Some Garlic History

Among horticultural crops, garlic has one of the longest and most-venerated histories. Cultures in Europe, Egypt, and India referred to the stinking rose as long as five thousand years ago; the Babylonians used it 4500 years ago, and the Chinese documented its use as much as 4000 years ago. Early documentation refers to its medicinal properties, although monks in India avoided garlic, considering it a stimulant that aroused the passions.

Wild garlic, of the true garlic species Allium sativum, is found only in the republics of central Asia, with long, cold winters and short, hot, and dry summers. Throughout history, this area region has sat at the crossroads of trade routes, so that migrants and travelers have collected the wild garlic and carried it far and wide throughout the eastern hemisphere, so that it appears in mythologies in Egypt and creation stories in Korea.

Like many other members of the onion family, garlic uses its native short season of suitable growing conditions in the spring to collect water and grow through a vegetative cycle before developing a dry outer skin and going dormant. The dry outer layer provides a barrier against moisture loss as the bulb sits just under the surface of the soil, waiting for the following spring’s warmth, when it uses its reserves of moisture to reproduce. Because it uses day length as a cue for when to turn to drying, garlic matures in the middle of the summer even in the Upper Midwest, despite plenty of heat and moisture to come.

Wild garlic produces true seed, but cultivated garlic seems only to have been propagated asexually through bulb reproduction; each clove of garlic has the potential to become a new bulb, enlarging and then dividing over the course of the growing season. Within the past twenty years, USDA researchers have used environmental manipulation to pioneer the production of true garlic seed that results from sexual reproduction, allowing for the potential of recombining genes through traditional plant breeding techniques to create new varieties.

Goings on on the Farm

Yes, it is still raining. Returning from a meeting about the Organic Farming Conference at the MOSES office in Spring Valley, Wisconsin, daughter Isabel and I got caught in a Winona downpour that completely missed the farm, for which I felt grateful. And then another inch dropped on the farm in the middle of the night, replete with that sort of lightning that feels more like a flickering fluorescent light bulb than individual flashes, and a thundering background that drowns out any other noises.

Of course, things turned hot and muggy this week, as I think everybody in the Midwest noticed. Really hot and really muggy by Wednesday afternoon, so that the rain falling on asphalt seemed almost to sizzle.

We took advantage of a dry early part of the week to kill more weeds, trellis the outdoor crop of tomatoes, and push through the bulk of our harvest work. In the greenhouse, we’ve got some sickliness in the cucumbers, but the Sungolds are producing a bountiful crop. Chris seeded the storage crop of beets down on the rental ground on Saturday afternoon, along with the normal round of salad greens and quick herbs. In the transplant house, we started the fall cropping cycle of Italian greens.

On Monday we harvested a nice crop of garlic. We’ve been harvesting green garlic for quite a few weeks now, but this will be the crop that we cure for long-term storage. We decided to try something new with the cleaning and curing of the crop this year. In the past, we have hung the garlic in the barn to cure, but this year we decided to place the garlic in bins and hook the bins up to our greenhouse heater, which has a large, forceful fan on it. This allows us to run slightly warmer and drier air over the garlic, drying out the outer layers and sealing up the pores for long storage; keeping it out of the barn keeps it out of reach of birds and other sources of potential contamination.

In this Week's Box

When you get this box home, everything goes in plastic bags in the refrigerator except the tomatoes. To get you the best possible tomatoes, we harvest them a few days short of dead ripe; even over short distances, dead ripe tomatoes don’t travel well, and you simply can’t hold a fully ripe tomato for more than a day or two. I like to put my tomatoes out on the windowsill to ripen. If I want to hold them for later in the week, I find a cooler, darker spot for them. In direct sunlight, they will ripen very quickly.

Romaine Lettuce – Now that summer’s heat has set in in earnest, this will be the last romaine lettuce harvest of the season. We’ll start planting the fall crop soon.

Lettuce Mix – On the other hand, we can keep the lettuce mix producing nicely all summer long, and should have this on a regular basis. The harvest crew got a little over-enthusiastic this week, so we’ve got a big bag for your box; but with the heat, it’s hard to go wrong with salads.

Carrots with their Tops – We decided to keep the tops on the carrots this week. I use them to make vegetable stock or as an addition to chicken stock, and in Western Europe, fancy ladies used to use the carrot tops to decorate their hair the place of feathers.

Green Garlic

Yellow Zucchini – We grow yellow zucchini because they are so much easier to harvest, and their flavor is just as fine as the flavor of the green ones.

Sungold Cherry Tomatoes – The Sungolds are coming on strong, with vines already reaching over nine feet tall in the greenhouses. Zane put a lot of work this week into unwinding the tomato twine to lower the plants, leaving the top six feet upright and laying the bottoms of the vines down closer to the ground.

Red Tomatoes or Cucumbers

Broccoli – With the first broccoli harvest of the season, I can’t say that I’m too happy with the overall quality. We’ve got some disease issues causing “brown bead” in the heat and humidity, which reduces the storage life of the broccoli. It is still very usable, and we have worked hard to get it good and cold so that it will last as long as possible.

Golden Swiss Chard - Swiss Chard is also known as “perpetual spinach”, and although I think it has a lot more merit on its own than as a spinach substitute, they are readily interchangeable in recipes calling for cooked greens. Our yellow-stemmed variety is just a little more fun than the white kind.

Fennel

Recipes You Can Use

Simple Broccoli

1 lb broccoli
1/4 cup olive oil
salt
1 Tablespoon lemon juice
1/3 cup grated parmesan cheese

Preheat oven to 450. Cut broccoli florets in pieces, they should still hold together. Peel the stem and slice. Place in a baking dish, toss with salt and olive oil. Roast until brown, approx. 15 minutes. Transfer to a serving bowl, toss with lemon juice and top with the parmesan cheese

Chard over Pasta

1 bunch Swiss chard
Tamari soy sauce
Sesame oil
1 lb pasta

Chop chard stems and leaves into one-inch ribbons and saute in butter or oil until bright green. Dash on tamari and sesame oil to taste, and serve over fresh pasta.

Grilled Fennel

Fennel Bulbs
Olive Oil
Salt

Pre-heat the grill. Slice the fennel bulbs in half the flat way, and toss with olive oil and salt. Place on the hot grill and reduce the flame. Grill until just beginning to brown on the edges, about five minutes, and turn. Remove from heat and serve when fork tender and slightly charred.