Garlic To Leeks With Greens In Between



These are the scapes of Allium vineale. They were tender enough to snack on raw, which I did, but most were chopped to flavor roast turkey.

I was impressed with the bulb size at about an inch. I've left the remaining vineale to size up. At this size there is a woody stalk at the center of the bulb.

The butter lettuce on the left and romaine on the right. Best grow fast lettuce, tomatoes are on your heels.

The cima di rapa, or rabe, is also growing fast. Eating rabe will put sand in your gullet. The leaves seem to have the magic ability to capture grains of sand deep into the leaf axil -soaking doesn't always get it. The answer is cultural -I think a mulch to keep down splash up is necessary.

Ahh, the elephant garlic. Just four 'cloves' pulled from a Fairway purchase were planted last fall. Elephant garlic is not really garlic, but a leek (Allium ampeloprasum), which explains its mildness as a garlic.


Farmish



Betsy and I looked at farm land for garlic seed growing last Thursday. The land looked like this, but with more slope, and untilled. Here we found excellent soil -a silty loam known as BgA/B or Bridghampton silt loam. Zero to 6 percent slope, eighty inches to the nearest restrictive feature, well-drained and far from the water table, but with very high available water capacity, and low in calcium (acidic). Bridgehampton silt loam is derived mainly from gneiss, granite, and schist, with some sandstone, conglomerate, and shale thrown in for good measure. This is glacial stuff and as good as it gets for growing garlic in our neck of the woods once it's been limed.

While the land itself offered only positives, the prospect of harvesting, curing, and storing our crop is still a problem to solve. We intended to be on the north shore, where there is still farming and its apparatus, but the Trust only has space remaining on the south shore, amidst multi-million dollar homes and summer throngs. This can be both a positive and negative, although finding a place that costs almost nothing for 3-5 months out of the year to process our garlic in real estate heaven? Not easy.

We passed this decrepit old potato barn on the main drag out of the Hamptons. It's clearly in disuse, so couldn't the owner let us use it for the price of fixing that garage door or what have you?

I shoved my phone under the broken door to picture the place. Clearly someone's furniture storage.

It could be perfect for curing garlic given its exceptionally high ceiling, concrete floor, eastern exposure, and soil embanked side walls.
The roof slopes down to the soil, with large (and broken) roof vents along the ridge. Luck had a real estate office adjacent, and wouldn't you expect them to know who owned the barn. They called me later to ascertain how much I am willing to spend, to which I could not say anything, only that I needed air footage, not necessarily floor space, and for only part of the year. Basically, I'm looking for a deal. I haven't heard back. This is a problem that needs to be solved before we can move forward with the Trust. Meanwhile, upstate, the earliest garlic is beginning to scape.


Hood Wink?



I picked this garlic up at the green market today. Frankly, I'm surprised at how little the farmers have at this time of the year at our local market. And doubly frank, I was surprised to see garlic being sold so late in the season. Can some varieties store this long? Yes, but I didn't see any at the cream of the crop market in Union Square on Saturday.

I bought some, happy to have farmer garlic, now that I dislike buying from the grocer so late in the season (it usually is sprouting at this time of year thanks to long term refrigeration). It was exceptionally cheap, 3 for 2 dollars or 66 cents each. The laws of supply and demand dictate that garlic at this time of the year should be coming in at $1.50 or more per bulb. Another curiosity. I asked the representative what kind it was and he deferred to another. She said it was elephant garlic. Imagine my puzzled look.

When I got home I turned them over to realize that the roots had been scooped out. Do some local farmers do this, I do not know, but it is well known that this is the methodology of growers in China. I've never seen it done to U.S. grown garlic, and certainly not farmer market garlic. Now looking closely, the soil appeared smudged on, as if by muddy fingers, as in after the fact, to make it look, err, farmy.

Am I wrong? Don't know. NYC Greenmarket has a rule against this, although nationwide, not all farm markets do (Minneapolis Farmers' Market comes to mind). If you have the right conditions for storage, you can grow and store certain varieties into May, but I'm skeptical that this farm has done that.






Weed of the Week





I've been eyeing this weed for a couple of weeks now down at the beach farm. I asked my garden neighbor Wolf, who has a clump or two in his plot, and he says he eats it in salads. On the very same day, Marie celebrates finding Claytonia at Union Square green market. I've got a clump growing at the corner of my plot. Wolf's plot borders on a weedy plot that is absolutely filled with clusters of tiny, pale blue or white flowers. Could they be the same?

Vineale Scape





The field garlic has really improved in the last two weeks. And now it is forming scapes. Very hard to photograph with my phone, but maybe you can see the little red, yellow, and green beaks. I would like to see if I can push the harvest date toward middle May. I am trying to grow larger field garlic. I may also attempt to collect bulbils for replanting.


Soiled Again




I saw the bag as I arrived home late last night. It was in the tree pit. I looked over in the side yard, but all was in order. It was too dark to see that the offending, aggressive individual had dumped their potting soil remains underneath the climbing rose matting down Gaura and Allium. This is the second dumping in two weeks -must be spring. Only one bit better than what I get in autumn -old, potbound soil.





A Yard Grows In Brooklyn



It may not look like much right now, but the side yard is about to find itself this year. Thanks to my landlord's decision to move his utility poles, we decided to revamp the messy and overgrown plot. I curved our pathway around the building, sending us to where the poles used to rest. Now we can plant in the area we used to use to step over the fence. Farther down is a gate, a broken gate, but a gate. We plan on planting the strip nearer the fence, leaving the side near the building (always under threat from landlordian ideas) as a walking path.

I moved all the iris (the reblooming iris) to the back side of the poor man's patio, intending them to keep the sleeping cats at bay and support the leaning monkshood and phlox that dwell so well under the remaining yew tree. A stump is all that remains of the other yew tree cut after heavy snows two winters back. It is the fulcrum of the planting against the wall, where most plants were divisions from the front yard garden. The dirt patch, where the iris used to reside, will be filled with low to medium height, drought tolerant perennials like the coneflower, lily, yarrow, thrift, tickseed, solidago and ironweed that are already growing here. I removed the 10-foot-tall-growing maximillian sunflower, banishing it to the beach farm fence line. This move I call a 'happy neighbor.'

There are many volunteers, including asters, bachelor button, cosmos, borage, and allyssum that self-seed every year. In between the stones are a variety of sedum -we just bought three quart-sized varieties at Gowanus the last rainy Sunday morning. We're thinking of blue flax for the new strip, a plant admired by both Betsy and I, a western plant, not well known or understood here in the northeast. We asked the nursery if they would carry it so we don't have to mail order ridiculous little pots for the price of a gallon from High Country Gardens or some such place.

We concentrate on drought tolerant because we both know prairie and desert plants well, but also because we don't have easy access to watering and like to leave town on occasion, never having to worry about finding a watering neighbor with a 100 foot hose. The creatures seem to dig them too. The asters become a bit weedy, but they are so easy to dispose. Roses are incredibly drought tolerant and the same for our irises, dicentra, and monkshood. But that doesn't mean if it shouldn't rain for weeks on end, I am not out there with my water can, hoofing the distance forty times. Very little (that anyone actually likes) can withstand all-out drought. This season we are short about 8 inches of rain, but then, that could change in a moment. I wouldn't feel uncomfortable predicting a cooler, wetter summer than usual, but either way, the garden should be up to it.