Don't worry, this title does not introduce a recipe suggestion.  It does introduce an essay based on the saying "If life gives you lemons, make lemonade" as it applied to CSA farming.  More specifically, we will discuss how the commitment of consumers to a CSA farm allows farmers to be more creative in utilizing their less than blemish free produce, and where in the case of garlic, that has led us here at Hunters' Greens.

Garlic is a perverse crop to grow.  On about September, as we are exhausted and ready to put the farm to bed for the winter, it is time to plant garlic.  It is a rare year when we are adequately prepared.  Sometimes we venture out to Hillsboro to buy some select varieties from our favorite seed garlic grower, but as of late, Jim runs down to the supermarket and buys ten pounds or so of garlic to plant.  Actually, the last few years, we have begun planting back some of the last years crop, so we can begin to call the seed garlic our own.  One has purple skinned cloves and the other pink, so we might call them "Winco Wine" and "Fred's Red".

Once you get some bone dry ground or spongy wet ground prepared (depending on whether you beat the fall rains in planting), the poor little garlic cloves face a long winter of incessant rain, compacting the ground around them.  As early spring arrives, weeds spring out of the sopping ground and threaten to bury your garlic.  Early on, we lost track of whole garlic crops in the weed.  An early mulching might help these problems, but we are always waiting to see the tops of the garlic out of the ground before we mulch, and it always seems too late.

So recently, Jim has become a mulching monster, and mulches every thing he can.  Garlic was one of his first victims, so as soon as he gets the garlic weeded on the first dry spring days, he lays down some hay mulch in the hopes of supressing weed, retaining moisture and softening the rain compacted ground.

Now this may be a fine idea, in theory.  But last week we discovered one of the pitfalls of poor implementation.  Every year in July, Jim digs out one of our Rodale garden advice books that has an entry about how many skins a garlic bulb should have when it is harvested.  The advice of some intrepid garlic farmer had been queried, and the farmer asserts that when it has seven skins it is ready to harvest.  If you wait too long, the cloves begin to break through the skins and you have a bulb with dirt in the top that won't store well.

Some of our CSA customers may remember getting a few bulbs of uncured garlic in July.  That garlic had seven skins.  So what happened to the rest of the crop?  Well, this leads us to another of the perversities of garlic.  It wants to be harvested when we are still busting our butt, trying to finish up planting summer crops and itching to get started planting fall crops.

This year with the hot dry weather, Jim gambled that he could just stop watering the garlic and it would cure in the dry ground, and be ready to harvest when he got around to it.  By the time the poorly forecast soaking early August rain began falling it was off his radar screen.  Last week, he decided he'd better get the garlic in before it rained again.

As Jim began harvesting the Winco Purple he realized he'd waited too long.  The bulbs were breaking open, the stems had rotted away and even the layers of skin down to the naked clove were breaking down.  It was the evening before delivery and he raced to finish a row before dark.  And this when he started making garlic lemonade.

As Jim dug through the mildewing mulch, he suddenly realized that the mulch was contributing to the problem.  Now Fred's Red matures a little later than Winco Wine, so Jim immediately stopped harvesting and began pulling the damp mulch of of the remaining rows of Fred's Red.  Their skins were breaking open but were not in as bad shape.  Jim spent the rest of the twilight pulling off mulch and abandoned his plans for including garlic in the harvest.

But what to do with the now black skinned Winco Wine?  The next step in making garlic lemonade was to triage the bulbs.  The best good sized bulbs would go into next week's share.  The main problem with the broken down skin is storage, and CSA shares get about as much garlic in a season as Jim uses in a week, so storage shouldn't be an issue.  Because we are marketing to a captive and generally sympathetic market, we can at least try this garlic out on the CSA members.  A single crop garlic grower marketing to the broad public would never get away with it and may have to ditch the garlic.  A single crop grower would never make this mistake, but neither is she trying to juggle twenty or so crops at once.

The second branch of the triage brings us to another perversity of growing garlic.  The intrepid garlic grower will save the largest cloves to replant, with an eye toward maintaining and increasing clove and bulb size.  Now, as the cook in the family, Jim knows that when it comes to garlic, "size matters".  There is nothing so frustrating as being pressed for time and trying to peel twenty tiny cloves to put in your spaghetti sauce.  On the other hand, as a marketer, it is really hard to pass by the biggest bulbs that would impress the customer.  The blackened Winco Wine offered and easy out.  Some of the biggest bulbs had broken open the worst, and were quite unsightly.  These we will save to plant.

The third branch of the triage are those bulbs we will save for our personal use and those that we will plant for green garlic in the spring.  Medium sized, ugly bulbs will suffice in our kitchen, but we now save our frustration by planting the tiniest bulbs whole for the early green garlic.

In the coming weeks we will see what the triage for Fred's Red will look like.  We anticipate some prettier, more storable garlic since Jim discovered his mistake before all was lost.

So that's how you make garlic lemonade.  Oh, and one more thing, you squeeze out the last bit of sour lemon juice, and write an essay about it to entertain and edify your customers, while spinning a cautionary tale about timely garlic harvest for your fellow intrepid CSA farmers (as if they don't already know better).