An Odour to Garlic

 “Garlick maketh a man wynke, drynke, and stynke.” Thomas Nashe

“Shallots are for babies; Onions are for men; garlic is for heroes.” Unknown

“A garlic caress is stimulating. A garlic excess soporific.” Curnonsky

“Garlic. Life stinks with it. Life stinks without it.” Deborah Morris

“A nickel will get you on the subway, but garlic will get you a seat.” New York expression (Yiddish or Jewish?)

Photo 1: Last Year's Onion, This Year's Potato Plot

While preparing this year's potato and sweetcorn bed, a decision had to be made about the orphan garlic plants. These had sprouted during the warm February from cloves I had clearly missed while harvesting last season's crop (Photo 1). Fortunately, we are still working our way through last year's harvest so they weren't missed in a culinary sense.

Garlic is beneficial to roses in so many ways that Mary had already relocated a clove's worth of small plants to her rose bed (Photo 2). If garlic sprays deter aphids and slugs, then garlic plants offer the same promise with extra culinary garlic in autumn?

Photo 2: Garlic Planted in the Rose Bed

What to do with the remaining fifteen or so plants? Like many gardeners, I hate throwing away plants and especially food plants even when serendipity played a larger part in the development of these little plants than my careful nurturing. So, after digging them up and teasing apart the bulblets ...

Photo 3: Garlic Bulblets

... they were replanted in a narrow strip originally intended (many years ago) as a linear strawberry bed (Photo 4) ...

Photo 4: Garlic Orphanage

They will, of course, get the same care and attention as our planned garlic crop.