Easy to grow, relatively easy to store - and you can enjoy these vegetables all the year round. You'll no longer nip in to the supermarket and buy just enough alliums as a basic flavouring/seasoning for other dishes - experiment, make them into substantial dishes, and enjoy their sharp sweetness!
Of all the things I grow, the garlic has perhaps the most amazing story to tell.
Walk through woodland Britain in spring and early summer, and you will find wild garlics. However, these are cousins of our cultivated garlic, whose history is rather more exotic.
Back in the mists of pre-history, the steppes of Central Asia was the birth place of the Indo-European family of languages. Every so often over a period of several thousand years, a wave of nomads migrated outwards. One wave went south and east into India - their language became Sanskrit, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali; another travelled into Iran, and their language became modern Farsi; a series of waves arrived in Greece, (giving three varieties of Ancient Greek), in Italy (giving us the Latin of the Roman Empire, and the Romance family), and Central/Western Europe (giving us the Celtic languages). Within the era of our written history, Germanic tribes migrated in, destroying the western Roman Empire (and giving us German and Scandinavian languages - and of course English).
Put this story beside that of Allium Sativa, edible garlic, which grows wild today only in Central Asia - Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan; and I have a haunting mental image, of a bunch of nomads, setting out on their long, dangerous trek, which would lead them across continents. No lights to turn out, but Mum fills her pockets with wild garlic cloves just before they leave; some for the road, but always some saved to cultivate.
Around 3000 BCE, Egyptian and Indian cultures were growing garlic; around 2500 BCE, the Babylonians; around 2000 BCE, the Chinese.
The most astonishing part of this story, is that the garlic we eat may have a very direct link to that bulb in the nomad's pocket. Think about it. Garlic is not propagated from seed, with all the possibilities of breeding for specific traits. Rather, it in effect clones itself every time you break off a clove - are we may planting almost exactly what those first nomads popped into their pockets and satchels!
Treat garlic with honour and respect!
The origin of onions is unknown - perhaps the steppes of central Asia, or Iran and Pakistan, or the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean.
- The oldest records of people growing onions comes from ancient Egypt - onions were left in tombs around 3500 BCE, and we know onions and leeks were important elements in the diet of the pyramid workers.
- We have records of a somebody ploughing the city governor's onion plot in Sumeria around 2400 BCE.
- The Roman Empire introduced onions through Europe
- and now we have so many shapes, colours, sizes and tastes.
The leek is probably a domestication of a wild allium native to southern Europe and Asia - its route through history is similar to that of the onion.