Monday, May 30, 2011

Green Garlic comes to an end for 2011


Winter is truly behind us as today we finally lurched into summer, easily hitting the high 80's, maybe even 90 degrees! It felt wonderful, to truly finally be warm. I think I can put away my winter gloves for the last time. :-)

My husband spent the day at our 'city house' still sorting and clearing out the dribbles of stuff that seem hard to make decisions about 'keep or pitch'. I weeded the front sidewalk at the farm and then hauled the spading fork down to the garlic field to harvest the last of the green garlic of the season, not the intentionally planted cloves to be harvested early, but those where 2-3 cloves accidentally got planted together instead of just one. Growing too close together to produce full and nicely shaped bulbs later in the season, we dig up these two-sies and three-sies to consume as 'green garlic', a mild-tasting garlic and a briefly-appearing spring delicacy.

We had about 10 pounds after cleaning, the vast majority of which will be headed downtown in the morning to several of our chef friends. However, we saved the smallest pieces and any that were injured during the digging for us to eat tonight. We cleaned the dirt/mud off the roots, chopped off the roots and the small amount of brown tips (only on the first leaf to emerge) and then chopped them up similar to how one would use a green onion, stem to stern, the whites and greens together.

Here is a photo of the chopped green garlic along with a piece of a multi-grain baguette covered with hummus and chopped green garlic. We loaded up the green garlic over a vegetable pizza and figured our pizza might have had the equivalent of "5-A-Day" on our plates!
(Photo: Chopped Green Garlic from the Dyer Family Organic Farm, Ann Arbor, MI)



Just for fun, here are my two favorite bird photos today, a female hummingbird getting ready to land on the hummingbird feeder and then when she was feeding on the feeder. I took these photos while I was sitting on our front porch this afternoon taking a break from the very hard work of digging green garlic out of the muddy raised beds while also keeping my balance in the wet and muddy paths and then hauling it all back to the garage in 5-gallon buckets containing water to keep the roots wet.

The short way back to the garage (one leg of a triangle) was through waist high grass (maybe tomorrow it will be dry enough to cut) or the longer way back was over to the driveway and then up to the garage (two legs of a triangle). Either way, the grass is way too high and the ground way to wet to use our wagon to help haul the loads, so I made many trips to manage it without dropping or spilling anything! I am not complaining because all the trips back to the garage meant lots of breaks to see if I could get some great 'photo-ops'!

(Photo: Female ruby-throated hummingbird coming in to land on the feeder - look at the length of her beak!)

(Photo: Female ruby-throated hummingbird feeding) 

"Cultivate your life - you are what you grow - inch by inch, row by row" 
Diana Dyer, MS, RD















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