Garlic cured

Holy moly. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I had a very large crop of garlic this year. Over a hundred heads worth of "ordinary" types of garlic, plus eight huge elephant heads. I decided to experiment with braiding all that garlic and hanging it up in the utility closet* to dry and cure for a few weeks, in hopes of preserving it for later use (read: all winter long and probably into the spring, at which point I'll have spring garlic ready to use). My herbals disagreed a bit about the best methods for curing garlic, and the Internet was full of "do this! no, don't do that, it'll ruin it, do this instead! No, that's wrong!" contradictory advice. I did some poking around, and decided to go with leaving the roots on for a few weeks while the stems and roots dried out, and not to worry too much about trying to clean it before braiding it, either. I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

Wednesday evening, I decided it was long enough. Time to get out the braids, trim off the roots, and see what I had.

Survey says: exactly ONE head lost to mold. All the rest look great. The braided stems dried out amazingly well, particularly given that at least half of what I harvested were technically hardneck varieties that aren't supposed to braid. I did wind up breaking off four or five heads during the course of trimming off all the roots, but that's not doing too badly. If the garlic is cured as well as it appears and holds as well as it's supposed to, I should have garlic to spare for months to come. Yay!

The elephant garlic cured all right as well, but I harvested it a bit too late, so instead of nice tight heads, I have big sprawly cloves-about-to-pop-loose heads on five of the six I haven't used yet. I don't think it will last all that well, so I see a massive roasting-and-freezing party is in my near future for that.

I am moderately chuffed. Yes, garlic is available for cheap year-round from the grocery store. But there's some atavistic part of me that derives a great deal of satisfaction from growing and preserving my own food. Joy!

*I don't have a root cellar in my home, or for that matter many spaces that qualify as a "cool dark place," particularly not when the temperature is hitting 100. I still have very fond/envious memories of the storage room/root cellars in my grandmother and great-grandmother's homes, with shelves full of home-canned fruit, pickles, and other sundry goodies. (My Grandma H. did a ton of home-canning and pickling, and had many friends who made jam, etcetera.) I use a paper-shaded shelf in the garage for storing some of my home-canned goods, but the garage has a window and therefore has too much light to be a good root cellar. It turned out that the best place I could think of to hang and cure the garlic was the same closet where the broom, the vacuum, and the spare lightbulbs live. Added bonus: any bits of dirt or stem falling off of the garlic could be swept up right away using the adjacent tools. And if the vacuum wound up smelling a little like garlic for a week or two, no big deal, right? (Fortunately it did not.)

I don't need a root cellar. I don't home-can much of anything except rose-petal jam and fireball sauce, and this is the first year where I've had enough garlic to have to worry about where to hang/cure/store it. Except that I probably will have enough potatoes to worry about curing, too. And maybe onions. And... Oh bother. Well, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it, I guess.

Friday memage: Interview Me! Meme

Snurched from carrot_cake67, who asked excellent questions. Thanks!

The rules are:
1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me!"
2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will post the answers to the questions (and the questions themselves) on your blog or journal.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions. And thus the endless cycle of the meme goes on and on and on... - I don't really expect this last part to happen, but hey.

1) How did you meet fisherbear? I think I heard this many moons ago from monkeybard, but I'd like to hear it from you.
Fisherbear and I met in college. A number of people were talking in the hallway, and I heard his voice. I don’t remember what he was saying – it was trivial conversation – but that voice! It froze me in my tracks and sent shocks throughout my entire system. I *had* to find and meet the owner of that voice, right then, do not pass Go, do not do anything else, find that person NOW! There was nothing rational about it, just pure instinct. It’s the most visceral reaction I’ve ever had to another human being. Turns out the voice belonged to this super-smart, amazingly nice guy with the most gorgeous eyes... We became friends long before we started dating, but that’s how we met, or at least how I remember meeting him.

2) Favorite Fandom?
Oy. I have been (and am) a fan of various shows, authors, sports teams (go Mariners!) and artists, but I generally really *don’t* like fandoms. Most fans are great people, don’t get me wrong. I’ve made some really good friends in my relatively few ventures into fandoms. But there’s a certain segment of the population that seems to equate “fan” with “entitled because I’m a fan,” which drives me bonkers. And fandom does seem to bring out the nutters in larger-than-usual proportions.

Case in point: on the one hand, this is super-funny, and Mr. Tennant was a huge good sport about it, but on the other hand, this kind of fandom behavior is all kinds of cringe-worthy.

Link to follow if the embedded player does not show in your browser: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnYBuO8OqFg

3) Fruit or vegetable?
*blinks* Yes please. I’m trying to get at least five servings a day. ;-)

4) Favorite book genre?
That’s a tough one. I love books, as you know. I used to devour anything in the fantasy/sci-fi section, but in recent years that’s become so dominated by trends that I’m not into and tie-ins to shows/games/phenomena that I don’t follow, that I’ve rather drifted away from it unless it comes highly recommended by someone I trust or is an author that I know I like. I enjoy certain kinds of mysteries, but not the hard-core true-crime-horror stuff. I love well-written nonfiction, particularly biographies, histories, and science writing. And between us, fisherbear and I have a lot of photography and art books. Also, a lot of the stuff I really like tends to cross genres, or at least dance gaily around the boundaries.

Basically, if it’s a book and reasonably well-written, I’m probably going to like it, genre notwithstanding.

5) If you were to own your own business, what would it be?
An independent publishing house, or maybe a photography gallery, or a crafts studio, or…oh, you mean I’d have to turn a profit and make a living at it? Hm. That’s a stumper.