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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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Search and Destroy

I came across this recent Danish invention (via Riverrim). A weed killing robot that recognizes weeds and is used together with:

“High-tech tools for weeding that at a later stage can be implemented are tools like laser, micro spraying and mechanical devices.”

Are robots that travel through our gardens using a laser to kill weeds what the future holds?

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Podcast

Here’s is your chance to hear the voice behind this blog!

Emma of Fluffius Muppetus has invited me to record some segments for her show The Alternative Kitchen Garden.

The first one is to be aired on Sunday 8 July (that’s today!), with 2 more segments to follow in future weeks. This first segment is on the history of heirloom gardening before WWII. The next segments are on changes that took place during and after WWII, and where to find heirloom varieties to grow in your garden today.

It’s my first attempt at podcasting, so please don’t expect too much. When I have more time, I’ll record some more.

I’m really grateful that Emma has let me to join her show in this way. While I would like to do some podcasting like this, I don’t have enough time to run my own show.

Update: There were some initial corruption problems with the file that are now fixed. If you are having problems with a copy of the file you downloaded within a few hours of it’s release, please get a fresh copy!