Garlic

There was a mad dash this weekend to get outside. It was the first truly nice weekend of the year, with temperatures close to 70 degrees on Saturday (middle of February, I might add). I had forgotten, once again, to get the garlic planted in the fall, and while it was waiting patiently in a pot, I knew it had to get into the dirt officially. Okay, I didn't completely forget, and last year's crop did great even though it was planted in the spring. The true reason I put off planting the garlic was that the garden needed to be extended and I was waiting for a nice weekend to complete the daunting task.

Turns out, thanks to my hard-working hubby, it wasn't so daunting. He spent an hour on Tuesday breaking up the grass, so come Saturday we only had to dig out the grass, put up the retaining wall, and dump about a ton of dirt and cow manure into the new area. It was a lot of heavy lifting, but worth it.

Towards the end of the work, I could contain my patience no longer and grabbed the pot filled with dirt and about 25 cloves of various garlic types. I dumped the contents out and was very pleased to see that each clove had developed about 3 inches of roots. I was not pleased to see that since I had thrown the cloves in the pot any old way, many cloves were sprouting sideways! I can only pray that the quality of the finished bulb will not be affected. 

I never thought growing garlic would be so easy, but decided in 2009 I would give it a shot. A couple bulbs of gourmet garlic ran about 7 bucks, so if it didn't work, I wouldn't be out a lot of money, and if it did work, I would have a terrific supply of gourmet Persian Star garlic. Luckily, it worked. So this year, I thought I'd try again with Persian Star, but also try Music, a popular variety, and Inchelium Red garlic. Of my new garden extension, a third of it got turned over to all the garlic.

To me, garlic makes a dish. I add it to every savory dish I make. It imparts a pungent, spicy almost sweet flavor and is necessary, as far as I'm concerned. It also has medicinal properties. Garlic is thought to be a cancer preventing, cardiovascular clearing, bacteria fighting wonder bulb! It even wards off vampires and the evil eye. Okay, that last bit was a joke, even though that is what folklore tells us. We should be eating more of it. True, it does give the consumer a case of stinky breath, but if we all ate it, no one would notice.

Between the culinary and medicinal properties, it truly is a special plant. That's why I nearly broke my back this weekend getting it planted, I'm giving over a good portion of my new garden extension to it, and I can't wait until the newly planted bulbs stick their leaves above the soil.

"Without garlic, I simply would not care to live" Louis Diat, a fabulous French Chef