Yesterday morning we started pulling out the garlic. It was a big job and we didn’t even finish. Vince was digging it up (same photo as earlier) and I was loading it on the drying racks.
It’s in much better shape than I had expected with it having been left in the ground longer than it should have been.
Last year we harvested about 200 pounds. It seems like more this year but we won’t weigh it til it’s dried out for a week or so and we cut the stems off.
We have five drying racks and we filled three of them, and have about 1/3 of the garlic left to harvest. I was thinking we’d have less garlic than we had last year but Vince reminded me that the five drying racks held the onions too last year. Oh, that may be a problem if we have no place for the onions.
Last night we had this conversation:
Me: Before we were married, did you ever have a garden?
Vince: YES!
Me: Where?
Vince: Georgia.
Me: You did not! I went to that house. The whole back yard was a swimming pool and play area!
Vince: Maybe it was at my first house in Georgia.
Me: NO!
Vince: Maybe I didn’t ever have a garden but my father always had a garden.
Well .. that’s a big different. Vince works his tail off in our garden but that’s (1) to keep me quiet and (2) he likes the food it produces but his heart is not in gardening.
He was out digging the garlic. I was fertilizing the beans. I looked over and he was holding something and really scrutinizing it.
I couldn’t even see what he was holding and I was hoping it wasn’t a snake he’d accidentally grabbed onto. I said “What’s wrong?” He said “This looks like an onion!” The look on his face was so funny.
Me: Oh, it IS an onion.
Vince: How did it get in with the garlic?
Me: I ran out of room when I was planting onions and stuck some in empty spots on the garlic row.
We had planted the garlic first and it had already come up so when I ran out room to plant the onions, I stuck a few of them in with the garlic.
Vince said “I pulled it up. I thought . . this doesn’t look like garlic!” And he was trying to look at it a bit more closely to see if it really was an onion.
Maybe you had to be there but it was so funny when he said “This looks like an onion!”
Kathy Chiocca says
I was so excited the first time I saw you had planted garlic that I planted some. It was in a little empty flower bed. It gew! although the heads were small. I have planted some every year.
Last year we took a ride down a dead end road near our house and saw row upon row of produce crates and they were filled with garlic. And there were lots of beautiful heads that had fallen on the ground. We became garlic gleaners. We had enough for the winter and I went ahead and planted some of that garlic too.I think we will have enough garlic now. Thanks for the inspiration.
PS I am married to an Italian too and he also loves garlic.
Susan Nixon says
At least he noticed the difference. =)