Elephant garlic update

I’ve noticed an interesting thing about our elephant garlic plants. Some of them have grown up tall and strong, with flower buds waiting to burst into bloom, while some of them appear to have failed altogether – their stems are yellowing stumps that have become prey to slugs and snails. The failed ones are those which I companion planted with mizuna last autumn. Maybe I left the mizuna in too long (it had bolted, flowered and gone to seed), so that it was sucking vital nutrients from the garlic?

As an experiment, I dug up one of the mizuna-containing pots to see what was underground, so to speak. Answer? an unripe bulb of elephant garlic, which will hopefully have grown and divided in a month or so’s time. I will do more companion planting of this sort next year, but I shall remember to uproot the mizuna before it starts to bolt.

Uprooted “sad sack” plant showing perfectly healthy looking (albeit unripe) bulb