I have a great story about Pete’s cousin, MJ (who is going to shoot me when she reads this).
When their grandmother passed away a few years ago, city girl MJ generously offered to help sort through Grandma’s old country house before it was sold. While rummaging through a pile of clothes stacked on top of a closet, she pulled out what she thought was an old fur coat, only to find her hand grasping a large dead rat.
After screaming and running out of the house, she stood on the grass, trying to catch her breath, when a toy rubber snake caught her eye. Then it moved. More screaming ensued, which ended with her curled up in the foetal position on a bed, demanding to be taken home to the city.
Now, I have to confess, I’m about as comfortable in a rural setting as MJ is. So whilst I was very excited at the prospect of spending the day with our old friends Diana and Ian on their small property near the Blue Mountains, I was a little perturbed by Di’s remark that they might be shearing sheep that day, and that we’d all be put to work.
The perturbation subsided as soon as we arrived. Di and Ian’s property is so relaxing, and so incredibly welcoming, that our few hours there felt like a week’s holiday.
And we were indeed put to work, as were our friends Christina and Steve who joined us for lunch, although it didn’t involve shearing, much to Small Man’s disappointment. However, we did move the sheep…
Aren’t they beautiful?
The lambs needed to be sorted from the ewes and weighed, and it was Big Boy’s job to push them off the weighing platform. I asked him what it felt like, and he said it was “like trying to move a furry sofa that pushes back”.
As I’ve mentioned before, Di and Ian are small scale garlic growers – and whilst their garlic isn’t certified organic (a very expensive process here), it is grown organically and all tended and weeded by hand, a laborious process that necessitates the unpaid slave labour of their three handsome sons.
The garlic was harvested in late November, and has been drying and curing ever since. I thought you might like to see some photos of the process.
It’s hard to get an idea of scale, but these large Russian bulbs are the size of my fist…
The purple striped garlic are a new crop for Di and Ian…
Different varieties were hanging from the rafters..
..and drying on airing shelves, before being cleaned up for sale…
We bought two kilos of garlic to add to our homegrown crop. Compared to our baby bulbs, Di and Ian’s are large and perfectly formed. Their Australian white garlic will sell for $30/kg this year, and the purple stripe variety for $35/kg. If you’re in NSW and are interested in purchasing some, please email Diana – djditchfield(at)hotmail.com.
(Edit: My apologies for the earlier misinformation, but Di’s just let me know that they can only post to NSW, not the whole of Australia. I believe there are quite convoluted quarantine rules about shipping garlic interstate).
Most of the garlic we bought were Australian whites, with their lightly blushing bulbs and pungent, creamy pink cloves (there’s a kilo of garlic in the photo above)…
The beautiful purple stripe garlic is quite different, but equally as delicious. To my palate, these are a bit sweeter, both in aroma and flavour…
Christina and I have bought our annual supplies, which we’ll be breaking into unpeeled cloves and freezing. Doing so will ensure that we can cook with locally grown garlic all year, without having to buy imported bulbs sprayed with toxic methyl bromide (a mandatory Australian government requirement).
After lunch, we spent time wandering around Di and Ian’s fabulous vegetable garden. I was particularly impressed with their sage – we’ve only ever grown the ordinary gray-green type, but Diana has both variegated and reddish purple varieties growing as well.
In preparation for next year’s garlic, they’ve planted a legume crop to improve the soil. The bonus are these deliciously sweet peas – we harvested around the edges and picked nearly two kilos to bring home!
A perfectly wonderful day, spent with great friends. Maybe country life isn’t that scary after all!
. . . . .
Ian and Diana Ditchfield
contact: djditchfield(at)hotmail.com
Fig Jam and Lime Cordial 
Now then, I thought all Australian homes had resident snakes and that the resident one kept the other ones out…. sort of like poodles and foxes…
There is only one thing worse than coming across a dead rat in a drawer, that is coming across your gran’s two dead mink thingie wotsit with their heads holding onto their tails…she wore it round her neck. Was it a stole? I dunno.
I want to visit your friends’ garlic farm – it looks so wonderful, thank you for sharing your glorious day out – more outings please, you take fabulous photos and spin such a fine tale – I love them xx
Thanks Jo! :)
Hehe..I think that’s what MJ thought it was too. “Oh, I didn’t know Grandmother had a fur coat..”. :)
We had great fun at the farm, and there was so much more we didn’t get to see! They had some cattle as well, which were too far away to get to on foot, and some llamas (I think they were llamas, but they might have been alpacas), including a newly born baby one. It was too cute, but I didn’t get a decent photo of him!
