Scape Time

Our garlic started putting up scapes a few weeks ago, and we've been harvesting them to cook with. We probably let them get too big—the conventional wisdom is that cutting scapes off will let the plant spend more energy on making a big, fat bulb of garlic—but we're lazy and they look cool. Incidentally, Patrick just put up a really interesting post about breeding garlic from seed that's worth checking out if you're interested in that kind of thing.

Holy Garlic Stink, Batman

Last night, we went through with our plan to turn some of our green garlic into pesto sauce. I cleaned a small handful of garlic—roughly the same amount as bunch of green onions from the grocery store—and chopped off both the roots and the grassy tips. I threw the garlic in our trusty Magic Bullet, along with some olive oil, a little salt and, to thin it out a bit, some water from our cooking pasta.

We put it in a pot to heat up and added some romano cheese. It looked very, very, green and it smelled deeeelicious.

Then we tasted it, and we fell to the ground and started to cry. It was insanely, tongue-burningly strong. It was intense.

Note to anyone making sauce out of green garlic: No need to use a ton of the stuff.

We poured about half of the sauce into a container to use some other time, and added a boatload of cheese and cream to the remainder with hopes of mellowing it out a bit. That did the trick. It tasted way good on pasta, and we'll zap up the rest of our early garlic crop and freeze it (in teeny tiny portions) so we can throw it on food throughout the sumer.

I kept getting whiffs of garlic today because my bookbag, which was in the kitchen while we were cooking, reeked of it.

Food!

Let the record show that this, the fourth weekend of April, 2008, marks the first time this year that we ate actual food from our garden.

This lettuce was planted last fall and survived the winter with only a couple of frostbitten outer leaves. Due to the lack of an appropriate harvest basket we jammed it into this coffee mug. It (the lettuce, not the mug) made an excellent salad for dinner last night.


This garlic was planted a year and a half ago, got swallowed whole by weeds and never harvested, and re-emerged this spring as a million little clusters of green garlic. Some of it made an appearance in our soup tonight, and the rest will be pesto by tomorrow evening.

Got deer? Got bamboo?

Then sharpen the bamboo into spears and kill the deer! Or build a fence.

Deer have been stomping around our garlic patch and threatening to turn our tidy rows of bulbs into mush. We don't really want venison that's been raised on the neighbors' ChemLawn grass and Miracle Gro shrubbery, so we decided against the sharpened spears and went with a fence instead.

There is nothing the deer particularly want from the garlic garden—it just provides a convenient shortcut for them to take when they move from chewing off the tops of our blueberry bushes to rolling around on the herbs. Our fence basically needed to provide enough of a barrier that the deer would walk around the garden rather than through it, so we planned a fence that would be tall enough to keep them from jumping over it.

The first order of business was a trip to the bamboo forest.


Bamboo will be the first thing we plant at future house. We use it for practically every single garden project we do, and it's plentiful, cheap, and pretty. The above picture was taken yesterday—while the rest of the area is still in gray and brown winter mode, the bamboo is a nice cheery green, like it always is. We chopped down about a dozen tall pieces and dragged them over to the garlic, where we proceeded to attach 6-foot bamboo poles to metal stakes and pound them into the ground around the perimeter of the garden.

Then we took looong pieces of bamboo and tied them to the uprights, parallel to the ground, so they went the whole way around the garden (minus opening we left at one corner). We ended up with sort of a bamboo split-rail fence. For extra insurance we ran pieces of twine between the bamboo, so that the deer won't be tempted to climb through the gaps.


Now, let's hope it works.

We wanted a lot of garlic this year. We ordered some from Seeds of Change, won some from a dude on eBay, bought some at a farmers' market, and were given some of this house's resident garlic (Music garlic, which has been planted here for years). All together we have:

Georgia Crystal
Russian Giant
Music
Italian
German Extra Hardy
Bogatyr
Chesnok Red
Spanish Roja
Emmaus (some mystery variety we picked up at the Emmaus Farmers' Market)

At the end of the day we had 429 cloves of garlic planted in two and a half nice, composty beds, and covered with a few inches of broken down grass clippings and old straw.

Don't be alarmed by the smoke. We had us a little old-tomato-plant-fire to keep us toasty while we planted.

We planted some of the garlic earlier in the season and just mulched it today. It's already sprouted and has made some good headway so far. The new stuff will probably sprout soon, considering the weirdo temperatures we've been having--it was 70 degrees yesterday and 40 today. Either way, we're going to be eating major amounts of garlic scapes in June and harvesting a boatload of bulbs not too long after that.

The Garlic of Education

Meg and I are always learning something new about the fascinating world of backyard food production. Recently we learned that our steps to planting garlic were a little out of order. Actually the only step that was out of place was when to add mulch. We thought that the mulch was added AFTER the garlic sprouted. This assumption was made because we were under the impression that the mulch would suffocate the garlic and keep them from sprouting. We were wrong.

Many of the garden blogs we read are talking about one of three things: frost/snow, what's in food storage, and planting garlic. While reading Tiny Farm Blog and Her Able Hands I realized that mulching your garlic beds doesn't have to wait for the shoots to show. After sharing this information with Meg we decided that we should gather some straw bales right quick. The shoots are already close to four or five inches tall and were going to be covered next week, but now it is at the top of our to-do list with a bit of fire under our asses.

I don't feel that we are too late; we waited this long last year and ended up harvesting close to 200 bulbs. However, it is a bit of a bother sifting straw between every sprout and if this helps ease the chore than I am all applause.

Garlics

Last year we chose a pretty crappy location for our garlic, and most of the bulbs we harvested were small and/or squishy. Gross. Half of it didn't even make it through the winter (despite our efforts to mulch) due to some combination of inadequate sun and the garlic's own lack of hardiness.

This year we annexed the superior upper garden, which is basically filled with pure compost, is in full sun, and has great drainage. We also paid more attention to the garlic we bought, and found varieties that can handle a decently cold and snowy Pennsylvania winter. Our garlic is going to be so awesome.

Steve-o generously tilled the garden for us, so it took practically no time to build two lovely beds.


Nice!

Last Sunday we planted 200 cloves: 50 each of Spanish Roja and Chesnok Red, and 100 of an unnamed hardneck variety we bought at the Emmaus Farmers' Market. Next week, we'll add 50 cloves of Music and 25 Russian Giant, plus some German Extra Hardy, Italian Purple, Bogatyr, Georgia Crystal and more Spanish Roja. Our 350-400 cloves will turn into 2000 cloves by next year, and you can bet we'll be reeking of it.