Port Potager

The 2012 garlic harvest is in the books! I dug up and braided the last ones (our late Italian variety) this morning: This last braid is also my very best one--it's as tall as I am! (By the way, that's 5'2", since I think I use this measurement fairly regularly.) It's the biggest one by far: So that's this season's garlic, curing on the porch. All told, it's about 130 bulbs (not counting the tiny ones that went straight to the kitchen). This means we have 2 1/2 bulbs of garlic per week until next year's harvest — that's probably more than we need. On the other hand, we'll blow through quite a bit of it when canning season comes around in a few weeks (think pasta sauce, salsa, pickles, and relishes).  Finally, very sharp-eyed readers may notice a difference between this garlic harvest photo and the last one  (besides the obvious part about there being  more garlic braids now). Hint: Look up at the ceiling. This past wee...

Most of our Spanish Rosa garlic stalks were lying down on the ground today. Some of their leaves had died back, and they each had about four or five good leaves left. I have read that you want to harvest garlic before all the leaves are brown, because each leaf is a paper around the bulb, and they will store much better with several layers of the papery husk left on them.  This seemed like the right time to check them out, so I dug one up. It was gorgeous — nice and plump, with pinkish-purple papers: So I kept digging up all the ones that looked ready, which was about 30 in all. The big ones I braided together to make ropes by which to hang them: Kirk hung a hook and a small chain from the ceiling of the screened-in porch, and we tied our three garlic braids (about two dozen bulbs) to it. This isn't just for arts and crafts. When you pick garlic, you need to cure it by letting it air dry in a shady spot for several weeks until the leaves go brown and the papers a...