Adventures with Garlic

Jared told me he missed by blog. It's been a very long time since I've posted anything. When Kathy asked me about it, I claimed having just too much failure. And there has been plenty of distraction. I think I essentially quit trying to garden last year, so there was nothing to write about. But this year, I got busy again. So, my first new post is about garlic.

I ended up with a fair amount of garlic from last year. It hung braided in the garage all winter. Then it started to sprout. I tried saving some of it and took the cloves that hadn't sprouted and dried them in the dehydrator. I used the garlic press to squeeze out what I could and then either took it as it was or used a rolling pin to make it into powder.

But, then I still had a lot that had gone too far into sprouting, so I put some out on the street with a sign inviting neighbors to take it and plant it, gave it away to people at church to plant, and then planted about 20 or so cloves myself. Garlic should be planted in the fall, not the spring, so it was just an experiment. I had actually also planted about 7 or 8 cloves last fall. The fall cloves were large. The spring cloves were small.

Still, you have to do something with the cloves. And given that my last year's bumper harvest all sprouted before I could use them, I decided to take a couple of the big cloves and see what I could do. My first attempt is shown here. I cut the cloves in half and then dehydrated them.. Then i tried to grind them up with a mortar and pestle. Probably the wrong approach. The dehydrated cloves were tough as nails and didn't break up easily. I ended up using a knife to make them smaller.

I did end up with three sizes -- rather large chunks of garlic, smaller chunks of garlic (more like what I think of as minced) and powder.

Then I read that the smartest way to store garlic is in white vinegar. The value is that you only have to get the clove out of its casing. That in and of itself is a little sticky. Although I learned that for many cloves, you can sort of squeeze from the top and the clove will separate from its skin nicely. So, I separated a couple of heads of garlic and stored them this way in a cup-sized jar. The recipe I read said the vinegar doesn't really penetrate the garlic. You just wash it off before you use the clove.

I finally harvested the remaining garlic that had been planted in the spring. The heads were smaller and the cloves were smaller, but I was able to get another three cup-sized jars out of the plants. I canned the jars just like I would anything else. Two of the lids sealed. Two didn't.

There were some cloves left over, so I chopped them up and dried them. They were easier to deal with in terms of getting powder and minced garlic than I had experienced when I tried the same process with the garlic that I had only halved. So, next time, if I want dry garlic in any form, I will cut it up first.

I like growing garlic. It grows well. I don't mind having too much of it. I can always give some of it away.