There’s a big mistake that many people make with elephant garlic. It’s such a big mistake that their elephant garlic never grows very big at all. It ends up a big disappointment, and they never grow this vegetable ever again.
That’s a shame because elephant garlic is a pretty awesome bulb to grow when you know what you’re doing. So here’s the mistake you must never make: don’t treat it like garlic.
Elephant garlic isn’t actually garlic. It is different, more closely related to the leek, and has a different lifespan. To get those big three-inch cloves, you need to wait two years between planting the seed garlic and harvesting the plant. If you harvest after one year, you’ll get a solid bulb that hasn’t produced any cloves and is only marginally smaller than normal garlic.
Two years sounds like a while to wait, but elephant garlic does keep you entertained in the meantime with big strapping leafy growth (think of it as hench garlic), and an enormous flower spike like an ornamental allium (which you should cut off really, but it seems a bit of a shame). Oh, and you get a garlic bulb the size of a fist, albeit with a milder flavour.
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