A Farmer and His Garlic

As part of his annual crop rotation scheme, Leigh Hauter over the years had planted garlic just about everywhere he could on his farm except for this strip of land on the slope just below his greenhouse.

The previous owners of Bull Run Farm had not done much in the way of erosion control. "There was very little topsoil left on that slope," he said. So he spent at least five years building the soil again with applications of compost made from horse manure and straw and the droppings from his chickens.

This year, Leigh and his farmhand disagreed over whether the soil was ready for garlic. Leigh said no, the farmhand said yes. "I was never really happy with what had been growing up there," Leigh said. "I didn't want to risk putting my garlic all in one place where it wouldn't do well." Eventually, though, the farmhand prevailed. Garlic it would be.

Leigh prefers a German porcelain variety of hardneck garlic. "It's done better for me, and it makes a larger bulb," he says.

Garlic is divided into two types: hardneck and softneck. They are both grown exactly the same. But the hardneck has a determinate number of cloves (sometimes as few as four, but large) and produces a "scape," a stalk from which a seed head grows. The scapes--tasting of garlic and delicious as food--are harvested before the seed head forms. Softneck garlic, meanwhile, is the kind most often found in stores with an indeterminate number of cloves--often layers of them--as well as a thicker skin. Because of its thicker skin, softneck garlic stores longer.

Garlic typically is planted in fall, then overwinters in the ground. Around August, Leigh orders 400 pounds of bulbs from a commercial grower in New York State. These will produce about 12,000 plants, resulting in 12,000 bulbs to be distributed to Leigh's 500 CSA subscribers.

First Leigh tilled the soil on the slope, adding some more compost. Then they planted the cloves--pointy end up--using a mechanical device pulled along behind his tractor. Two people ride on the device feeding cloves of garlic into a wheel that inserts the garlic about three inches below the soil surface, several inches apart, then covers them over. As long as you're driving the tractor straight, the method will create neat rows of garlic.

The final step is to cover the garlic with a thick mulch.

Garlic doesn't like competition from weeds. The mulch keeps weeds down as well as retaining moisture in the soil. Leigh uses hay from one of his neighbors who raises hay along with beef cattle. In exchange for selling some of the beef to his CSA subscribers, Leigh gets whatever hay hasn't been sold at the end of the season--typically 50 to 75 bails of it. The garlic field is covered over with a layer of hay about six inches thick, enough to block any sunlight that might reach the soil. "If the weed seeds don't get light, they can't grow," says Leigh.

The garlic, however, has no problem pushing its way through the hay after it sprouts. By spring the unmistakable garlic leaves--slender and pointy--are already several inches long. Leigh won't need to water the garlic much at all. "Even that drought we had a couple of years ago when I was worried about the garlic, it did okay." Nor will he be adding any additional fertilizer. Garlic likes lots of organic matter. But you don't want to feed it too much or you'll get too much foliage and not enough bulb.

When the scapes come up, sometime in June, they'll be cut and sent to subscribers as a treat in they're CSA boxes. Cutting the scapes also redirects the plants' energy toward making bigger bulgs. They'll be harvested when about two-thirds of the leaves have turned brown, usually around the end of June.

Mulching Garlic

I like to mulch with straw. Straw gives the garden a natty look, like the gardener really knows what he's doing. Ha! And really I should have mulched my garlic beds when I planted them last fall. But I haven't been particularly thrilled with straw mulch around garlic. It seems like the weeds always manage to find a place to grow through the straw. So this year looking at the same issue again I thought I'd try to make the straw thicker by chopping it up. This has the added advantage of making the mulch easier to lay around the garlic leaves--if you waited until spring to mulch as I did.

Here's my chopper: the trusty leaf pulverizer. It's really just a weed whacker (line trimmer) in a can, a small motor turning two lengths of plastic line at great speed. Like a food processor, you just drop your vegetable matter--usually leaves in the fall, straw at the moment--from the top. The Whirring plastic line chops it to pieces and it all falls conveniently into the trash can underneath. I always seem to have at least one pile of rotting straw somewhere in the garden, usually last year's mulch.

