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The Stinking Rose
Love it or hate it, common kitchen ingredient garlic has been with us for thousands of years and is able to make some serious health benefit claims. With today’s move towards grow-your-own, garlic should be on everyone’s menu. We take a good hard look at ‘the stinking rose’. Although garlic is found around the world, these days over 75% of the garlic used is grown in China. It’s not just underpants produced in copious quantities. Over 10 billion kg of garlic is produced and exported from China annually. Most of the garlic found in shops here in New Zealand is sourced from China and is easily spotted by the pure white skin and the roots chopped off tightly at the base. This seems silly really as garlic is unbelievably easy to grow at home, even for those who are normally shy of gardening. You’ll need an organic bulb (best to get this from your local health food store) as Chinese imported garlic is treated to prevent it sprouting. While there are several types of garlic, one type that isn’t really garlic is the milder flavoured elephant garlic which is actually a type of leek. For those looking for a good strong garlicky tang, elephant garlic just doesn’t cut it. True garlics come in two main groups, softneck and hardneck. Softneck is more common as it is easier to grow and plant mechanically and has a good long shelf-life. The soft neck means that it’s this type of garlic that you find braided into long strings of garlic as in the vampire tales of old. Typified by the abundance of cloves in each bulb and the pale papery skin, softneck varieties are ‘silverskin’ or ‘artichoke’. Hardneck garlic varieties have a firmer stalk that coils out from the top. They also have fewer softer cloves in each bulb and are much thinner skinned, in some cases having little or no skin at all. It’s this ‘thin-skinned-ness’ that makes them less common commercially. They simply don’t keep well. Garlic is best planted in Spring or Autumn. Having chosen your variety, simply break the bulb into the separate cloves. Each clove will end up as one bulb with several cloves. Chose a site that gets plenty of sun and where the soil isn’t too wet. Garlic grows well in containers so you might like to plant several pots of garlic to make it easy to keep an eye on them through the hot summer months. Push the cloves, sprout side upwards down into the soil about 2.5cm with about 10cm between cloves and about 35cm between rows. If you’re planting a range of vegetables, garlic grows well with lettuces and brassicas (like cabbage and broccoli) as the smell deters aphids and cabbage white butterflies, two of the most common vege garden pests. But avoid planting garlic too close to peas, beans or potatoes as this isn’t such a good mix. You’ll know when it’s time to harvest your garlic because the green shoots that grew out of the cloves you planted, will go brown and die back. At this point gently pull your garlic up and hang it somewhere cool and dry with good air circulation and leave for at least a week to dry out. Avoid the urge to wash the bulbs; a simple shake will get most of the soil off. When it comes to cooking, for many people, garlic has a place in just about every meal. There are many proven (and many more unproven) health benefits attributed to garlic. Heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer, coughs, colds, intestinal worms and even diabetes have all been treated using garlic and garlic extracts. The effectiveness of some of these has been clinically proven. The flipside of garlic consumption is the undoubted presence of the aroma of a garlic eater, although for some being accused of smelling of garlic is proof that the accuser isn’t eating enough garlic! The longer you cook garlic the sweeter and less pungent the taste becomes. The spiciness of raw garlic is caused by a compound called allicin which breaks down during cooking. What causes the breath and sweat to smell are sulphur compounds that can’t be digested so have to be excreted through the skin and lungs and which aren’t affected by cooking. Although parsley gives short term relief to the smell of these sulphur compounds, they take several hours to completely reveal themselves by which time the parsley is long gone! As if garlic’s health benefits weren’t enough, through the ages, many cultures have granted garlic magical properties; warding off demons, vampires and werewolves. It seems that there might even be some truth in this as some delusions and mental illnesses are the result of parasitic or bacterial infections, which some believe can be treated with garlic. 
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