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On one of my many trips to garden centers this spring, one shop’s vegetable department was just brimming with 6-packs of beautiful leek seedlings. My mind immediately jumped to the fall when I could use these homegrown leeks in a few of my signature soups, chief among them being potato and leek soup. I had never grown leeks before, but I knew their cultivation involved more than planting them in the ground and watching them grow. I decided to take a walk on the wild side and popped the 6-pack of leeks into my cart.
If you’re not familiar with the leek, it’s a member of the onion family (and, interestingly enough, the official symbol of the Prince of Wales). It doesn’t produce a bulb, however; it’s the lower portion of whitish, tightly packed leaf sheaths that are used in the kitchen.
Taste-wise, leeks are similar to onions but with a buttery mellowness.
You’re wondering, how do leaf sheaths, which are typically green, become white? Good question, and that’s what makes their care in the garden a tad more complicated than their onion cousins.
It involves blanching, and I don’t mean the kitchen term blanching, but the gardening version of the word. This involves mounding or hilling soil around a portion of the plant to prevent light from reaching it.
If you’ve ever raked mulch off of a bed of perennials a bit later in spring than you should have, you would have noticed leaves starting to grow still covered with mulch, but appearing whitish. Basically, in the absence of light, a leaf won’t produce chlorophyll, or the stuff that makes leaves green.
There are two ways to blanch leeks:
1. Dig a trench 8 to 12 inches deep, and reserve the soil along the side of the trench. Plant either seeds or seedlings at the bottom of the trench. As the leeks grow, backfill the trench (put the soil back into the trench). You also can choose to backfill with sand or sandy loam, which may a better substrate for the leeks to grow through.
2. Omit the trench and just plant seeds or seedlings as normal. As the leeks grow, form small mounds or hills of soil around the plants.
This trenching and mounding requires a bit more space than I have available in my small garden. Mounded soil takes up a lot of space at the base, so I came up with a third method that uses the space more efficiently. I decided to build a frame around my row of leeks.
I built a frame measuring 3 feet long, 1 foot wide, and about 5 inches tall that fits nicely around my leek row. My leeks are currently about the size of a highlighter, and this week I felt it was time to get blanching.
I added about 2.5 inches of garden soil to the frame surrounding the leeks, and I will need to add more soil as the leeks get bigger. Of course, as I was adding the garden soil to the frame and was watching the soil sift itself through the leaves, I realized I probably should have added sand to the frame instead.
How will the larger soil particles affect the growing sheaths compared to sand? Will I end up with leeks having big soil bumps along its white shaft? Leeks are incredibly slow growers, so it will be many months before I find out.