Vampire Avoidance Redux

Aside from that one so-sugary-it-gave-me-cavities-to-write-it post, we haven't been writing much here lately. But that's because we've been really busy. K's sister and our nephews were in town for a week, which involved spending several days getting the house in-law-ready and several more days of recovery after the five year old left the premises. And then there was college world series, which didn't end the way I wanted it to but had The Owls stick around long enough that I spent lots of time in front of the teevee. And then I went out west for a week to do some research with a collaborator. So it has been a busy few weeks without much time to keep up with the blogs I read, let alone post here.

However, I returned home a couple days back to find that the garden had gone crazy with all of the rain that the eastern half of the country got in my absence. The sunflower was taller than I was and the mint was threatening to take over all of Smallville:



But most importantly, the garlic was ready to harvest. Yes, the long wait since we first planted the garlic last November was drawin to a close, and many of the leaves had turned brown so it was time to start digging and see how the bulbs had done over the course of the year.



And the results: they seemed to turn out quite nicely. Some of them are smaller than we would have liked, but we aren't sure if that is because of something we did -- plant them too close together? not get them fancy enough soil? -- or if its just the varietals we chose. You may recall that we planted about a half dozen different kinds of garlic, and since several off these are kinds you can't find in many stores we don't really know what size they are supposed to be. But in any event we washed the dirt off and cleaned them up and now we have to wait a little bit longer for them to dry out and then it will be time for some good eatin'.



Now, if you are like most of our friends you are looking at that garlic and saying "my lord, how will you ever eat that much garlic before next year's harvest comes in?" But that's not what we say. We look at that pile and say "that should last us a month. maybe two. and then we'll have to break in to the other half that we haven't harvested yet":



Did I mention that we eat a lot of garlic?