Barb asked what else was growing along with the pet Romaine. This is from the same small plot: a hundred pounds of potatoes and almost 200 garlic bulbs.
Peg is proud of her root crops, and grows between 600 and 800 pounds of potatoes and perhaps 400 garlic bulbs.
This year, she grew Russian Bananas, red Sangria potatoes, blue potatoes, and German butterballs. Here’s she’s toughening their skins: when they first come out of the soil, the potatoes are thin-skinned and easily scraped. After a week of air, their skins toughen up and they can be handled without damaging them.
When garlic comes out of the soil, it is also thin skinned and liable to bruise. Here the bulbs are air drying and forming their papery skin. Peg has been refining her strain of garlic for eight years, growing each successive crop from her biggest most successful plants. Her bulbs are beautiful, and they’re specially selected for these conditions. I’m planning on 80 garlic plants this fall, so I bought 10 bulbs for October.
She said that each bulb has six to ten large cloves around the outside, and those are what you plant (you eat the small ones inside).
Garlic and potatoes are both ancient plants. Here is an illustrated manuscript of garlic harvesting.
Harvesting garlic, Tacuinum sanitatis, 15th century. (Paris, Biblioteque Nationale, Département des manuscrits, Latin 9333, folio 23.)
Since potatoes were developed in South America, their harvest art from the 1400s is less familiar
but the solemn pride that comes from bringing in the winter’s food is just the same.
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