Very Special Garlic

Well, it is to us!

When we bought this wee farm five years ago, the previous owners had planted a lot of garlic. It was hard neck garlic and we didn't know at the time but this garlic is actually pretty difficult to grow. Conditions must have been favourable ( because we knew stuff all) and we got a good crop and after sharing it with friends and using it ourselves we've managed to keep a little each year to plant on. Until 2 years ago. Then we were lucky enough that one of our friends, Wendy, could spare a bulb of one of the original garlics we'd passed to her, and we planted it and kept our fingers crossed. The cloves grew beautifully and we got another year. Then, last year we ate a lot of it and what we thought we'd kept just dried out to nothing :( It was the end of an era. It was an old Heritage variety and we didn't know exactly which one, other than it's a purple stripe,  so that was that. But No! When we planted our garlic way back in June little did we know we were actually planting a few precious cloves of the hard neck that had been passed around over the last 5 years and up it came - yippee! So we have a very few, beautiful, precious hard neck bulbs of garlic ( one of which we will store very carefully for planting in June, all going well) And surprisingly they have done SO much better than the supposed easy to grow more ordinary soft neck variety which I'm leaving in the ground for now as it is much smaller and pretty mediocre, meh!

These are little bubils which grow up the stalk - they taste just like garlic so you can put them on salads - yummy.

Our little vegetable miracle.