Lovely!
Truly-lovely!
I loved the stories! The pictures! The sheep!
AND the garlic!
What a wonderful farm.
I grow those sages as well, but don’t use them much for cooking- (except the broadleaf reddish-purple” BierGarten” variety that goes well in whole wheat sage bread.
Thanks for sharing your outing- it refreshed me as I looked from the snow coming down to see a fresh crop of peas!
Thank you, Heidi! The peas were truly wonderful, we ate the whole lot, all 1.75kg, in two days. The first night Pete shelled and ate raw peas for dinner. Our little backyard crop was nothing compared to these, but we will have to try harder next year, because fresh peas are just amazing. By the following day, they weren’t as nice to eat raw (although still magnificent in a pasta) – shows how quickly the sweetness fades once they’re picked!
Wonderful post, Celia! Beautiful garlic, and some beautiful shots as well. Sounds like an exciting visit.
Thanks Doc! We had a blast! :)
What a beauty of a day! Now I want to look around for more types of garlic. We put it in everything savory
My fam gave me a heavy duty garlic press for Xmas, no peeling required, just insert clove and squish. I also have a tiny handheld mandolina that I use for slicing or mincing garlic. Nomnomnom!
Maz
Maz, that’s pretty cool – I didn’t realise there was a press you could put unpeeled cloves into! There are HEAPS of different types of garlic! Ian gave us an unusual variety to try as well, called “Shantung”, and I tried to have a garlic tasting. I could pick the difference in aroma, but the raw garlic taste was so strong that after the first two I had trouble distinguishing the third.. ;-)
Abundance illustrated.
I love this post for so many reasons. The documentation of the garlic is fabulous – I make sure I NEVER run out of this amazing ingredient, the sheep pics glorious and how can you resist all that beautiful sage. As for the peas, when I left my 2 year old daughter for 5 days for a trip to Poland I brought her a bag of peas picked from my aunt’s garden picked the day before. If she’d missed me at all (having a lovely time with Grandma) she forgot it as she unpodded them and ate the lot. Happy New year.
That garlic looks magnificent. Lucky you for having friends in the business! What do they do with their sheep? Are they solely for wool? I love the black faced varieties.
…country living *sigh*…sounds like a fun day with friends.
That’s funny Celia, cause I could easily picture you on rural farm setting :-) Sounds like a great day. That whole ‘organic certification’ business is similar in Ireland. If you can find a grower that cares then I think the cert is unnecessary paperwork.
Gorgeous garlic! I planted some sprouting bulbs from my kitchen one year. Big shoots came up, but I never saw any bulbs form. :(
I’d love to have friends with a farm! That garlic looks wonderful and fresh. Thanks to you, I have been freezing my cloves and have no wastage anymore.
Peter, thank you! It really was abundance – particularly the peas!!
Sally, how lovely that you can distract a two year old with a bag of peas rather than a dvd or a toy! Your little one doesn’t realise how lucky she is! :)
Brydie, yes, we’re very lucky! The sheep will be shorn for their wool, and some of the prettier girls will be kept for breeding stock, but the rest will be sold for meat.
Gill, I am absolutely hopeless in any rural setting. When Pete and I were first dating (nearly 30 years ago now!!), I went to visit his family, who lived in a semi-rural part of the neighbouring state. When we arrived, their flock of geese surrounded our car and started honking like mad – I refused to get out of the car! Not quite the impression I was hoping to make on his folks – whingey, terrified city girl too chicken to get out of the car! :)
Sasha, I think climate is a real biggie for growing garlic. We grew some this year, but it only made tiny bulbs, nothing substantial. We don’t get cold enough here in Sydney to do it really well, but next year we’re going to try refrigerating the cloves first to see if we can force them, like tulip bulbs.
Sue, isn’t it fabulous how well freezing works? I’m extremely happy not to have to throw out mouldy garlic anymore as well.. :)
I can remember getting just picked peas from my uncle’s farm. Mum would make me whistle while I was shelling them, otherwise very few made it to the pot to be cooked. I could never understand why Mum would even bother to cook them when they tadted so good raw. Peas are still my absolute favourite vegeteble.
Those sheep are so beautiful and well kept – how do they keep them so clean?
That garlic looks fabulous. I haven’t thought of freezing the cloves. Thank you for that.
