Oniony entities and how to feel rather silly

"It's shallot day!" exclaimed Bob the Farm Manager, as I arrived to the first bright blue sky in days.





Evidently all the rain we'd gotten over the last week took a toll on Katchkie's shallots, which were soaked and in danger of rotting under their healthy-looking green stems. They needed to come out of the ground, even if they weren't ready yet. When I asked Bob how much longer they should have been in the ground, he replied, "I don't know; I've never grown these before." Huh.





I spent the next few hours pulling stems out of the ground, most of the time taking the shallots with them. Every few plants, the stems came up but most of the shallot stayed put-- it was rotted through and just broke. Or an entire shallot would come up, wet and mushy and hosting some very well-fed worms. The presence of worms does, indeed, prove that the soil is healthy, so the farm's ecosystem is working just fine-- the only losers are the humans who need shallots in their recipes.





Not to worry. The good shallots still filled three crates, which I promptly took back to the greenhouse and spread out on two tables to dry further in the heat.





But I wasn't finished in the "spicy herbs that people peel" department. There were three rows of garlic that also had to be pulled up. I had been out in the field a few days before, snipping garlic scapes, and just for fun I had tried pulling one out of the ground. No go-- it was embedded in there.



(In case anyone is lost, both shallots and garlic-- and all oniony entities-- are roots. The stalks that grow out of them are often edible-- as in the case of garlic scapes.)



This, I learned, is why farms have tractors. Or one of the reasons anyway. Bob went over all three rows with the tractor, cutting low enough that the earth was disturbed and the garlic came up easily. We then pulled up great bulbs of the stuff, often with lots of mud and the occasional earthworm. (Happy happy earthworms.) Getting all that healthy mud off the garlic bulbs turned out to be a chore-- we shook the bulbs, knocked them together, and sometimes just raked cakes of mud off with our fingers. Finally we piled all this garlic on the truck bed (also attached to the tractor) and drove it back to the greenhouse, where it was spread out on tables next to the shallots.

One of the garlic bulbs did go home with me, and Jeff spent the next two days trying to figure out why it was dry enough to cook with. Until, that is, Bob said something two days later about hanging the garlic in the greenhouse to cure.

Yet another tidbit from vegetable processing land: one must cure garlic before using it. It can't be pulled out of the ground and cooked the same day like an onion, no matter that it vaguely resembles one. Am I the only person who didn't know this?