Gardeners' Holidays 2017: Squashmas

For the past couple of years, the August Gardeners' Holiday that began its life as Squashmas has focused more on other crops. In 2015 the squash harvest, though plentiful, was eclipsed by the bounty of our first harvest of bush cherries (which, sadly, has never been repeated since). And last year, our tomatoes were the stars of the garden show.

But this year, Squashmas returns to its roots. Although our attempt to fend off squash vine borers by burying the stems of the plants in dirt was only a partial success, both plants are still producing for now, and today we enjoyed our first zucchini-based meal of the season. The dish, Linguini Aglio Olio with Zucchini, is one we found in Nava Atlas's Vegetariana and enjoy regularly during zucchini season. Basically, it's just zucchini sauteed in olive oil with lots of garlic (the recipe calls for eight cloves to three medium zukes), with a little fresh parsley thrown in until it's just wilted, all tossed with linguini and seasoned with salt, pepper, and oregano. It's a quick and simple meal that always comes out well.

This time, however, the dish had a special feature. Aside from the linguine and the olive oil, everything in it came from our garden. The zucchini, of course, but also the parsley, the oregano (gathered from our herb bed in the front yard), and even the garlic.

This is the first year we've successfully grown our own garlic, though not the first time we've tried. I'd read somewhere that if you simply pull apart a head of garlic and plant the individual cloves, each one will mature into a complete head of garlic, which you can harvest as soon as the green tops turn brown and dry. However, the first time I tried this, not much actually came up. So I did a little more research and found that the easiest varieties to grow in cold-winter areas are "hardneck" garlics, which are distinguished by a stiff stem surrounded by a single ring of large cloves. What we'd planted was "softneck" garlic, which has a softer stem and several layers of cloves, because that was what we'd been able to find at the grocery store. (Most garlic sold in supermarkets is the softneck type, because it stores better.)

So last year, we hit the farmers' market, where we found hardneck garlic for sale for what we would normally consider a ridiculous price—something like a dollar a head. However, we figured if we could manage to turn that one head into a dozen or so, we'd end up paying less than 10 cents a head, which would be a pretty good deal, even if we had to wait close to a year for it.

Now, when you grow garlic, you have to plant it in the fall, leave it in the ground all winter, and harvest it in the summer. So rather than put it into the main garden, where we'd have to work around it during our spring planting, we tucked the cloves into the dirt around the edges of our asparagus bed. I've since read that this actually isn't a good companion planting; asparagus is one of the few crops that doesn't do well next to garlic, which can transmit diseases to it and maybe disrupt its root system when harvested—which might explain why the asparagus in that bed hasn't been doing so well. So I guess next year we'll have to find another spot for it. (Perhaps we could plant it in a ring around our rosebush, as that's supposed to be a beneficial pairing.)

But if the asparagus was at all harmed by the presence of the garlic, the reverse clearly wasn't true. We got some delicious green garlic scapes this spring, and about two weeks ago, Brian went out and came in with a fistful of smallish, but perfectly firm and intact heads of garlic. Unfortunately, he had already trimmed off the stems by the time it occurred to me to check on how best to store it, and according to The Spruce, it's actually better to leave them on until they're fully dried out. But we followed the rest of the article's instructions—brushing off the dirt but not washing the heads with water, and leaving them in a cool, dry room to "cure"—so we should be able to keep it in good condition for two to four months. That is, if we don't eat it all before then.

So this year's Squashmas is really a dual celebration: our usual zucchini crop, and our first-ever crop of garlic. Here's to many more!