Onions and Garlic

Onions and Garlic

                   These are basic for cooking any cuisine so a home gardener has to figure out the best for planting space plus the best for the climate that one lives in.  If you think about famous or favorite onions like Hawaii, Sweet Onions from Georgia or the Walla Walla from eastern Washington it relates to long hot growing season.  Currently, in Olympia Washington planting onions and expecting good results is like our tomato crop, it may happen but it is to be consider a bonus year.

                  With the mild rainy winters garlic is my approach to suppling myself with one of the two vegetable.  I plant a ten by eight foot area with garlic in the fall of the year.  The first winter I was here I did not get my garlic in the ground until December but in June or July the following summer I realized what an easy crop it was for me to grow.  The added bonuses include the tops that appear about a month before harvesting.  The top in a short week of time does goes to seed in manner of curling and dropping downward.  It is important to cut these tops off so the plant does spend it energy sitting seed but instead sends the the energy to enlarging the bulb in the ground.  The tops are often sold at farmer's markets for $10 a pound for a good reason.  If you have had any stir fried with a little sea salt you would understand.  It is a summer treat like the first strawberries.  

                  The key to getting large garlic bulbs, I believe, is by starting with large cloves and secondly stopping all watering of the garlic for the weeks right before harvest.  I love the rhythm of gardening and one of my favorite times of the year is to pull out my bulbs and lay them to dry on a side patio with the weather forecast is clear of rain.   A few weeks later, my skill from childhood of braiding comes into play and I quietly sit under the grape arbor twisting and weaving the stocks of garlic into long ropes I can hang on the side of my tool shed to dry more.   The routine of annually doing this connects be to the cycle of gardening in a way that I particularly enjoy.

                   Saving garlic changes each year for me. All the years, I pull out the largest cloves for seed to use in the fall.  Of course, after two years all sense of what varieties are now being planted are lost on me, even though the first year I have six different kinds.  Following that separation, the remaining bulbs are sometimes stored in a refrigerator, some are skinned and frozen as cloves, some are put into oil and frozen and a few are roasted and them frozen.  Keep them fresh, I find difficult because you get the little green in the center growing and they become strong or bitter like the ones in the grocery store.  I use garlic almost daily so I treasure my ability to grow my own and have it available most of the year for cooking.