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Silver Rose Garlic

Silver Rose Garlic

You might be wondering why I am posting a picture of a cured garlic bulb at this time of year. Most of us are busy harvesting and curing our garlic. What’s particularly interesting about this bulb of garlic is it’s from last year! That’s right, this garlic has been sitting around for a full year now.

This is what the inside of the cloves look like:

Silver Rose Cloves

Okay, perhaps it’s not the freshest looking garlic, and ever so slightly soft to the touch, but still very edible! None of the cloves are rotten. A month ago there wasn’t even any sign of sprouting.

This bulb didn’t actually come from my garden, rather it was leftover planting stock from an order. It’s possible what grows in my garden will have different storage properties.

Now that I have fresher garlic from my garden, this bulb is going into the compost bin.

For anyone who wants to eat home grown garlic all year round, this is a very interesting variety to consider!

This is a Silverskin type garlic.

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First Tomato of the Year

Here’s my first tomato of the year:

F2 Cross

I got this tomato from my friend Lieven in Belgium. It is an F2 generation (so genetically unstable) cross between Ida Gold and Whippersnapper. Ida Gold is a golden color, while Whippersnapper is a red tomato. The tomato on the left is fully ripe, and notice how they turn from gold to red as they ripen, and how the ripe tomato isn’t completely red! This is going to be an interesting tomato. I haven’t tasted it yet, I’m going to wait for the other tomatoes in the bunch to ripen so I can have them together.

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Pfälzer Dinkel

I posted previously on this spelt I’m growing, here and here.

Here are some of the heads after harvest:

Spelt Seed Heads

The plants were quite productive. A rough estimate would be I planted 20g of seeds and ended up with a harvest of about 1Kg, or a 50-fold increase.

This is something of an ongoing experiment. Spelt is an old wheat variety, and is known for having a difficult to remove husk. I am going to try building a hulling machine, and see how it goes. This year I don’t have enough to make harvest or threshing difficult to do by hand, but in the long run I will have to see if this is a good variety for this. This particular variety of spelt was used originally for making German pretzels.

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Choosing a Wine for it’s Biodiversity

This is something I’ve been meaning to post about for a while now.

Many people think having a real cork stopper in a bottle of wine is wasteful and destructive to the environment because the trees cork are harvested from are endangered, and so choosing plastic over cork protects these trees. Nothing could be further from the truth!

In fact harvesting the cork from these trees causes little or no damage, and without the demand for wine corks these trees will be removed so the land can be used for other purposes.

Wine makers don’t like real corks because a small percentage of their wines go bad, something that doesn’t happen with plastic corks or metal caps.

Choose for biodiversity! Choose for a real wine cork instead of plastic corks or screw on caps! It makes for a nicer bottle of wine too.

For more information see this article on The Star.

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Interesting Scape

Scape from Korean Garlic

These are scapes that came from two kinds of Korean garlic, Korean Red and Pyong Vang (I think this is just an alternative spelling of Pyongyang, the capitol of North Korea). Sorry they are a bit crumpled, I stuffed them in a bag with other scapes, and wasn’t very careful with them. Notice they are mostly topset pod and not much stem, unlike normal scapes that are mostly stem.

I was at the garden yesterday, and I was very surprised to find even more scapes had formed, almost as many as the previous visit!

My garlic is finally showing some signs of rust, with about half the plants having a few small specks on them. It’s not too serious I hope, and I’m still expecting to have a mostly normal harvest this year.