Spade Work : From Plot to Plate

Summer Promise

Chillies Ring O' Fire and Apache; tomatoes Golden Sweet and San Marzano promise a good harvest shortly.

Guatemalan Ikeda and Susan Delafield

Guatemalan Ikeda is a hardneck purple stripe variety - you can just about see the purple marking on the clove. Medium size bulbs with nine cloves, it had a powerful garlic fragrance which tamed slightly when it was added to a parsley pesto over salmon steaks and baked.

Morning after dry mouth was rated at six out of a scale of ten. (Taste and fragrance opinions are highly subjective).

Susan Delafield is a porcelain variety and among the largest bulbs this harvest. The white thin skin held seven cloves and when split apart revealed a contrasting bright purple skin.

As for taste and morning after - I'm suffering with a heavy cold so this was all lost on me. Hopefully a feed of garlic scape pesto this evening with pasta will drive the virus out.

Uzbek Turban : The Morning After

My wife has a 'dry mouth scale' when it comes to rating garlic, so a twenty clove of chicken recipe (simple -stuff a chicken with twenty cloves of garlic and roast) is likely to overdo it.

Uzbek Turban scored 8 out of 10 this morning (up there with scapes) and that was from two small cloves in the sauce.

You're on notice - use sparingly! I wonder if its strength will develop or mellow over time?

Garlic Tasting 2008

All thirteen varieties of garlic were harvested last week and left to dry in a ventilated greenhouse which was a bit of a risk as they could have 'cooked' if it had been a hot week.

Despite a really bad attack of rust, the bulbs seem unharmed.

Any that look as if they will not store well I'm using first - just like the Uzbek Turban in the picture - the bulb looks as if the cloves are splitting one from another.

It's not the biggest bulb of the lot - that award goes to the Susan Delafield of which more in a later post. But there are a decent ten cloves in all, nicely coloured with a pink tinge to the skin which is slightly more pronounced on the inside of the clove.

It peeled easily and when crushed for a courgette (zucchini) pasta sauce it rendered oodles of garlicky juice. This packed a punch (not quite in the garlic scape league though) and as I type wafts of garlicky goodness are rising up from the keyboard even though I gave my hands a good scrubbing. As for taste, well, it was garlicky. I'm guessing that this is pretty much all you can say about garlic, except when it's old, hot and bitter.

Thanks go to Patrick of Bifucated Carrots at www.patnsteph.net/weblog/ for the seed.