This morning, Randy pulled up all the Early Italian Purple and Inchelium Red garlic at the Angelus Street Garden. These two soft-neck varieties have been very productive and problem free for us. Inchelium Red is listed in the Slow Food USA Ark of Taste, a catalogue of over 200 delicious heirloom foods that are in danger of extinction! We’re doing our part to keep this distinctive variety from disappearing.
Randy pulled up some truly gigantic, fist-sized heads of both varieties! The Nootka Rose is still in the ground, it takes a bit longer. We bought the three varieties of “seed” garlic in 2009, so this is our second harvest. We will cure and save the biggest ones, some for GrowMemphis, and some for Tubby Creek Farm that will be planted in November to yield for our 2012 CSA and farm stand.
Garlic is a pleasure to grow. It does require loose soil and plenty of nutrients, but if you can satisfy those requirements, it is almost labor free! The individual cloves are pushed into the ground in November when the weather is cool and the chaos of the growing season has abated. It is covered with thick mulch, we’ve been using straw, and watered by the rain all winter and into spring. Since it is pulled up in early June, we usually only have to water it a couple times in May if the rain doesn’t take care of that for us.
Now, the garlic is laid out on newspaper on the dining room table waiting to be sorted into what will go to the farmers market and what will be saved for “seed”.
