This week has been all about garlic. As somewhat of a celebration of the summer solstice on Tuesday, I harvested garlic, loosening the soil with a digging fork and then exclaiming gleefully at the beautifully large heads I pulled out of the ground. Root crops are always fun to harvest, because you never know exactly what you’ll find.
After gathering and hauling the garlic out of the garden, I strung it up on twine and hung it in an outbuilding to cure for a few weeks. While you can certainly use garlic fresh out of the ground, the curing process dries the papery outer layers and allows the heads to be stored.
Those of you who follow me on Facebook may have seen that I’ve been working on a new product this week. On Thursday, with some of the garlic left over from last year, I made garlic salt! I had previously dried the garlic in a dehydrator, so all that was left was to grind it into powder and mix it with pink Himalayan salt. It smells so good! I like to use garlic salt in place of table salt on just about everything. Mmm, garlic.
So what’s growing in the garden? All the summer vegetables! Last week, I shared about all the flowers heralding fruits to come, and this week, some of those blossoms have already given way to baby veggies. Teeny tiny beans should be plumping up enough to harvest in another week or two, and the waist-high cherry tomato plants already have pea-size green fruits on them.
The corn is also lush and about shoulder height, though the winds from Wednesday’s storm knocked much of it over. (Don’t worry, it should recover.) And although the yellow summer squash doesn’t have blossoms yet, it looks like it will soon!
As I predicted last week, the radishes and lettuce are, unfortunately, done for the season. The peas, too, are finally slowing down, though I harvested a few pints this morning to sell tomorrow. Come early – they sell out quick! I’ll also have the new garlic salt, of course, as well as fire salt and all of my handmade items.
See you at the market!