Garlic Roulette

I am very good at growing things accidentally.  Boy #2 brought home a craft he had made at preschool which consisted of some soil and grass seed on a plate.  You get the idea of what’s supposed to happen here.  For the sake of safety and mess containment, it came home inside a zipper sandwich bag.  Instead of lovingly taking it out and displaying it in a sunny window sill and carefully misting it regularly, I tossed the whole bag on top of the fridge and forgot about it.  A few weeks later, I spied the bag, and curious as to what I had tossed up there, I pulled it down to discover that the grass had sprouted and was about an inch long, and the whole pile of dirt was covered in a mossy coat of mold.  Oops.  Zippered sandwich bags make excellent miniature greenhouses.

Later in the cleaning binge, I found another zipper sandwich bag in the refrigerator.  Most of a head of garlic had been put in the bag last fall….or maybe last summer….or maybe before we moved last June.  It had overwintered beautifully in the refrigerator and had sprouted some lovely green tops.  So I planted it.

I don’t know where the garlic originated.  The packaging has probably already composted back into dirt in some landfill.  Or at least in my fairy-tale imaginings of how a landfill works.  It might have been grown in Oregon, in which case, we do stand some of a chance of harvesting garlic.  It might have come from Florida, in which case my odds of success are low.  Even if it was originally from an organic farm in an Indianapolis suburb, my odds are still pretty low based on my history with garlic.  The last time I planted it (and I used starts that were intended to be planted in a garden), it didn’t do squat.  So, do I feel lucky?

The Web-Mistress