I think I just need to do this.

OK, so I came up with a fun little name for my blog and all kinds of big ideas. Then the writer's block hit me hard. Or was it all the great ideas swirling around my noggin? I was going to write this long dissertation about how I came to the blogosphere, organize by topic, amaze you with my common sense knowledge, and so on.

Know what? I'm full of crap. I think I'll just start jotting some ideas and see where it goes.

So here I go...

Hmm..

Well...

Sigh. I am going to get some water...

OK, I'm back. Let's see....

OH! I know. I like to garden. Right now it's summer here in the Southeastern US. The price of EVERYTHING is up, and people are growing food. I'm one of those people. I have a big property, not huge, but a good sized .81 acre. I can put a lot of space into food production. Each year, I try to increase the garden size and become more efficient. I'll post more on the garden as I go along in the days and weeks to come.

Garlic was one of the first things I've harvested this year. It's an easy, almost foolproof (at least for this fool) crop to grow. It was super easy to get started: Back in November of last year, I went to the local natural foods coop and purchased a few bulbs of organic garlic. I broke the bulb into the individual cloves and planted them, root (fat) side facing downward in the prepared planting bed. They were spaced about six inches apart in rows about six to ten inches apart. I watered and mulched with chopped up leaves, and waited... Spring sprung, and so did the garlic. I fertilized it a few times and kept waiting. My patience was rewarded with a bounty of garlic in mid June when the leaves started to die back. All I had to do was pull out the now big bulbs. I need to weigh it to get the final tally. Here's the freshly harvested garlic. I used some of the green parts for cooking, but the garlic cures better and keeps longer if the leaves are left on. Curing? What's that? Well, after the garlic is harvested, it needs to be kept in a warm, dry place for a few weeks so it will store and last a while. So, cure I did, on a large window screen that I picked up for free at a local trash transfer station (us folks who don't live in the city limits either have to pay for trash removal or haul to a transfer station and toss the trash into Dumpsters. The transfer station has a salvage shed, where you can leave things you don't want and others can take them for free. That's another post for another day). OK, this is getting fun! I placed the window screen on top of a clothes drying rack upstairs in my finished attic, which also doubles as a handy boudoir. Now, three weeks later, I have me some cured garlic. So, there we have it. Garlic. And, it does not smell strongly of garlic upstairs.

UPDATE: I just trimmed and weighed the garlic. I got 27 bulbs with a total weight of 2.75 pounds. That should keep me cooking for a while.