Bonus garlic

  We arrived back in Cinci at the end of last August after a summer of fun out at the homestead only to find that the garlic we had planted the previous fall was waaaay overdue to be harvested.  We kind of figured that this was going to be the case but dug right in anyhow.  All of the plants yielded up handfuls of individual cloves which were a real stinker to handle.  I suspect the bulbs lose their integrity after so long in the ground.  We gathered up all that we could and I ended up drying them in the oven.  The house stunk to high heaven and even made us feel a little queazy...but that's another story.  As you may have guessed, there was absolutely no way we were going to get all those individual garlic cloves out of the ground.  The result?

A whole patch of volunteer garlic!!!  We dug them up today and some of them were real beauties.  It was really too early but we are about to move and don't need to be bothered with this at the last minute.  I got the bright idea that I was going to braid them for ease of transport but had no luck whatsoever.  It was a total mess.  Hey! I was a sailor...what gives?  How different can it be from ropework?  After a little research, I discovered that you need them to "cure" out in the sun for a week or so before braiding to let the plant stems get nice and pliable instead of all fat and juicy.  Live and learn!