Just Braiding My Garlic

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Before the last winter, A+ planted a few cloves of garlic in hopes that they would eventually grow and produce lots of fresh garlic for us. Luckily, his experiment succeeded abundantly, and we ended up with a harvest of about 18 heads of garlic!

While not all of them were in a proper condition for drying and preserving for later use and/or planting in the fall, we did manage to get a dozen in decent shape. I was really excited to try braiding them together, because that just seemed like both a practical but also beautifully quaint way of preserving garlic.

After messing about with various hook and string and clothesline arrangements, we decided that it would be better to go with smaller bunches of garlic because we didn't want anything being too heavy and either breaking hooks or pulling them out of the wall. Falling garlics no good! Thus, the final arrangement of two braids, with six heads of garlic each.

It was quite a process preparing the garlics for braiding, because we needed to cut off the roots and remove the outermost layer of skin (mainly for cleanliness). Then I realized that we had let the garlics sit a bit too long and thus the stems had gotten rather dry and stiff. We ended up laying a soaked towel over them for a good 3 - 4 hours before they got soft enough to braid.

But, braid the garlics, I did!

           

 


We hung both bunches in the kitchen, one near the stove and one above an extended counter area. I'm really looking forward to having our own garlic to eat in the coming months. I just hope the bigger ones will keep well enough to be used to plant more this fall!

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