Dancing with Garlic

This is our garlic harvest, which I dug up on the second to last day of 2005, filling a wheelbarrow with fat juicy bulbs of pungent goodness.

The photo I posted last week was garlic as I suspected, elephant garlic, supposedly much larger than ordinary garlic. Certainly the plants are twice or thrice as tall and the individual cloves are much bigger. But, strangely, the bulbs of the elephant garlic are not much larger than the biggest bulbs of our ordinary garlic, which is, imho, champion sized. I cannot take full credit for the beauty of this garlic crop which was planted before I arrived, but I have hand weeded it three times, and made sure it was watered liberally and mulched, so I can still kvell*).

Harvesting the garlic made me nostalgic about living at Dancing Vege Farm in Upstate New York, where the garlic harvest was stacked higher than a child at the end of each row. We filled the ceiling of the barn with it as it cured. That was the first place I tasted roasted garlic, where in its abundance we would have a bulb or two each to spread on toast every night. It was also a place of abundant home grown maple syrup, which I remember with even more fondness, being an incorrigible sweet tooth.


* Yiddish: to glow with pride