Gotta go for the garlic

You know how it goes, your spend your whole life without a particular nugget of knowledge, and then suddenly there it is; everyone is talking about it everywhere you go. Lately, that’s how it’s been with me and garlic.  I love having garlic on my team.  I use it indiscriminately–always starting out with a little of it simmering softly in some olive oil, and regardless of where I end up my kitchen smells like I mean business.  Like I know what I am doing.  But the buzz I’m hearing says that cooking with garlic is not the end all be all. The universe has been badgering me with a different message:

You can grow garlic.

What? Grow garlic? Now I know that garlic doesn’t arrive on this planet neatly pulverized in glass jars. But truth be told I never gave any thought to how it grew.  Until recently that is, when the universe became bent on converting me into a garden garlic maven.

The latest hint I received by way of a new magazine called the Edible Front Range. It’s a cool new freebie that focuses on the local food movement.  And guess what? They’re talking about planting garlic.

Most of what I’ve been hearing revolves around this one fact: you plant garlic in the fall.  Hey Universe, know what? It’s December. Maybe that’s why I’ve been so deftly ignoring your hints.  Ok, maybe the first whisper about planting garlic arrived before the first frost, but hey, I was still preening about my revolutionary day spent planting tulip bulbs. My thoughts were dancing with the colorful, not the culinary.

Looking out over my computer into a white blanketed yard, I can safely entertain ideas of growing garlic without actually having to put spade to frozen tundra.  I know this, thanks to a fact I unearthed in that cute new magazine. Procrastinators delight,  garlic can be planted in the spring too.

And so it shall be…

But spring is a long way off, and I’ve got garlic on my mind now.  So here’s what I’m thinking: the last of the CSA garlic sure would be tasty roasted up and slathered the next loaf of homemade bread. The one I’ll be baking just as soon as my copy of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes arrives.

• Category: Garden
• Tag: garlic, planting