As a city girl who moved to the country, I can empathise with your cousin. Some of the wildlife that has to be dealt with leaves a lot to be desired and one has to become knowledgeable about things were hitherto a mystery – like pumps! Boy – what I learned about pumps in the first few days!!
Still, the benefits are brilliant and make it all worthwhile – most of the time.
Hi Celia!
Lovely photos! The sheep are so nice. Remind of a lamb I once bottle raised. The garlic is lovely. I wasn’t aware there were so many different varieties. Fresh peas taste so good. My children love to pick the fresh peas, shell them and eat them. Especially while outside playing or working in the garden. A quick, nutritious snack.
Do you freeze the unpeeled garlic cloves in a plastic container or plastic bags? How do you defrost it? Does it taste the same as the fresh one, once defrosted?
Thanks for the book darts. They are so neat! I’ve already put most of them to good use in my cookbooks.
Manuela
Deb, the reason the shearing was delayed was because of all the rain, so the sheep had had a good shower just the day before. They were actually wet to touch – not surprising given how slowly wool dries, I guess! :)
Amanda, you’re much braver than me! But after a day at Di and Ian’s, I can see how the lifestyle could be so appealing!
Manuela, glad you liked the book darts! I have a cheap vacuum sealer, so I break the bulb into unpeeled cloves and vacuum seal them in thick plastic bags. If you’re using a regular ziplock, it’s a good idea to double it up, to stop the aroma permeating the entire freezer. When the garlic is defrosted, the skins slip off easily, but the clove has turned translucent and has a much softer texture, making it easy to mash up before cooking. We don’t notice a big loss in flavour or aroma, but we only use the defrosted garlic in cooking, not raw. I have a post in my drafts folder about frozen garlic – here’s the photo I took of the defrosted cloves…
Good on you, Celia for trying to always use Australian produce. I wish more people did.
Don’t be too hard, though, on our quarantine people for insisting that imported garlic be treated with methyl bromide. Methyl Bromide is a fumigant and is necessary to deal with bacteria from the soil from some other countries. The soil can hold plant disease and also human disease as some countries still use human sewage to grow their crops.
If you were closer I’d invite you to see our farm – chooks, our neighbour’s heifers and steers and our boarding kennel and cattery. We also have an orchard.
Meg, I’m not, truly – I understand that our incredibly strict quarantine laws are there for a reason. But I think lots of people don’t understand what has to be done to keep our rural industries safe, or what they’re actually eating when they get an imported bargain. Recently the bee man at the markets told me that all imported honey has to be irradiated before it’s allowed to enter the country – which means all the manuka honey from NZ etc has to be blasted before it comes in. And it’s absolutely necessary too, if we’re going to keep the varroa mite off our shores.
A friend told me yesterday that she heard a farmer in Tasmania on the radio who had tended to his cauliflower crops with great love, but who will now be left with no option but to bulldoze them into the ground, because the cheap imports available in the supermarkets means he will lose money if he even harvests them.
I’m not trying to be an arse here – I know we all have to work to a budget – but it really doesn’t cost a huge amount more to try and buy locally grown fruit and veg, even if it’s not organic or certified.
I’d love to see your happy chooks! :)
What a nice way to spend a day Celia.
I once had a holiday job harvesting garlic, it was hot and smelly and VERY hard work! Lucky I loooove the smell, cause I stank for ages!
My mum and dad have their farm certified organic and it cost them a fortune and every year they have to pay a bomb to keep up it’s certification. They used to grow herbs for Coles, and even though each little bag was stickered with the organic sticker and number they didn’t get one extra cent. Farming is a hard way to make a living.
I have been pullling up all the pea sprouts rising from my garden mulch, but after your harvest I just might let them grow,Yumm…
B, it really is a hard slog, isn’t it? I have enormous respect for anyone who tries to do so. Don’t pull out the pea sprouts – I was so impressed by how many peas were growing in crops that were grown just to improve the soil!
Aaahhhh you made me laugh Celia, I loved your sons description of having to move a wooley sofa that pushed back….. sheep are a touch resistant to work with aren’t they.
I love the purple garlic, & thanks for the shots of the garlic drying too, its always interesting isn’t it to see where it all came from, the drying sheds would have had an awesome aroma :) Sounded like a wonderful day on the farm, very civilised way to live too :)
Now I want to go on a farm adventure. Do you know how much they charge for garlic postage? I’d love to try it.
