garlic

Reasons that garlic is wonderful.
1. You get to grow it in the heart and darkness of winter, when your inner gardener is otherwise starved and having to subsist by re-reading seed catalogues a thousand times.

2. You can make a ritual with it and have a feast on the shortest day and then plant some at midnight. I'm still gunning to achieve this one. The reality other years has been plagues of flu which mean we are sick and so are half our friends. Vomiting bugs were a gross variation the first year in wetville.

3. It's good for you and available pretty much all year round. Though it isn't fresh out of the ground year round, drying and ageing makes it more potent. I really don't think anyone should by garlic tablets though when you can put the real, unprocessed thing in your food so easily.

4. Plaiting it makes you feel all clever a la Laura Ingalls Wilder and Little House on the Prairie. Well I'm sure it will when I do actually plait some.

5. Tabbouleh and hummous are mega-ly wonderful for your body. Raw garlic and yummy.

6. You can make garlic spray. Now I've read this in quite a few places and not really taken it on board. But today I was chatting to the local market gardener. We only have one and he lives/grows nearly 40 km away. Twice a week he tows his vege cart up to our town and sets up shop on the side of the main road. We got chatting (that would be me grilling him and him being kindly) about the white buttefly menace and he told me about the garlic spray he makes and uses. I couldn't use a tractor to drive over the garlic bulbs several times to squash it, but I could use a bucket and water to let it ferment for 7-8 days and then make it into a spray and spray it on the brassicas. So then it turns out he grows his own garlic but doesn't bring any up to our town as it isn't popular. So I have his number so I can pre-order some next week as I'll need more if I'm going to make garlic spray.

7. When you roast garlic slowly in the oven and then squeeze it over your roast meat, it tastes divine in a totally different way to eating it raw or quickly cooked).

8. Apparently roses love growing beside garlic. I've asked our neighbours who win prizes with their roses for some recommendations on good roses for certain spots in our garden, including the proposed site for most of next season's garlic, and they have invited the kids and I round to view their (new) house, their roses books and their roses whenever it suits us. They are also going to give me the contact details for the mushroom compost people in Christchurch which is what they grow their divinely successful garden on.

9. Who wouldn't want to grow some of their own garlic? It's currently $20 per kilo for non-organic garlic in the local supermarket and that's probably for Chinese garlic. And just to properly make us gasp, organic (though not certified that I could see) garlic, from the USA and thus drenched in fossil fuel when we can grow our own perfectly well here in NZ, is retailing at no less than $50 per kilo.

10. I've a feeling that garlic is surrounded by lots of folk lore in various countries. Hopefully I'll be back with more details when I've learnt some stories.