Everlasting Garlic

Garlic is used in almost every cuisine on the planet, and with good reason. It is incredibly versatile but also a hardy and easy crop to grow. While there are many tips for growing garlic, each one different from the last, one thing everyone seems to agree on is planting garlic in the fall.

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When I clear the next bed it will be time to plant the overwintering onions. I choose to plant my onions in the autumn for two reasons; the first is that I like having the beds filled overwinter. It’s nicer than having a bare garden to look at. The second is that they are harvestable about a month earlier in the summer, which means their bed is available for replanting a month earlier, and that works for me.

I felt like spending some time outside on Sunday morning. This was the salad bed when I went out – a chaotic jumble of plants, most on their last legs. I cleared it all out, and was rewarded with several carrots, a small beetroot, a little tuft of kale and some leaf beet leaves.

After 3 weeks (2 ‘official’, 1 trial) living on a modern version of the wartime rations, Ryan and I are calling it a day. We’re not hungry, and we’re not bored with the food. What we’ve found is that we live within the ration of meat, fats and dairy products quite happily. I guess this is because we are flexitarians (or reducetarians), and have been consciously reducing our meat consumption for some time, bulking out meals with vegetables and/or pulses, as they would have done in wartime. (And we’ve long been barraged with health warnings about eating too much fat!) Of course, we also have the benefits of a household fridge, and an array of foodstuffs that just wouldn’t have been available in wartime, particularly as the war wore on and people’s stocks of spices and flavourings ran down.

Would you like to find out how to grow garlic?  It’s such an easy crop to grow!

I GROW HARDNECK GARLIC because I like the big heads with a few, extra-fat cloves each (usually about four, maybe five), but also because of what happens right now, when my ‘German Extra Hardy’ plants send up their early bonus–a tasty flowering stalk, or scape. I prune each mildly garlicky curlicue off, grill it whole or cut it into pieces and saute or stir-fry it, or make a batch of scape pesto for the freezer.

IT’S MY FAVORITE HARVEST MOMENT OF ALL: The garlic is in, and the barn smells like it. Seventy-five big, fat heads of ‘German Extra Hardy,’ a hardneck variety also sold as ‘German Stiffneck’ and beloved by Northeast growers in particular, are up and out and under cover.

FOR THOSE who cannot read one more headline of world despair or political madness, a recent “New York Times Magazine” story on what happens when combat veterans and damaged parrots connect is a certain antidote. A must-read:  Charles Siebert’s “What Does a Parrot Know about PTSD?”  (Photo of blue and gold macaws under Creative Commons license from Marcel Burkhard.)size-xl coyotes: woyote, coywolf, or what?THE OTHER NIGHT at a dinner, someone said that they’d seen a wolf in a local cornfield. No, I said, we don’t have wolves in the Northeast, but we do have really big coyotes (60ish pounds, rather than the “usual” 35 or 45). To refres

I remember discussing black garlic with my friends at a dinner party about 10 years ago.We’d all heard of this trendy, artisanal