I couldn’t transplant my home-grown strawberry starts into a bed until way too late. Still, I figured the starts would be fine, since I’d put several inches of mulch around the crowns. 

Interestingly, they made it through the worst of winter weather, including multiple Northeasters, and every time we got a melt, I could see they were pretty darn healthy looking. 

But then, each time it got really cold, the beds were covered with snow. Which we all know is the best winter insulation gardeners can find! 

But wait… Two weeks ago, we had yet another Northeaster—temps in the teens—and no snow. I could see from the house the strawberry plants had lost color—and looked peaked. And when it warmed up and I got a closer view, I saw to my dismay that this last thaw had heaved the strawberry plants’ root balls right out of the ground. 

I got busy right away and replanted the crowns, and added even more mulch. Fortunately, like daffodils and garlic, strawberries are resilient. Nearly every crown has already sent up a very hopeful little leaf, unfurling more each day. I’ll plan to report on their progress!

There’s the first tiny leaf, right in the center of the crown!

What Spring surprises are you finding in your garden?