Don't Forget...

To order your garlic (for fall planting) NOW!

Because I was late ordering last year (I ordered in summer rather than spring), I ended up getting a variety of garlic that I’d never planted before, and as you can see from the above picture, the bulbs ended up being quite a bit smaller than the type I prefer (which is Inchelium Red). It’s ok, the garlic will be fine, and home-grown garlic of any kind beats the pants off of anything you can buy in the store. But still, I wish I had my old faithful hanging on the ceiling racks.

So - don’t be like my 2023 self - be like my 2024 self and make sure you order now! I actually order it in March for delivery in October. My favorite place from which to order seed garlic is Filaree Farm in Oregon. They have so many different varieties. I like the softnecks so I can braid them for hanging, but if you like garlic scapes, you’ll want to order hardnecks.

Anyway, our garlic harvest was late this year, in early June rather than late May, and then the stalks hung on the garage racks for a month in order to thoroughly dry out. This past weekend, I braided them for hanging in the house. It’s a fun task.

Then I cut up all of the old cloves left from last year, all of which were bolting. I cut out the green shoot, put them in the food processor and made a paste, then spread it on a sheet and put it in the dehydrator. After drying, I whizzed it in our dedicated spice grinder (an old coffee grinder) and voila, we’ve got our garlic powder supply for the next year.

The smell of the house on ‘garlic’ day is really something. It feels good to provide ourselves with this necessary kitchen ingredient each year. Garlic is a beautiful and easy crop to grow, it’s used in practically everything we cook, growing it ourselves saves us money and time, and it looks great hanging up in the house.

Green Garlic Puree

I’ve written before about the difference in my two garlic beds. I planted Inchelium Red garlic last October as usual, but this time I split the crop into my two fire-ring beds. One bed had a cover crop of cilantro in with the garlic, and those bulbs grew tall and green and fat - and they are ‘curing’ in place now, without irrigation, filling out and waiting for harvest in early June. In the other bed, the garlic was alone, without a cover crop, and it didn’t do as well. The bulbs were short and measly, and didn’t seem to be getting any bigger. I decided to harvest it early and use it as green garlic. However, I couldn’t use it all at once, so I thought I might try to find a way to preserve it, long-term.

‘Green’ garlic is simply immature, taken out of the ground before the bulbs grow to a typical size. Interestingly, I discovered that many of the bulbs had already ‘headed up’ - that is, grown individual cloves, which you can see from the cross-section picture at the top of this post - but they were smaller than normal. However, many of the bulbs were simply one swollen clove, and had not yet headed up. Regardless of their size or development, I cut the green stalk off each one (which you can also use like scallions or chives) and let the small bulbs dry out on a paper towel inside for a couple of weeks. They were dirty, but as soon as they dried out, I could rub off the outer dirt and skin and reveal the clean, small bulbs underneath.

Then it was just a matter of peeling each one. Green garlic, being immature, doesn’t get all papery like mature garlic does; this means the peels are still quite moist and easy to take off. I decided to make a puree of the cloves with olive oil, and freeze them in cubes to use in cooking later. You cannot store garlic in oil in the fridge, because of the risk of botulism. The USDA Center for Food Preservation recommends storing garlic in oil in the freezer. Here is their blurb about that:

“Garlic-in-Oil

Research performed by the National Center for Home Food Preservation confirmed that mixtures of garlic in oil stored at room temperature are at risk for the development of botulism.

Garlic-in-oil should be made fresh and stored in the refrigerator at 40°F or lower for no more than 4 days. It may be frozen for long term storage for up to several months. Package in glass freezer jars or plastic freezer boxes, leaving ½-inch headspace. Label, date and freeze.”

Blending the garlic with oil was easy, and it made a pretty yellow puree, which I then decanted into an ice cube tray and put in the freezer. This amount yielded only 7 large cubes. Granted, they are pungent and will certainly pack a punch in any recipe. How handy to be able to take a cube out of the freezer, toss it in the frying pan, and have a lovely flavored oil in which to cook a mess of greens, or meat, or eggs. They could also be defrosted to make salad dressing (though it would be strongly-flavored!).

Nothing we grow in the garden should go to waste. There is always a use for it, and if not in the kitchen, it can be fed to livestock or added to the compost pile, where it goes back to feeding the next crop.

Time to Order!

It’s time to start thinking about ordering onions, shallots, garlic, potatoes, sweet potato slips, and asparagus crowns. My favorite place to get these items is from Filaree Farms in Washington State. They are an organic operation, and family owned. Everything I’ve gotten from them has been first-rate.

For garlic, my favorite variety is a softneck called ‘Inchelium Red.’ I’ve grown it for the past five years and we love it. It has a strong flavor and a beautiful purple cast to it, and it dries and braids well. It’s also a fairly good keeper, even in our warm dry climate.

I do not grow onions, but I do grow shallots, and like both ‘Dutch Red‘ and ‘French Grey.’ We have had allium aphids quite badly with ‘Dutch Red,’ so I’m going to try ‘French Grey’ again this year and see if we have better odds.

Potatoes come in three different ‘time’ categories, if you will - early season, mid season, and late season. Early season include varieties such as ‘Yukon Gold’ (my favorite). Mid Season include varieties such as ‘Red Chieftain.’ Late varieties include all the fingerlings, and russets. It’s fun to plant 1-2 of each kind, so you have potatoes all the way through summer. Home-grown potatoes really do taste different than store-bought, so it’s worth giving it a try.

