Garlic Harvest

Well, fellow-gardeners, this is what it’s all about! This is why we work to build the soil. This is why we pull the weeds: harvest!

For some unknown reason, my article, “The Garlic Lesson,” posted back in October has been the most popular of all my garden posts with some 868 on-site readers to date (big numbers for me) and growing in popularity. That lesson has served me well and produced a bountiful crop. This picture shows a small portion of it.

For the last two days, I have been digging up the garlic and man, is it beautiful! Of course there are some scrawny ones, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a healthier bunch of garlic heads. You know garlic is ready to harvest when the outer leaves turn yellow and some of it starts to lean over as you can see in this picture. Here in the wilds of West Texas, we begin harvest around the end of April.

I carefully dug up each bulb and placed it in a bucket of water for cleaning purposes. I have tried curing it both ways: unwashed and washed and I can’t tell any difference in quality or storage length. It just looks better washed and the wife likes it that way too.

Soon we will hang bunches of garlic in the storage shed for drying and curing. I have saved the biggest and best heads for seed. We hope to double our production in 2009.

In the meantime, eat your veggies…Nonnie and Pop said so!

Is the Tomato a Fruit?

One of my sons (Number 2) was touring the Charamon Garden yesterday and I asked him what his favorite vegetable was.  Among those he mentioned was the tomato.  “But,” he added, “I guess tomatoes are technically a fruit.”  So what is a fruit and what is a vegetable?  Well, if you’ve played “20 Questions” on long trips you know that the first question is “Animal, vegetable or mineral?”  So a vegetable really is anything that uses photosynthesis to grow…plants.

When we say, at the end of most posts, “Eat your veggies…Nonnie and Pop say so!” we are talking about plants and fruits that you can eat.  Wickipedia agrees:

Normally, any herbaceous plant or plant part which is regularly eaten as food by humans would be considered to be a vegetable. Mushrooms, though belonging to the biological kingdom Fungi, are also generally considered vegetables in the retail industry.

Using that definition, all fruits are vegetables, but all vegetables are not necessarily fruits.

The term fruit has many different meanings depending on context. In botany, a fruit is the ripened ovary—together with seeds—of a flowering plant. In many species, the fruit incorporates the ripened ovary and the surrounding tissues. Fruits are the means by which flowering plants disseminate seeds (Wickipedia).

So, botanically speaking, the tomato is a fruit.  But, continuing to speak botanically, so are peppers, eggplants, okra pods, peas, beans, squash, cucumbers…to name a few we don’t generally consider fruit.  When we eat broccoli, cauliflower, and figs, we are eating the buds of blossoms.  Lettuce, collards, cabbage, spinach and chard are leaves.  Potatoes, carrots, parsnips, sun chokes and sweet potatoes are roots.  Garlic and onions are bulbs.  Asparagus, rhubarb and celery are stems.

So, eat your fruits, leaves, stems, bulbs and roots…Nonnie and Pop said so!