I might have garlic.
It’s embarrassing to admit it, after I spent an entire blog post last year complaining that I not only paid six bucks apiece for two heads of pedigreed garlic, but the crop failed. The varieties were “German” and “Music,” although for that kind of money I decided to rename them “Duchess Cecilie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin” and “The Second Movement of the Bach Concerto for Two Violins in D minor.” You rationalize your way; I’ll do me.
But the suckers never even came up. Instead their mulch showed signs of having been drilled, by bird or rodent, and some sort of abscondment was assumed to have occurred. I was not heartbroken. Garlic is cheap and you can buy it all year for a lot less than six bucks a head. I did call the garden store to see if they had any recommendations, and maybe I was hoping they’d offer to replace my bulbs, but they offered condolences instead, which was at least something.
Thing is, though, after a fair amount of time had passed, I noticed some buttons of greenery in a couple suspiciously neat rows, and then they shot up when I wasn’t looking, just like skin tags. And after a bit more time passed, it appeared I did have garlic plants, corresponding precisely to the number of cloves I had planted. And now they’re all big and everything. And I not only saved the little instructional flyer that came with the bulbs, like a person with no internet, but even remembered where I put it.
So I had a look-see.
Last week, I had confidently started dinner and gone out to harvest my first leek, which looked as big as what I’d buy in the store, and I could indeed have sliced it into the thin rounds called for if any of my kitchen knives had a pull-cord and a two-stroke engine. Clearly I had missed my harvest window for the leeks. So I thought I’d better get up to speed on my fancy garlic.
The flyer said there was something I was supposed to do to it in January, which I didn’t do; and something else in March, April, and May, which I didn’t do; stop watering in June, which was the only thing I did didn’t do because I hadn’t been doing it all along. And then, when there are three or four brown leaves on the plant, it’s ready to dig up. If there are scapes on it, hanging down limp, they can be harvested first and sautéed in oil—what can’t? But if the scapes are already pointing straight up, you might be late to the party. You might as well grasp the whole thing near the root and gently tug on the shaft and wiggle it a bit and see what happens. Odds are it’s woody, like my leeks.
I suck at this. I plant these things but I have trouble finishing.
Anyway, I still have hope for the garlic. Because it’s underground. As long as I don’t look, it might very well be in there. It’s totally in there! My new strategy: Just plant root vegetables. Until you actually start digging, you’ve got nothing but hope. We could all use a bit of that.
Your garlic sounds like the vegetable equivalent of Schröedinger’s Cat. Until you actually pull it up and observe it, it is both dead AND alive.
Schröedinger’s clove
I’ll go along with all that…if we may spell it Schrödinger or Schroedinger!
Schroedinger’s Garlic was my thought too, and wasn’t the least bit surprised to see Mimimanderly pop in with it first.
Chuckling at the spelling guidance. Not everyone knows that oe takes the place of an umlauted “o”. A few years serving in Germany certainly broadens ones grammar and spelling horizons!
On the other hand, I can’t tell you how excited I was to learn how to put all those little dingeys on my letters.
“She was the cuddly kind of Miss
A man can love to death;
But when I sought to steal a kiss
I wilted from a breath
With onion odour so intense
I lost my loving sense.
Yet she was ever in my thought
Like some exotic flower,
And so a garlic bulb I bought
And chewed it by the hour;
Then when we met I thrilled to see
‘Twas she who shrank from me.”
by Robert William Service
A very nice contribution, thank you!
I’m confused. Did the garlic fail to emerge where you thought it was planted? As in it came up somewhere else? Did it emerge later than you expected it?
It came up exactly where I planted it, but way later than I expected, and now I am revealed to be a pessimistic old goat.
I was distracted by “You might as well grasp the whole thing near the root and gently tug on the shaft and wiggle it a bit and see what happens.” Um, wasn’t that how a lot of Catholic girls got pregnant, back in the 1970s?
I figured you’d be distracted, Ed.
To be fair, I was also distracted by “scapes”, because my mind conjured up the word “bathyscaphe”, a word we learned in ALM French, Level III. (It’s about those random neurons firing…..)
Scapes? What are those? I’ve planted garlic many, many times only to have it disappear forever, now I just buy it when I need it.
Scapes are the flower stalks before they bust into bloom. Apparently delicious.
Reminds me of the time I planted carrots. I finally pulled one up late in November, figuring by then it HAD to be done. It was like one of those little baby carrots fancy restaurants put on your plate. Good luck with the garlic, hopefully it is under there!