The trash can practically carries itself to the garlic bed, where I spend an hour or so arranging the chopped straw around the plants, about two inches thick. I like the idea of foraging for mulch on site, rather than buying something in a plastic bag from the garden center. In the past I tried mixing chopped leaves and shredded newspaper together for mulch. But the newspaper liked to blow around too much in the wind. Now I'm thinking the straw could easily be stretched by mixing in some of the shredded leaves I've been saving from last fall. The first job of mulch is to hold moisture in the soil. But it also does a good job of suppressing weeds, and garlic doesn't care much for weeds.

How do you like to mulch your garlic?

Garlic Harvest

Garlic planted in the fall overwinters and should be ready to harvest sometime in early summer. Yesterday we gathered 40 heads of garlic from a bed outside our front door. This is a softneck variety. Originally we had planned on planting hardneck garlic, which produces delicious scapes or flower stalks, but our favorite seed source--Southern Exposure Seed Exchange--ran out.

Garlic will last months if it is dried and "cured" in a dark and relatively cool place. The curing process typically means hanging the garlic so that each head has good air circulation around it. Some authorities recommend leaving the dirt on during the cure, then brushing it and any loose skin away.

However, all of our produce has to come into the house. We don't have a good work area other than the kitchen--not yet, anyway. So I clean the garlic before curing it. A thin jet of water from the garden hose quickly washes away the dirt and removes a layer of skin, revealing the pearly white heads underneath.

All this garlic should keep us for a long time. It may even be time to start looking for some good garlic recipes. An acquaintance, Susan Belsinger, wrote an entire book about garlic, "The Garlic Book: A Garland of Simple, Savory, Robust Recipes." Do you know it?

Kids Make Fava & Pea Salad with Roasted Garlic Vinaigrette

Sometimes I am completely surprised by what the kids in my "food appreciation" classes find delicious. I wasn't sure at all about this particular dish--a salad of fava beans, peas and asparagus--because it is just so darn green. In addition, I was betting the kids had never heard of fava beans and might very well reject them, even though they are among my favorite foods.

In fact, there were several different elements in this lesson competing for attention. First was some background on favas, since they are the original old world bean, unlike virtually every other bean in the world, which traces its lineage back to the Americas. There is also the strange little casing from which the fava must be liberated before it can be consumed.

We also had asparagus spears that needed to be cut in a decorative fashion for our salad. And then came the matter of a vinaigrette that starts with roasted garlic. For this I introduced the kids to parchment paper, an easily overlooked but extremely handy kitchen supply that gives rise to its own cooking technique: oven steaming. I showed the kids how to slice the top off a whole head of garlic, drizzle it with olive oil, then wrap it in parchment paper, and again in aluminum foil for roasting in the oven.


I've always purchased my favas frozen at the local Latin store. The tender, sweet bean is encased in a tough shell. Defrost the beans in a pot of boiling water, drain and chill in cold water. If you make a slit at one end of the shell with a paring knife, the bean slides right out. One of the students preferred prying the shell open with his fingers. To each his own.

I now find shelled favas in the frozen section of the local Whole Foods. This eliminates a lot of work. For the salad, we found that 1 1/2 cups each (about 8 ounces) of favas and frozen peas, plus 1 pound of fresh asparagus trimmed and cut on an angle into 1/2-inch pieces, then cooked until tender, made enough for at least a dozen snack-size portions. Cut this recipe in half to make four adult-sized dinner portions.

To defrost the favas and peas, we simply combined them in a bowl and covered them with hot water for a minute or two.

Roast the garlic in its parchment-foil packet ahead of time in a 350-degree oven for one hour, then give it a chance to cool. When it comes time to make the vinaigrette, squeeze the garlic like toothpaste out of its paper skin into a mixing bowl. Kids love the smell of roasted garlic, but they weren't quite sure what to make of the squishy, caramelized puree that emerged.

