I attended a garlic festival yesterday here in BC! If you can imagine garlic vendors & activities in every direction, with thousands of people gathering to share their love of this pungent and useful bulbous plant, that's GarlicFest!
It was a bit of a drive, but thanks to friends of ours with a sweet ride, we made it to Grindrod BC, a small Okanagan town known for a quiet lifestyle, farming, and... garlic.
It was tough to get a photo that showed much of the event at once, but imagine 360 degrees of this:
Yes, even garlic ice cream. These people are serious about their stinky cloves!
@MediKatie and I happen to enjoy garlic ourselves, and have grown it for years. Unfortunately, we lost our stock during the homeless period after my grandmother died. My grandfather's garlic probably still lives on, at the property, but I don't have access to it nowadays. Therefore, I picked up a few great planting (and cooking) varieties to get me started at my new place!
There's my garden as of this evening. I'm about 2/3 of the way across it, in my slow mission to turn over all the soil. I have a small basil and purslane patch in the foreground. Garlic will probably go somewhere toward the back.
It's mid-summer and things are pretty hot and dry right now. I'll be planting the garlic (broken up into individual cloves) sometime around early October. If things go well I'll be able to harvest it in July, and keep the process going, so we always have an abundance of super-healthy organic garlic for stir frys, marinara sauce, pizza, nachos, and so on.
Garlic benefits the gardens it grows in, and the people who eat it. It requires little care, and only reasonably-good soil. Grocery stores charge several dollars per bulb for decent garlic. Yours could be twice as good, and essentially free.
Stay tuned here as this little patch of earth turns into a thriving lush organic garden full of life, beauty, food, and medicine.
DRutter
