When most of the leaves are yellowing, then it is time to dig. You don't want to wait too long, until the tops completely die back, because the cloves continue to grow. They start blowing apart the head and the clove covers degrade, and it just doesn't keep very well. Dig carefully, and you'll find lots of small brown "buttons" attached around the heads. Replanting these in controlled areas gives you a way to expand your stock quicker, as they can grow into full heads in two to three years. If anything can be called elephant garlic seed, it is these buttons. Elephant garlic stores extremely well, providing garlic I can count on eating in my home all year long. I actually still have perfectly good heads of elephant garlic available from my June 2016 harvest even though I've already harvested 2017. The good thing is that whatever is still left by planting time in October this year I will plant - after a year-and-a-half in a cardboard box in my basement.

I stumbled across a late season sale at Runnings Farm Fleet in Windom in very late spring of bulbed elephant garlic. I put in a bed, and only one clove came up and it was a scrawny thing too, but just in the past couple of weeks half a dozen more have started to show up, and these seem to be quite a bit more robust.

Does elephant garlic sprout in the fall like some garlics and other alliums like the walking onions do? If so it would seem like this is awful early, but like I said above, I am purely a novice with this plant. I wasn't thinking when I laid out this bed; so I would like to move the elephants, even those not yet sprouted, if that is possible yet this fall...

There are now a full dozen shoots and more showing up every day. I had planned to run the regular garlic bed right through there, but I think I will just let the elephants be and see what we get next year out of them.