'hand-me-down' produce. I love the thought of gathering mulberries from a tree
my grandmother visited as a child or savouring an old style apple
that transports the tastebuds back in time perhaps a generation or three.
It is inspiring to meet so many people in the Ballarat region (especially through the Ballarat Permaculture Guild ) who share this passion and are actively planting and maintaining all kinds of fruits and vegetables, saving seed stock and various strains of productive plants so we'll be able to enjoy them in the years to come.
So you can imagine how excited I was to discover garlic growing in the dry creek bed that runs past the ruin of what was once a thriving family homestead, where my Grandmother Anita and my Great Aunty Ruby were born just after the turn of last century. The ruin is snuggled amongst the granite boulder strewn landscape of the Palmer hills in South Australia - where in the far distance you can see the fertile plains of the Murray River stretch as far as the eye can see.
This arid and isolated place that we know as Doctor's Hill (apparently named after a local doctor retreated there to take his own life) must have been a challenging environment in which to try and eek out an existence, but it was where my Great Grandmother raised her family, milking cows at dawn every morning and growing her own vegetables with water bucketed out of the spring fed creek. Now all that remains are the ruins of numerous out buildings and the main home and various fruit trees that have survived without any tending over the decades including a massive mulberry tree, a straggly quince, pear and fig trees. And wedged between huge rocks in the creek - an abundance of giant garlic plants.
I have a romantic notion that the garlic I harvested at Doctor's Hill decends from plants grown 100 years ago, perhaps from cloves that made the long boat journey from Prussia with my family all those years ago. It's certainly giant garlic, elephant garlic or Russian garlic. . .I'm not sure which name is correct or what variety it is exactly. But for me it is 'Doctor's Hill Garlic' now and I plan to grow as much as I can from the few cloves I retrieved from that dusty creek bed and hopefully share it around with the rest of my extended family who share my thoughts that this is 'special and historic' garlic.
So last winter (on the shortest day of the year as I'd been advised to by garlic growing experts) I planted my stash of rescued cloves and 'bulblets' in a small corner of the garden. Despite the slightly average soil and not much tending at all I managed to grow a beautiful crop of Doctor's Hill Garlic, the stems so long the flowers towered over my head. Along with plenty of huge cloves there were plenty of 'bulblets' to plant again this year.
Some of the heads hadn't formed proper cloves by the time I picked them a month or so ago and are the size of golf or even tennis balls, perfect for larger dishes requiring loads of garlic. So to avoid my fridge and house reeking of garlic when I use only a partial clove - I've taken to roasting a batch at a time and storing them in the fridge, ready to be thrown into smaller dishes. I find the roasting accentuates the milder flavour of this type of garlic and makes is so easy to throw into quick dishes. I'm using so much that I think this year I'll have to quadruple my patch size and perhaps return to the ruin at Doctor's Hill and rescue some more for planting.
