Garlic

Growing garlic, along with all other vegetables that develop underground (potatoes, carrots, etc.) requires a leap of faith. I can’t check to see if everything is developing properly. I’ve grown plenty of skinny radishes, and I don’t trust those underground developers – who knows what they are up to under there? They could be taking the water I give them and slacking off. So it is always a bit of a miracle to pull something fully developed out of the soil, which I did when I harvested my garlic a few weeks ago. What a relief!



I planted two types of garlic, but in a fairly typical display of overconfidence in my ability to remember things, I failed to label which was which. In fact, I failed to write down the names of my garlic at all – which means a regretful entry in my garden notes: “Grew garlic. Tasty. No idea what kind, or where I can get more.”

Currently, my garlic is curing outside the kitchen door. I attempted to braid it into an attractive braid, such as you see in cooking magazines and “rustic” photoshoots, but failed abjectly. Now I suspect that those lovely long braids of garlic in magazines are (gasp) staged. They must use fake garlic hair. Another illusion shattered. Then again, maybe I just need to wait until the garlic stems are a little dryer.



When I started my garlic growing adventures, I consulted The Complete Book of Garlic when it came to the curing stage, and learned the following:

“Pull the bulb from the ground and loosely rub the soil out of the roots. Keep the harvested garlic out of direct sunlight. Do not wash it with water. Garlic needs to dry and cure in a well-ventilated area out of the sun. With twine, tie the garlic in bundles of six to twelve and hang to dry and cure, bulb portion downward, for several weeks until the vegetative material above the bulb is completely dry. Trim off the vegetative material to approximately 1 in. (2.5 cm) above the bulb. If the vegetative material is still moist, the garlic needs more drying time. Trim the roots, leaving about 1/4 in. (0.5 cm). Brush the soil from the roots with a toothbrush and remove the outermost dirty bulb wrapper with your thumb or the edge of the toothbrush. Use netted bags, such as those typically used for onions, shallots, and garlic, to keep your harvested garlic sorted and stored so that air can circulate.”

Good to know! Unfortunately, Ted Meredith does not address the issue of “making your garlic braid look like it does in a magazine.” But he does talk about the differences in garlic flavor:

“For salad dressings that include crushed raw garlic, I like a garlic that is richly flavored, but not overly hot. Rocambole cultivars, such as ‘Spanish Roja’, ‘Russian Red’, and ‘Carpathian’ fit the bill perfectly. Purple Stripe cultivars, such as ‘Shvelisi’, ‘Samarkand’, and ‘Shatili’ are strongly and complexly flavored, but not overly sulfurous or aggressive, and work well minced and sautéed in Continental cuisines. The large-cloved and somewhat more aggressive Marbled Purple Stripe and Porcelain cultivars such as ‘Bogatyr’ and ‘Romanian Red’ are good choices for spicy Asian dishes where a greater amount of more aggressively flavored garlic works well. These are a few examples among many, and of course, everyone has their own favorites and favorite ways of cooking.”

As someone who always believed that garlic tasted like – well, garlic – it’s interesting to learn that there are different flavors out there. If only I had written down the type I have.

Chani West-Foyle, Marketing Associate

New Low-Maintenance

One of the books that I am most looking forward to this year is The New Low-Maintenance Garden. I love working in my garden, but I also love cooking, movies, teasing the cats, knitting, bike rides, dancing... and on and on. So the idea of a low-maintenance garden is a "have your garden and eat it too" best case scenario to me. Plus the book is gorgeous! Here's an excerpt from Val's introduction, where she explains how she came around to the low-maintenance garden ideal.



The Simplified Garden: A New Low-Maintenance Manifesto

"Gardening, like everything else worthwhile in life except maybe love, comes down to time and resources. Our passion for plants and nature too often obscures this basic truth. But we ignore the time and resource part of the equation at our peril.
The idea for a fresh take on a simplified, low-maintenance garden came directly from my own years of intensely gardening an overplanted quarter-acre hillside. All the weeding, grooming, watering, mulching, and mowing finally wore me out. As a horticultural librarian and weekly garden columnist for the Seattle Times, I used my garden as my laboratory. For many years my enthusiasm for digging, planting, and caring for all I’d created was boundless. And then one day it wasn’t.
The spring I felt more jaded than enthused when I looked at flats of beguiling baby annuals waiting to be potted up, I realized with a sinking heart that while my passion for plants and gardens was perpetual, my inclination to spend most waking moments working outdoors was not.

And then my husband resigned as yard boy. After thirty years of marriage, he’d run out of patience helping me with something he was never much interested in. As middle-age crises go, it wasn’t too bad. He simply told me, again and again until I heard him, that he was going to spend his weekends bike riding and kayaking rather than hauling buckets of mulch up the stairs, mucking out the pond, and carting away excess biomass. Greg now claims it took four years before I heard him say he was through toiling in the garden. Out of kindness, he kept working during the time it took to sink into my consciousness that I no longer had a crew. When I finally did understand that I was on my own caring for these thousands of plants, I belatedly realized that while I loved my garden, I too craved a little downtime, more spaces in my life to read a novel, go to a movie, or browse a museum without feeling guilty about time away from endless garden chores. It was time for a new low-maintenance garden intervention.

I set a new goal, one that seemed nearly impossible at the outset of my gardening odyssey. I wanted to be able to look out my window and see more than just work waiting for me out there. I wanted to enjoy my garden, not just labor in it. Was it possible to grow the flowers that I love—I came to gardening originally because of a passion for flower arranging—plus berries, vegetables, herbs, and lettuces without again creating a garden that ceaselessly called for more care than I had time or energy to give it?"

Chani West-Foyle, Marketing Associate

Demise and Rebirth

I’ve heard rumors that even the best gardeners kill plants. I’ve also heard that the truly enlightened don’t waste time on regret – move on, get another plant, put it in another place, see what happens.

I admire this. I picture experienced gardeners as being kind of like spies or tough detectives in novels or on television. Confident, ready for anything, letting bygones be bygones. (At least, that's how I like my detectives. None of this pesky humanity business for me. There's no room for doubt in a detective!)

I have not yet reached that enlightened state. I still go through lots of guilt when one of my plants dies because of me. I have a list in my head. Recently, there is my viburnum. Or my echinacea that I forgot to water one weekend, and that turned into a crispy array of tiny leaves. It looked like what herbs are supposed to look like when you hang them upside down in a cool dry place for three months.

As a sort of penance, I tend to water things that I'm convinced are dead. I think of it as buying my way into the good graces of the departed spirit of my plant. (Too much anthropomorphizing can do that to a girl.)

But sometimes I've called the death too soon, and the watering pays off. My viburnum? Sprouting new leaves.



And the echinacea? Tiny new growth as well!



My garden is a better place.

-Chani West-Foyle, Marketing Associate