SO FAR SO GOOD - OUR WILD GARLIC SUPPLY
Winter is starting to end and the next crop is starting to grow!
Last year, we found all sorts of Wild Garlic growing out in the woods, which was incredible. There are a lot of excellent health benefits to Garlic, so to have free Garlic in the woods for us to gather is a huge blessing. Six months ago, I featured it in an Edible Outdoors post.
I’m not sure if the Garlic growing in the woods around here is truly wild or if it was naturalized from an old garden, but either way, there are some really patches of it growing.
One of the very first posts from @papa-pepper was an amazing, simple, and beneficial recipe.
At that time, seven months ago, I was still trying to figure out how to make a post and what to post on steemit. The “recipe” was basically to just fill a jar with raw Garlic and then cover it with raw Honey.
Over time, the Garlic actually absorbs the Honey and almost becomes “candied.” It's like the Honey gets infused into the Garlic and sweetens the whole clove. These raw Garlic cloves then mostly lose their strong flavor and become a sweet treat!
It’s so delicious once the process is complete that the @little-peppers will eat them up and ask for more. The process can take a few months to complete, but once they are ready, they will quickly disappear. I had hoped to make up many jars of these, but, unfortunately, I only made one this year.
Here is all that we have left.
The health benefits of Garlic are many. Not only is it a nutritious food with low calories, but it also is excellent for the immune system, and contains antioxidants. Since Honey is another amazing food with anti-fungal and anti-bacterial properties, we like to combine both of them to support our overall physical health.
Not only did we enjoy some cloves in the Honey, we also braided some up to dry and store for winter. Months ago we had a couple braids of Garlic hanging in the sun. Now, they are hanging in our pantry. Here is a picture from the end of last summer after I had made a braid with the @little-peppers.
I made two long strands of them, thinking that it would be enough Garlic to last us until the next harvest. So far, so good, because we have only worked our way through the smaller strand.
As Monster Truck the Pepper is showing, the shorter braid is completely used up and it is time to start on the second one. Whether it will last until the next wild harvest remains to be seen, but we can already see that the next harvest is starting to grow!
Thankfully, the Garlic reproduces on it's own very well. At the top of each mature Garlic plant last fall was a small cluster of baby cloves. Without any intervention from humans the baby cloves will eventually fall to the earth and begin to grow. Since we harvest a lot of the wild Garlic last year, we wanted to make sure that there would be more to come, so wherever we found some growing we made sure to spread the baby cloves around when we uprooted the plants.
Now that it is staring to warm up a little, we can see the green shoots of new Garlic plants bursting through the leaf litter on the forest floor all over!
In some areas, the forest floor is almost covered in Garlic shoots! Obviously, that is excellent news for us, and it sure gets us excited about this next growing season and the harvest that follows!
We are so amazed and blessed by things like this, and it makes us appreciate creation all the more. Time and time again incredible edibles can be found in the wild. They can grow and reproduce, bringing harvests year after year, all without any care from a gardener.
To get in there and work the soil and plant the seeds can be an excellent time too, but to reap a harvest where you have not sown is great too! It'll be nice to get some Garlic established in some other areas as well, and to continue to utilize this incredible resource.
FULL STEEM AHEAD!
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Damn, that garlic/honey looks gooooood!
It is very tasty, everyone should try it!
Thanks mate!
Honey soaked garlic - how interesting. Never would've thought to do that!
Garlic is so amazing that when I had an infected incisor and was quite swollen I just chewed on a wedge of garlic and not even a minute later the swelling had dissipated and wasn't hurting at all and we were so impressed that from that day anytime someone feels ill we eat raw garlic with our food.
Very wise choice. This honey method makes even children want to eat raw garlic, so that's a huge benefit!
It makes it very delicious, without even cooking it!
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Garlic has great health benefits.
It sure does!
We like them! Thanks @asmolokalo!
Definitely going to try combining two of my favorite foods. This was a great post, so cool to see how you prepare your foods and that you have so many garlic plants around. Upvoted
Love the sound of the honey garlic, never heard of that before :)
It's excellent @karenb54!
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So lucky you have wild garlic growing
We sure are man!
And we take full advantage of it!
What a neat idea. We haven't got access to wild garlic, will have to use Comercial instead. What honey did you use? Is clover honey ok?
I'm going to have to try putting garlic in honey. I've never seen that before -- it looks like a good deal. I bet you could market that as an Ozark specialty in some of the gift shops in Arkansas and Missouri. Local honey plus wild garlic. That would be a sure thing in little jars.
And aren't wild edible plants a great deal? When the wild plants, like your garlic, are so common, it lets us focus our gardens on other crops. It looks like you have a big stand of wild garlic right now. With all those bulblets, you will be able to have a massive crop, distributed over many wild spots tucked here and there -- diversifying your sources is a good strategy for ensuring a crop no matter what. And when your kids are exclaiming, "Great Garlic!", you will know that they have eaten too much of it, lol. Happy foraging!
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