Home Grown Garlic

Garlic is wonderful. It's delicious and, as an added bonus, totally easy to grow. Last fall, I'd planted 7 cloves in my garden. This spring, braving the frosty nights and hot southern exposure, they popped up and started growing like mad. I harvested the scapes about a month ago and made garlic scape pesto (better than basil based pesto any day). And now, just two weeks into July, I've harvested the little beauties, gave two heads to my grandmother and now am trying to save at least a few heads to plant this fall.

Now I don't know if I'm planting the garlic properly. My uncle plants the whole head in and not just one clove like I did. Also, home grown garlic tends to be bigger than what I've got. I'm not complaining but next year there will have to be some fin tuning and maybe a bit more experimentation. For now I'm just happy with the results.

My Thumb is a Dry Yellowish Green

See that little tomato? Beautiful isn't it? Wouldn't it be great if there was a whole bush of these little delights? Yes, it would. But such is not the reality. The reality is that my greenhouse experiment failed miserably on all fronts. This tomato, another one in the back there and one that fell to it's doom last week were the only things that sprouted out of half a dozen tomato plant, some sweet pea vines, and a few cucumber plants. Maybe too much direct sunlight. Maybe it has something to do with polination. Maybe I just purchased nasty plants that have it in for me. Vicious little flora.

Oh and I did plant some herbs. Basil, parsley, dill and something that was supposed to be cilantro but looked more like beefy dill or skinny flat-leaf parsley. The results here were equally disheartening. They all went yellow and dry. Once again I don't know if it's the watering or the sun or the bees or some cosmic order that is giggling about the fact that I couldn't even take care of a cactus.

Well there's always next year, right? And I've got a whole winter to read up and learn about gardening. I might go do some WOOFing to learn more.(For those of you who don't know what this is, it's basically where you can volunteer and in exchange you get room and board plus food sometimes and knowledge. You can find them at www.wwoof.org. It's the answer to travelling the world for free. Especially for those agriculturally minded).