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Here’s the how to…

Choose an area in your garden that is very sunny.  Garlic likes a lot of sun.  Amend the soil by adding compost and then work it into the ground by breaking up the soil and making it nice and loose.  We just used a little hand tiller and worked in some compost from our compost pile, but you could add any kind of compost/manure mix from Home Depot/Lowes or a local garden center.  Garlic likes rich soil, so don’t skip this step.

Buy some organic garlic.  I like to buy it locally at the farmer’s market but you could just as easily grab some from the grocery store.  Take it apart and use the largest cloves, as those will give you the best bulbs.

Plant the cloves 2″ deep, and 5″ apart, with the pointy end up.  I like to put them out on the soil like this first to make sure my spacing is right and then poke them in.  After you plant them, cover the bed with about 6″ of hay or mulched leaves, water, and let it go until after the snow melts!  In the late spring you will see a curly stem with a flower bud appear on the top of your garlic greens.  These are called garlic scapes and you remove them in order to force more nutrients to the bulb.  They are a delicious mild garlicy addition to your spring meals.  Here’s what they look like.

And here’s what you’ll be able to harvest next summer!

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I really don’t love canned tomatoes.  It’s fine if you often eat chili or spaghetti, but our household doesn’t go that route often enough to make it worth the effort of the canning process.  Plus, I would imagine that I am like most people in that I don’t plant nearly enough tomatoes that I have a huge harvest all at once. Since I don’t plan on canning weekly, freezing it is!  I have two ways that I choose to preserve tomatoes in the freezer.  The first is my super easy, super lazy way.  I wash them, cut out the core, and store them in a gallon ziplock freezer bag.  When we’re ready to eat tomatoes, I take them out and partially defrost them, peel the skins off and drop them into soups or chili.  So.  Easy.

The second way comes from the fact that I love roasted tomatoes.  Some of my favorite dishes are pasta dishes with roasted tomatoes tossed in or Tyler Florence’s roasted tomato soup.  So this year I thought I’d go that route with some of my small batches of overabundance.  All I do is clean them, core them, cut them in chunks, toss them in olive oil, salt and pepper, and add a generous amount of whole garlic cloves and onion chunks.

OK, I usually do a LOT more than this, so I don’t know why this picture is so sparse on the tomatoes!  I roast them at 425 degrees for about 40min-1hr, stirring every ten minutes or so.  I like to let them cook down for an hour if it’s a single layer.  The ones I have pictured below filled 5 large pans (approx. 9×13) almost to the top.  So these puppies cooked for 3 hours.  They were so deep red and delicious looking.  After you remove them from the oven, let them cool and then store flat in a quart Ziplock bag in your freezer.

I’d love to hear how you use your roasted tomatoes — I’m always looking for new recipes!

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