Garlic and Apples

Garlic and apples, two of my favorite things. I wouldn’t recommend eating them together though. I would try it however if anyone has a good recipe!

It’s been a quiet fall week in the garden. The days are getting so short now that there isn’t much time to spend outdoors after dinner in the evenings and it has been raining off and on since Wednesday night making it too wet to be in the garden between downpours.

Bookman with apples

I did, however, manage to get all the garlic planted Wednesday evening as the sun was setting and the rain clouds moving in. Within half an hour of finishing up it was raining. I couldn’t have timed it better really because the squirrels, who were watching me plant the garlic, didn’t get a chance to dig. And when I say they were watching me, I am not kidding. At one point in my digging I looked up to see a squirrel to my left on the retaining wall between my garden and my neighbor’s looking right at me. I stood up to shoo it away and it refused to budge. Then to my right on the back fence was another squirrel, and above me on the roof of the garage a third. Alfred Hitchcock did great with a horror film on birds, he should have done one on squirrels too. It was starting to get a little creepy with all those beady eyes looking at me. It was the garlic they wanted though and they have been foiled! Hahahahahaha!

And if all the cloves I planted actually turn into bulbs of garlic next summer, I will be opening a safe house for all those being tormented by vampires. As you may recall from last week, I had two varieties to plant and had four bulbs of each, German porcelain and Spanish roja. The German cloves were huge but I still planted perhaps a dozen cloves. Very satisfying. The Spanish, oh my were there a lot of cloves in each bulb! They are small cloves and with the four bulbs I think I ended up planting about 20-25 cloves! The beds I had ready for them almost weren’t big enough. So exciting!

I did not get a chance to plant the daffodils and the scilla yet. Bookman will help me get those in this week.

Nothing new blooming in the garden, everything is winding down. However, the apples are finally ready! Bookman canned a

Bookman picking apples

quart and a half of applesauce yesterday. Today I have apples in the crock pot cooking down into apple butter. Apple butter, in case you have never had it, is apples cooked down to smooth creaminess and mixed with cinnamon and cloves and a little sugar if you are feeling so inclined. It tastes great on toast instead of butter made of fat. It’s got the whole house smelling so good. I’ll be canning that once it is done cooking down.

Bookman and I will be making applesauce and apple butter for the next week or two. There will also be an apple pie at some point. We are also considering canning up a few jars of pie filling for ourselves and as a gift to our neighbors of the tart cherry tree. We’ve got a lot of apples. Have I mentioned how much I love apples? Our apples are lumpy and not pretty like the ones you get at the grocery store, but they taste just as good and that’s all that matters.