Asparagus is a vegetable that takes some patience, as well as a permanent place in your garden. You’ll plant the crowns, which look like little octopi, and then you’ll wait three long years, watching the shoots grow and flower and leaf, before you can start to harvest them. But once they establish, they’ll be in your garden for 15-20 years, which is a very good return on your investment.

Ordering now is recommended, as most growers run out of supply quite early. You might be able to find a local supply, but why not do it now, while you’re thinking about it?

A Tale of Two Garlics

Or rather, a Tale of Two Garlic BEDS.

This year, I didn’t plant as much garlic as I have in years past. The kids are both at college, and while Tom and I are very fond of garlic and cook with it nearly every night, making two portions rather than four has changed my planting schemes considerably (for every crop, not just garlic). I decided to put the garlic in our two fire-ring beds this winter and see how it worked out.

Last summer, one of these beds held basil (a riotous overflowing abundant crop of basil!), and the other held cilantro - which grew, then quickly flowered, and set seed, as cilantro tends to do. Last winter, both of these beds held sweet pea flowers.

I planted the garlic cloves in both beds at the same time this past October. Both get the same amount of drip irrigation. Both have very similar conditions regarding sun exposure, particularly in winter when our chitalpa tree loses its leaves. But the garlic crop in one bed is much greener, and much further along, than the other.

The top bed held the basil, which I either harvested before it had a chance to set seed, or did set seed but hasn’t germinated, because it simply can’t in cold temperatures. The bottom bed has its third or fourth crop of cilantro at this point, because it definitely set seed, and it can germinate well in cooler temps.

The cilantro bed not only looks prettier, full and abundant and rich, the garlic is also further along, taller and greener than the basil bed. The soil in this bed is also darker and richer than the soil in the basil bed.

What’s going on here? It’s all down to the wonderful synergy that happens when two or more crops grow together. One might think that the garlic growing alone would do better - after all, it has no competition for nutrients, light, or water - but that’s obviously not the case.

The bed with both garlic and cilantro is doing so well because the two species are sharing resources. Mycelium (strands of fungi) are connecting between the roots of the plants, and are shuttling resources between the two. Even more importantly, the garlic and cilantro are feeding two different colonies of microbiota in the soil. Each is photosynthesizing and pumping sugars down through their root systems to feed all the microscopic critters, and that means double the food. It’s also likely that specific species show up to eat from the roots of each kind of plant. It’s a beautiful symbiosis that results in TWO great crops, rather than just one.

My guess is that I’m going to be able to harvest the garlic that is growing with the cilantro earlier than the one in the old basil bed. It will be interesting to see if my hypothesis is correct.

Homemade Garlic Powder

2020 had one thing going for it: We had an absolutely perfect garlic crop. I had finally perfected our method of growing garlic and it yielded beautiful, plump garlic bulbs, with juicy, succulent cloves. We’ve enjoyed it fresh ever since we harvested it. But then it did what garlic naturally does after a certain amount of time - it began to bolt and grow. We don’t have a root cellar, so storing garlic in ideal temperatures/humidity is just not possible for us; eventually it’s just going to turn, and there’s nothing to be done about that.

Garlic that has bolted (started sending up new growth) is still safe to eat, as long as the cloves are still firm. However, you need to cut out the growing shoot before using it, as that part will be bitter. Also, inevitably, the shoot will use up all the sugars in the clove, leaving it mushy and tasteless. So it’s a careful dance, knowing when to stop using your garlic harvest.

We knew that we wanted to get ahead of the mushy-clove stage, so this past weekend, we made garlic powder with the remaining bulbs. I cut down all five of the strings of garlic still hanging over the piano. I kept two big bulbs to try another experiment; planting them now, in pots, to see if I can get a fall crop of garlic on top of our already-growing spring crop (planted last October). I’ll let you know how that goes. I also removed the firmest two heads and popped them in the fridge, hoping to halt their growth and allow them to be used in cooking a bit longer. The rest of them were separated into cloves, shaken together in two identically-sized cake tins to remove their skins, and then sliced in half to remove the growing shoots.

Then, the cleaned cloves were put into the food processor in batches and chopped up. We spread the mixture on dehydrator sheets and dried it for about 20 hours. I wish you could have smelled our house while that was happening. Truly, I felt like we were in the middle of some kind of spice factory. At first, it was so strong, it made our eyes water; after a few hours, the scent changed to something sweeter and mellower, but still plenty strong. It’s a really good thing we had already planned on Italian for dinner, as this smell fitted right in!

before drying

after drying for 20 hours

After that, it was just a matter of peeling the dried puree off the sheets and popping it into our dedicated spice grinder. It ground up beautifully into a soft, creamy powder, and yielded an entire pint! That’s enough powdered garlic to see us through a year, at least.

This project took a lot of time, but we are so glad we were able to use up the rest of our beautiful garlic harvest in a sustainable way. It feels right, and honors the time, money, and effort it took to grow the crop in the first place. Nothing is as rewarding to grow as a staple like garlic, which is used so often in our cooking.

Have you ever dried your garlic crop? Have you ever planting sprouting cloves in the spring for a fall crop? If so, I’d like to know how your efforts turned out!