You Grow Girl™

Let us turn our minds back four months (almost to the day by coincidence) to April of this year. Way back then, in a season that felt not so much unlike this one in many ways, what with the rain and the fact that I was wearing rain boots and long sleeved shirts, and it wasn’t winter but it wasn’t exactly hot either (I spit on you Summer 2009), I happened to mention that for various reasons this would be a year of garlic experimentation.

To recap:

• October 2008 – I did not plant any garlic. Boo. Hiss.
• April 2009 – I planted some sprouted garlic cloves purchased from a local garlic farmer. These are next up for harvest, but so far, so good from the surface. The seemed to reach maturity and definitely produced scapes.
• I happened to notice a few garlic leaves popping out of the soil, remnants of a bulb from the previous year’s crop that must have been missed during the harvest. Based on placement in the garden, I guessed that the variety is ‘Music.’

This brings us to today, or rather, yesterday to be precise. Most of the garlic growing at my community garden plot has died back and it’s time to start harvesting. I pulled up the “accidental” garlic and low and behold this is the result:

Despite growing very closing together, all of the cloves seem to have produced bulbs. It definitely looks like ‘Music’. If memory serves, they are smaller, but not much smaller than bulbs of the same variety I pulled up in late summer 2008. Now, if I were to leave one of these bulbs in the ground and come back at this time next year, I’d predict that they would be even smaller. And so on, and so on. However, for a completely accidental crop, I’m calling it a happy success.

Hooray for screwing up and missing a bulb while harvesting! Let’s do this again.