This is a story of unintended consequences… actually generations – garlic generations – of unintended consequences.
The garlic saga starts innocently enough in Spring 2004. Our new house on Alder Hill is surrounded by barren clay (yes, there is clay in some parts of Truckee). We hire a landscaper and plan a lawn surrounded by garden beds, with a waterfall coming down a terraced hill. This means bringing in sizeable rocks for the terraces and waterfall, and because of the clay, importing tons of soil and compost. Consequently we have nice, big, heavy, moving equipment on site. Hmm… I plan to install raised vegetable beds further down the hill… and here’s soil, compost, moving equipment, and a handy husband with a saw and hammer.
With our three nice big raised beds all filled with soil and compost, it is time to start planting, but by now it’s late summer, so what can I plant? But wait, the nursery has bags of garlic and onion sets, and these can be planted in the fall, so I plant garlic and onions around the edges of the three beds. So far, so good. I’m only thinking in terms of garlic bulbs and we clearly should have a good supply the next year.
By now, the sod is installed for the lawn and hundreds of trees, shrubs, perennials and ground cover plants are installed – and the indigenous critters obviously think that heaven had arrived, just in time for them to fatten up before winter. This is about the time when one of the landscape crew comments that he has heard that planting garlic around the beds kept the critters out. Well, that seems like a fine, environmental solution, and I like garlic, so off to the produce store to buy garlic in bulk. Oops, now we have to plant it, but, as luck would have it, I had fallen for a ground auger while perusing the booths at the San Francisco Flower Show earlier that year. Attach the auger to a heavy-duty drill, enlist the handy husband, and pretty soon we have groups of three holes spaced about one foot apart around the flower bed edges bordering the lawn. Break the garlic heads up – conveniently done by dumping them out on the grass and providing light pressure on each head with a foot; drop a garlic clove in each hole; fill the hole with dirt; run down to the store for more garlic; and repeat all operations often. Done!
Fast forward to spring 2005 and lovely sprouts of garlic coming up all along the lawn edges of the flower beds. Hmm… green garlic is quite mild, so you can use it with some abandon, both cooked and raw – a good thing because my yard had a lot of it. So much in fact that by the end of summer I have only dug out about one plant from each group of three. In the mean time, the garlic isn’t helping at all with the small critters – maybe because I only have garlic around the lawn edges and the critters can get in from the other side? Then, in the fall I discover that those pretty garlic flowers on the curiously bent stalks have turned into accumulations of miniature garlic bulbs – so, why not just scatter the bulblets around the outside edges of the beds and other places I had missed? Dig up garlic heads from the vegetable beds and I have my winter supply of garlic. Progress!
On to Spring 2006, and each of those surviving two out of three garlic cloves has now grown to a garlic head and each clove in the head has sprouted to produce a small clump of garlic. And, I’m frantically consulting recipe books and the internet for more ways to use green garlic. I find a fabulous lamb and green garlic yogurt soup that uses several pounds of green garlic, but how often can you make that? I’m giving it away to friends and neighbors. I dig up bags of the heads to dry for winter use. Didn’t make a dent in it! By Spring 2007, the clumps are large and starting to interfere with the sprinkler patterns. By summer, the leaves drape over the lawn and interfere with mowing and edging. I dig out most of the garlic next to the sprinklers and attempted to dig out all the heads in fall – I get most of them for about 20 feet, but then don’t get to the rest, and the heads I miss resprout the next spring. But now I have discovered that those crazy curved flower stalks are edible, great in salads, and sold in fancy food markets as ‘garlic scapes.’ Hey neighbor, please try some garlic scapes!
Spring 2008, the clumps are huge, and I’m taking green garlic to friends in Berkeley as house gifts. I take a big basket to a Slow Food meeting at Moody’s Restaurant to give away and chef Mark Estee’s eyes light up. It’s now on his menu as ‘Penny’s Green Garlic’ – and, Mark can have all the green garlic he wants. Even so, I bet there’s still plenty left by next year. And those bulblets that I sprinkled in liberal quantities around the outside edges of the beds? Well, those that landed in places that got watered have finally grown into respectably sized plants – so, here we go again!
The moral: plant garlic! It’s easy to plant and kids can help – if they get a few cloves upside down and they don’t grow, so what, just plant a few extra in case. It grows wonderfully in Truckee; green garlic is fabulous, just use it like regular garlic but also use the pale green stem portion; and use more, it’s mild. Garlic scapes are great; you can supply all your own garlic heads for winter – just don’t plant too much!! Together, we can turn Truckee into ‘The Garlic Capital of the West.’
You may be wondering about those critters that started all this… As far as I could tell, the garlic never fazed them. Not a bit. They remained rampant, and I started trapping them and releasing them as far away as possible. We enjoyed many good hikes with our dog as a result. I’ve continued trapping them since, but so far this summer, we have almost no critters. I suspect that the heavy snow pack prevented them from their usual mid-winter foraging. No chipmunks raided the bird feeder all winter, and that has not happened before. One thing I have no doubt of – they will be back, garlic or no.
