Identification
"Wild garlic", otherwise known as "ramsons" for some reason, grows abundantly in shady woodland areas and by roadsides all over this part of the world. I found some on my first walk into the woods past Clarence Park I've taken in a while and helped myself.
Like apparently everything you can forage to eat, it closely resembles other things that would put you on the wrong side of dead if you did the same to them, which just seems to be the way it is, so do be careful if you're doing any foraging of your own (which you should be, because it's great). Fortunately, garlic has the advantage of being more easily identifiable than some wild plants: if you're in any real doubt, the deciding factor is its taste. The leaves of "Lily of the Valley" look a lot like the leaves of wild garlic, but taste nothing like it. Wild garlic, as you may have guessed, tastes a lot like garlic. All parts of the plant do, in fact, and it is entirely edible - from the leaves to the stems to the flowers, right down to the bulbs. Another thing to look for is the flowers: wild garlic flowers are small and pointy:
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| Wild garlic, photographed in Bury, Lancashire, 19th May 2019 |
while Lily of the Valley flowers are round and droopy:
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| Lilly of the Valley flowers, from this page. |
Just to be on the safe side, I'd suggest waiting until the plant flowers to be 100% sure of what it is, if you don't want to risk putting poisonous leaves in your mouth. Which is great, because that makes now the perfect time of year to nab yourself an abundance of free, smelly and nutritious food. Go for it.
Experiment 1: Fermenting Wild Garlic
I love pickled vegetables, but making them can be a bit of a faff. Fermenting, however, seems to be a lot more straightforward. No sterilising of jars required, and no heating of spicy vinegar concoctions. Fermenting wild garlic needs only time, and salt. I followed the recipe you can read about here and here, and as demonstrated in this lovely video here. Simple as can be: salt, leaves, salt, leaves in layers; leave to go mushy and give it a "massage". I left mine salted for a good hour before mushing, and weighed down overnight in the jar before sealing the lid.
And there we have it: my first jar of fermenting wild garlic. If it tastes anything like the leftover salty strips I couldn't cram in there do, it's going to be quite the act of willpower waiting the recommended two weeks of actual fermentation time before eating. This was just an experimental jar: assuming success, there'll be plenty more, and larger jars, where that came from.
Experiment 2: Growing Wild Garlic on the Allotment
Wild garlic grows as bulbs, resembling spring onions or leeks as much as the garlic you can buy in supermarkets (no surprise there - all these plants belong to the allium genus). This makes them fairly easy to pull out of the ground if you give them a sharp tug as close to the ground as possible: and so it occurred to me, why not try growing some on the allotment? There's a patch where a rose I planted hasn't bloomed anything like as much as its sister I planted just a foot or so away, just close to the gate where I'm wondering if the difference in the amount of direct sunlight the two are getting has sealed their separate fates. I keep reading how garlic and roses make excellent companion plants, and as I've already grown the two in close proximity this year, I've no reason to doubt this. If "normal" garlic grows well with roses, then why not wild garlic too? And the shady habitat I nabbed them from can be replaced by the shade of the fence where the rose has had less success. Seems like a winner to me. So I removed the tiny rose bush...
...filled in the hole with some fresh compost, and planted the bulbs, roots still attached, in its place:
Perhaps these won't take, or perhaps they will: but if they don't, perhaps the dropping white flowers will re-seed and I'll have a healthy patch of ramsons this time next year. In the meantime, I'll be fermenting.
...filled in the hole with some fresh compost, and planted the bulbs, roots still attached, in its place:
Perhaps these won't take, or perhaps they will: but if they don't, perhaps the dropping white flowers will re-seed and I'll have a healthy patch of ramsons this time next year. In the meantime, I'll be fermenting.
Related posts
A Walk in the Park
A Soup Made of Scraps
The Decline and Fall of Clarence Park's Sensory Garden
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