Harvesting my grandma’s garlic!

Yesterday was the first garlic harvest of the year from our home garden.

And as usual, the earliest garlic was Stella.

This garlic is named after my grandma Stella who grew it in her garden.

My grandma had only been growing the garlic for 10 years or so when she gave it to me.

She had bought it at a nursery or hardware store or garden centre and had been just been planting it and replanting it in her garden.

(In fact, the squirrels were doing a lot of replanting in the garden too and as a consequence there was garlic all over the place in her garden.)

So this garlic is not a family heirloom but it is still a direct link to my grandma.

And it gives me a reason to talk about my grandma with my kids when we harvest this garlic, and when we braid it in the coming weeks, and again when we�re peeling it and chopping it up for supper.

And if my kids decide to grow it in their gardens and keep those stories going, in that way it will become part of our history.

A couple other things about this garlic.

This is an artichoke garlic. (Artichoke garlic is one of the 10 garlic horticultural groups.)

Most artichoke garlic have soft necks because they don�t produce garlic scape. That makes them easy to braid. In our climate 10-20% of the plants will develop bulbils in the necks which gives them a short hard neck.

Artichoke garlic tends to be milder tasting at harvest than most other garlic.. The taste gets sharper during storage – getting pretty hot by mid winter.

We�ve actually phased Artichoke garlic out at Tourne-Sol because the bulbs don�t yield as much as some of the other garlic that we grow.

Perfect for our home garden!