"Ew!" they exclaimed. "It looks like poop!"

When roasted like this, garlic is completely transformed--it loses all its agressive tendencies and becomes very mild, even sweet.

Use a whisk to blend 1 1/2 tablespoons red wine vinegar and a drop or two of extra-virgin olive oil into the garlic puree. When the oil is completely incorporated, mix in another 1/3 cup. Season with salt to taste. At this point, I would normally add about 1/2 cup toasted walnuts, coarsely chopped. But we don't do nuts at school because of allergies. One alternative might be the toasted roasted soy beans you sometimes find in the bulk section. One of the students suggested water chestnuts to give the salad a little crunch.

Toss the salad with vinaigrette, chopped parsley, some crumbled Feta cheese and serve at room temperature. The kids gave this dish a big thumbs-up. It would make an excellent side for a spring picnic.

Where's the Garlic?

This morning saw a happy convergence of food activities.

The garlic we picked yesterday is still sitting on the front stoop. I have no idea whether to wash it or find some other way to remove the dirt. I am just that stupid about garlic. I asked my wife and was surprised to learn she didn't know either.

But I was determined to taste some of the garlic and it just so happened I was preparing to grill four chickens. I had removed the innards and divided the birds into pieces with my poultry shears, removing the backs. I had the good sense to put the backs in a pot to cook for chicken stock. I don't normally save the innards. It suddenly occurred to me, Why not eat them?

My breakfast therefore consisted of sauteeing the hearts and gizzards first, seasoned just with salt and pepper. I then added the livers and when they were lightly browned added a clove of my fresh garlic, finely chopped, and put a lid on the pan just until the garlic had cooked through. Finally I ramped up the heat, poured in a splash of Bordeaux (2004 St. Emilion) and let it rip until the wine was a sauce.

Into a bowl, with a shot of the Bordeaux. While the chicken grilled, I dug into the innards. Very fine. I suppose there are better forms of liver (calves liver, for instance) but for an improntu meal, the chicken livers did the job. The garlic--fresh and strong--was just the right touch. The only thing missing: a baguette to mop up the sauce.

Garlic Harvest

In the course of weeding one of our garden beds, I forced myself to consider the small garlic patch that had been overrun with crab grass.


"It's all brown and dried out looking," I told my wife. "What do I do now?"


"Sounds like it's ready to harvest. When did you plant it?"


Last fall is when I planted it. But for some reason I was not expecting it to be ready for harvest until this coming fall, or one year later.

As you may have surmised, this is my first experience planting garlic. I just assumed it had given up the ghost after being throttled by all that crab grass.


There was just one thing left to do: Dig!


So out came the crab grass and the garlic. The bulbs were smaller than I'd expected, certainly smaller than what you normally see in the grocery store. (Maybe because of all the weeds?) The garlic sets were a gift from our farmer friend, Mike, so I no longer even know what variety they are, no idea what they are supposed to look like. Duh. Could have taken notes...

I tossed one to my wife.


"That's garlic!" she exclaimed. "They look great!"


Good enough for me. I dug up the rest of the garlic and set it aside. My daughter came out to help weed. Then we spread some of the compost we've been working on since March and turned it into the bed with a stirrup hoe.


The compost is deliciously fine and light and fluffy, like spreading goose down. It has exceded all my expectations, and certainly has been worth all the effort collecting leaves and grass clippings and weeds and kitchen scraps. Not to mention all those mornings turning the pile. (But really, I have no complaints. Turning compost is good for the soul.)


My daughter insisted on hoeing. She wants a vegetable bed of her own. I think we might just put some of our many extra tomato plants here. I planted several dozen, thinking I would sell them at the produce market. They are beautiful seedlings now that certainly will be producing fruit into October. Can't let them go to waste...