wow - I'm flummoxed. Garlic is one of the easiest and cheapest crops to grow in your backyard and you can easily get enough for an entire year with little effort.

We currently have a 3 X 5 foot bed growing FIFTY head of garlic. Not only will we have fifty heads of garlic to store for the coming year, but in a week or so we will be eating amazing "garlic scapes", the beautiful, curling flower stems of the garlic plant. (you see them at farmer's markets in the spring, for those who are unfamiliar). The 'scapes' are DELISH sauted or chopped raw in salad, and give a lovely garlicky flavor to dishes. Our bed was planted last Fall using 3 or 4 store bought head of garlic seperated into cloves. Planted 3 or so inches in the soil, each clove sprouty end up, and then the bed heavily mulched with lawn clippings and leaves from our last Fall mowing, these beautiful garlic plants require virtually NO maintenance; mulch keeps the weeds out. If you want big bulbs (heads) of garlic, cut and eat your 'scapes', or if you want some Gorgeous light purple flowers in your summer garden, let them go. You'll still get nice garlic heads, just a little smaller. Once the leaves of the plant have dried up and turned brown a good part of the way down from the top, dig one up and see how the head looks. If it's big enough, you're done. If not, let the rest go a couple more weeks and check again.

Once you've dug all your heads of garlic up, leave about 6 inches of stem above the heads. Gently wash the dirt off them, GENTLY pat them dry, and lay them out in a cool, dry area for a few days. Once they are dry and the stems have shriveled and dried out you can cut the stems closer to the head, and then hang them for storage over winter in ladies stockings, each head seperated by a knot of the stocking so they each have their own little "bubble" of stocking in which air can circulate. When you need a new head of garlic for the kitchen simply cut one out of the stocking hanger and VOILA. CHEAP, homegrown, completely organic garlic.

We all really need to educate ourselves more about growing some of our own food. It's NOT that hard.

Of course, garlic is just one of the things we grow ourselves. Our garden is organic, we kill weeds with heavy mulch, which we get from lawn mowing, and deter pests with tabasco / cayenne pepper spray. Beetles can be picked off beans, etc. by grandchildren (or neighbor kids) in exchange for the small bribe of your choice. (Actually, one year, we just let the beetles go to town, figuring, "oh well, we lost the beans", but even though the leaves were lacy, the beans still came and were great. Beetles gotta eat too, eh?)

This year we have strawberries, rhubarb, raspberries, peas, sweet corn, black beans, butternut squash, cucumbers, lettuce, spinach, carrots, beets, swiss chard, broccoli, peppers and tomatoes and potatoes, chives, basil & oregano. We worked pretty hard the weekends in May preparing the beds and planting (but NOT on the garlic, which just popped up from under it's mulch and went to town !). Now it just takes a 1/2 hour every few days picking a few stray weeds. Once everything is up a few inches you can mulch it all with lawn clippings,which keeps weeds away and helps keep soil moist so you don't have to water much. In August / September we will harvest and can and have a BUNCH of food to eat throughout winter and next spring that we know is safe, clean, not chemically contaminated and tastes awesome.

Any time we have a question, we just Google it and scan 3 or 4 articles until we have a consensus and away we go.

Take CHARGE of your own health, and your own life. Don't be at the mercy of corporate entities who have no interest in your physical well being, as long as you keep shelling out the dough for their pastey, tasteless, modified, less nutritious, e-coli-fied, 'soylent green'.

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Thank you.

I was wondering why the only garlic in the grocery stores lately is the purple streaked kind, with strong bitter flavor and too much juice (it squirts all over the place when you put it through the garlic press), while you can hardly ever find the big white mellow kind anywhere except the fancy expensive store. I wonder if it has to do with our markets being flooded with icky purple garlic from China.

I wish I had a garden. I did during the time I was caring for my elderly auntie in her home, until she died. I had 45 things growing, and the work was wonderful, soothing, refreshing, and it was so much fun to share the bounty with family and neighbors. Now I have my apartment, but I do enjoy growing culinary herbs and balcony tomatoes.

For those who don't know, growing garlic around your roses keeps the rose pests away. Basil protects tomatoes. So does mexican mint marigold, which attracts nematodes away from the tomato plants. Catnip protects gourds from vine borers, and I found the cat to be completely uninterested in the catnip until I plucked some, let it dry out, and crumbled it up. Then it made him curious and perky.

Companion planting is simply miraculous, an art and science that needs much, much more inquiry. I never poured one drop of poison on my garden, nor any store bought fertilizers or herbicides. There are other ways to keep the garden healthy and productive.

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