Right on schedule, our garlic has been harvested and are almost fully cured. Hard-neck, it doesn't get braided, so I'll eventually take on the fun project of slicing, dicing and canning in a mixture of oil and lemon juice, which I prefer greatly as 95% of the garlic I cook with is minced anyhow. (No matter what some of y'all might say about fresh garlic, if something happens and it doesn't cure right, in a few months you'll have wished you'd preserved it in oil...)
It's a far cry from the nearly 100 heads I'd harvest annually on the farm, but a vast improvement from the abject fail of the prior year where over half ended up rotting due to excessively wet spring weather, and my then forgetting to save heads of the good ones for fall planting (a real tragedy as I'd been planting the same types of garlic from saved cloves for the past 5 years) .
So with that, I started afresh with organic Duganski (purple stripe) and Music garlic heads, and even with temps going down to the single digits this past winter, they thrived and, for the most part, I ended up with great looking bulbs. The only ones that were small were, not surprisingly, crowded out by the insanely rapid pace of the French beans I'd planted at the end of the row and didn't get the benefit of zero watering at the end of the cycle as is standard. But I'm pretty stoked. And with the low quality of the garlic at our local co-op (and nearly nonexistent organic options at the farmers market in our town), it couldn't come at a better time.
"It's a comfort to always find pasta in the cupboard and garlic and parsley in the garden." ~ Alice Waters
Comments