Plant now for Great Garlic

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Garlic tastes wonderful, whether you mince it for salsa, pure it for pesto, bake whole bulbs until the flesh is soft enough to spread on bread, or steam a few cloves in the same pot with potatoes.

The perfect time to plant this crop A(llium sati)vuims late fall, a fitting last hurrah for the gardening year. Garlic does best in soil rich in organic matter; it also needs full sun and regular watering during the spring -sea son. In the summer, when half of its leaves turn brown, you can pull up the bulbs and treat yourself to the besttasting garlic you ve ever eaten, with a crisp texture unique to fresh, homegrown garlic.

There are two main garlic types: softnecks, such as artichoke, Creole, Asiatic and turban varieties; and more cold-hardy hardnecks, represented by porcelain, purple stripes and rocambole types. (See The Language of Garlic, Page 74, for the characteristics of each type, including the climates in which they grow best and how well they keep through the winter.) Climate plays an important role in the survival quality of garlic, which a-lso is a prisingly responsive crop. If you save and replant the best cloves from your garden-grown garlic, it will show its satisfaction with the particular growing conditions in your garden by improving in quality with each passing season.

Where should you start and what should you expect? The garlic grower s art varies from one climate to another, but these six organic growers offer expert advice for every region.

NORTHWEST: FILAREE FARM 

Since 1977, Filaree Farm in north-central Washington has been a pioneer in collecting, growing and selling little-known strains of gourmet garlic. All hundr-ed-plus va rieties grown at Filaree Farm are planted at the end of September, in soil that has been kept in alfalfa and other cover crops for seven years between garlic plantings.

For Northwest gardeners-, own er Watershine Woods recommends turban varieties such as Portuguese because they come in early, and marbled purple stripes because they are big plants with beautiful bulbs that have big cloves.

It's best to start with a small plot, Woods says, so you can make your mistakes on a small scale. It s also important to handle the bulbs carefully when you harvest them. Her advice is to treat the bulbs like cracked eggs.

Woods says she likes to steam garlic by adding peeled cloves to potatoes or rice during the last 3 minutes of cooking time. - It will soft en and you can eat it whole or mash it up, she says. Sh-e also en joys making her own garlic powder.

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