Celia I’m with you on the locally grown. Why don’t we do more to support the hard-working farmers here? The idea of someone having to bulldoze a crop because he can’t compete with cheap imports is terrible.
Anna, the aroma in the shed was amazing! And yes, it was very civilized, I though…:)
Claire, I’m not sure about the postage, sorry, but do drop Diana an email and ask her. Wasn’t that a terrible story? I felt so sorry for the poor farmer..
Oh no…having a huge s–ke phobia, I totally empathize with MJ!
Your friends’ garlic farm sounds brilliant, even though it’s labour intensive, the flavour more than makes up for it.
Would you grow your own garlic? Btw, still love the permaculture book, have to get around to drawing the design though. All those mandalas make my head go around in circles. (pardon the pun 8))
Soy, so glad you’re enjoying Linda’s book. It’s a great read, isn’t it, even if you just take little bits of info out of it. We did grow our own garlic last year, but they were only tiny bulbs. We grew it in an old laundry tub, which kept the weeds etc to a minimum. I posted photos here:
https://figjamandlimecordial.com/2010/12/13/homegrown-garlic/
What awesome friends! Nice people and they grow non-sprayed garlic! I had the same problem as you with my garlic – last year most of the bulbs didn’t form and this year they rotted with all of the rain we’ve had (SE Qld). I’ll take the easy option this year and buy some from Diana and Ian.
Thankyou Celia darling for the contact information! It is so hard to get good garlic. In fact I brought some home with me from Dayleford on the plane (yes I had rather smelly carry on luggage but I was desperate!). And I love the Patrice Newell garlic but it sells out so quickly!
Hi Celia!
Thanks for the info. I have a vacuum sealer, so I’ll try freezing some garlic. I always hate to throw out the bulbs that get moldy.
Manuela
Hi Celia – what beautiful sheep! Looks like a great day…
Thank you all! Lorraine, that’s too funny, and makes me wonder what other sorts of things you bring home in your carry-on luggage! :)
Haha I brought two dozen free range organic Daylesford Organics eggs. Is that weird? They were gorgeous eggs and the cartons got wet so we were busily blow drying the carton with a hairdryer when we got to the hotel :P
If there’s no garlic in heaven, I don’t want to go.
What a great outing with friends, every bone put to good use :-). I love the different varieties. Have a great 2011 Celia, lots of love to your family.
I love your idea of freezing the garlic to extend its shelf life. i tried putting some of mine in the fridge last season but it just went brown and soft by the time we needed it. The freezer it is with some of this years crop! thanks
No! No! Life in the country’s not scary at all!! (I shouldn’t mention we had to battle jumping jack ants putting away our tent last night).
It sounds like a blissful day out and all of that garlic – wow! The purple one is particularly attractive… wouldn’t it be lovely to grow huge garlic like the fist sized Russian ones!
Cosmo, Amen. :)
Oz, thank you, all the best to your and yours for 2011 too!
Bee, try freezing a little first to see if you like the texture of the defrosted cloves. Having said that, the not throwing out any mouldy garlic is just sooo wonderful! :)
Chris, I actually don’t particularly like the flavour of the Russian garlics! I far prefer the smaller ones – the purple one is very nice, but I think my favourites are still the Australian whites! :)
Those sheep really do look lovely – and so clean! And the grass looks so green compared to anything here in SA by this time of the year! I really love that giant purple garlic that’s been coming through lately – sounds like an idyllic day.
Oh no… country life is not so scary at all…I have met Christina and Steve and am friends with Christina’s Mother Ge…we use to live out of town Bathurst…What a great post…will have to look into that garlic…
Is this the garlic connection that introduced us? Son travelled on plane with my husband and gave us your blog?
Sarah, the sheep were really gorgeous!
Dzintra, it’s a lovely part of NSW!
Roz, yes indeed! Handsome Hugh was on the plane with your hubby. And after reading about it on your blog, Di and Ian bought me some black garlic for Christmas (pics in the Foodie Christmas post below).. :)
Hi Celia
Wanted to thank you for the introduction to Anarel Garlic. We had a lovely visit with Ian and came home with 2 kg of garlic to share. My parents live nearby, so we had a great time driving scenic country roads and picnicking in the bush. We did our best to encourage Ian with his next venture: horseradish. Didn’t tell him that my stepson and I chew on the roots for fun – he might have thought we were weird…
MamaVix, how wonderful that you visited! Thanks so much for supporting them, they’re just the nicest people.. :)