Wild Garlic

Just on the other side of the pool parking lot, with no street crossings, is the town community center. I’ve never made much use of this kind of amenity in other locations, but this community center is particularly enticing because it houses a library and offers classes and camps that the kids and I all enjoy. I go to yoga classes there once a week, and throughout the year the girls are typically involved in at least one weekly activity. Soccer practice begins there late in March.

The community center has a playground as well as some weedy woodlands. Its grounds have become part of the free-range neigh- borhood that the kids can roam. The building itself was once an elementary school, and though it will be renovated within the next couple of years, it still contains much of what any good walking neighborhood needs: reading material, a small deli service, and lots of kidfriendly space and activities. Oddly enough, though we live in the suburbs in a neighborhood with no sidewalks, this community center makes our lives here much more walkable, for the kids especially, than any house we scouted in the more urban neighborhoods with sidewalks and that were closer to our jobs.

Our first fall here, when the house was still sparsely furnished and money was tight from moving, I hosted a bulb-planting party to liven up a weedy flower bed at the community center for my older daughter’s sixth birthday in late September. We got permission from the center director, and I bought a mix of tulips, daffodils, and crocuses. As it turned out, the day was scorching and the ground so hard that I was forced to use my adult muscles for every hole. Even then, I could hardly penetrate the top two inches of soil. Wonderful as the idea was in theory, I won’t say it was the most exciting birthday party ever the kids perceived that the celebration was only thinly disguised forced labor. Still, we enjoy the benefits of the party every spring, the early days of it, when we walk to the community center and enjoy the flowers that have come up. My daughters and I have come to think of this flower bed as our own, though there have been times when ownership might not be something to be proud of as when it is thick with wild garlic.

Wild garlic is a lovely, useful weed. I have used it in cooking, mostly because I don’t cook with chives often enough to justify buying them. I remember as a child getting great satisfaction from pulling up wild garlic to see that little round stinky onion at its base. Apparently in France it is left to grow in the wheat fields because it adds flavor to the flour. But I have to say, in the bulb garden this spring, it was very much out of place. I began with the intention of pulling them all up and ended with a very dissatisfying hand mowing experience, because the heavy clay soil wouldn’t release the root bulb.

Chives, wild onion, garlic, and wild garlic all are narrow leaved, strong flavored, low maintenance plants that can contribute to early spring nutrition. These herbs are typically best fresh cooking breaks down their flavor fairly quickly, so they are best added just before serving, rather than to the frying pan to help flavor the heating oil. I’m certain that good cooks could distinguish more clearly among them in terms of usage, but one problem with making distinctions is that it limits one’s ability to be opportunistic about them. Whenever one of these weeds is available, I try to get nearby innocent children to taste, knowing that they’ll mostly just say some variation of “Eeew!” and move quickly away from me before I get any more big ideas. Watching their reaction, though, always reminds me of the first time I tasted wild onion in my yard as a child. The power of that taste was exciting in some strange way, and I tried them with some regularity, even though I didn’t willingly eat cultivated onions until years later, and didn’t actively like them until my early twenties.

Mixed in with the spring bulbs, though, the wild garlic is simply a nuisance. Partly I consider it a nuisance because it is so clearly weedy and makes the garden look untidy. Also, it is difficult to pull without pulling crocuses accidentally. I struggle with it, knowing that this wild garlic is simply joining in the spring bulb party, the rowdy black sheep in the lovely lily family.

In fact, I have a patch of wild garlic in my own garden, but it remains, for whatever reason, simply a patch that grows denser if I ignore it but doesn’t take over. The wild garlic in the public garden is a problem partly because it is thin, long, and inconsistent, much like a windblown balding man with a combover. The public garden itself raises issues, too. For one, I know even less about the soil history there, so I couldn’t necessarily recommend culinary uses. For two, even if I can personally tolerate certain weeds, other users of the community center may think it makes the building look unloved. As noted, I also have a sense that weedy areas invite more littering. With our community center trying to raise money for a new building, I’d like to think that pulling wild garlic is one way to help.

Despite the kids’ cooking classes inside, this garden is not an herb garden, at least not yet. Although chives, with their pompom purple flowers, are probably considered acceptable frontyard vegetables, I don’t think wild garlic is. One of the implied rules I have heard for gardening is that vegetables are inappropriate in the front yard. As Elizabeth Kolbert notes, “A lawn may be pleasing to look at, or provide the children with a place to play, or offer the dog room to relieve himself, but it has no productive value.” Fritz Haeg, an artist and renegade vegetable gardener, made New York Times headlines by breaking this rule in several cities, and he now has a book on the experience, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn. The rule about front-yard vegetables may be unwritten, but breaking it makes headlines. This wild garlic is effectively growing in someone else’s front yard, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to start an “attack on the front lawn” with my first battle being at the community center.

Another unwritten rule is the taboo against picking vegetables in public places, even when it isn’t stealing. I realized this particularly while Emily was helping me weed the community center bed. When she got a wild garlic with its bulb, she handed it to me proudly telling me I could take it home and cook with it. I was very happy to hold it, but after a few minutes I felt strange about the possibility of being observed by the many people wandering around for classes and soccer games. Ultimately, I ended up putting Emily’s harvest down in the grass, partly out of selfconsciousness and partly realizing that I didn’t have any ideas for cooking them at the moment. As much as I believe in the concept of wild edibles, I’m not willing to harvest on public property.

The one time recently that I made an exception was on a camping trip, and I wanted to impress the Chatham University students I taught in a one credit backpacking course with my campstove cooking. As we hiked in, Emily picked all the roadside garlic mustard she could carry, proudly helping me make my own dinner en route. The students didn’t notice at all, as they were locked into their own cold, wet misery of camping in rainy 45-degree weather. I ate well anyway:

Carry in dry pasta, plus small containers of pine nuts and par- mesan cheese. Collect handful of garlic mustard and/or wild garlic during last hour of hiking before reaching camp. Chop or pound together pine nuts and greens in a cup or bowl while pasta is cooking over fire, then stir parmesan into the greens mixture. Add to cooked pasta just before serving.

Back in my home garden, I did buck the edibles-in-the-front- yard rule this year by scattering a few lettuce and carrot seeds in one of our flower beds. Both did quite well, which was a happy surprise given that the bed was unfenced from our resident rabbits. Perhaps some were eaten, but since I wasn’t paying close attention to them I never knew what we lost. In any case, the carrots from the front yard were free of the insect damage that most of our vegetable garden carrots bore. The lettuce was attractive and tasty until it set stems and bolted, becoming tall and bitter. All in all, it was a surprising success, and I plan to repeat the planting next year.

Many of our garden plants are decorative versions of edibles. Most common is the ornamental purple cabbage or broccoli that many people plant in fall, for its frost tolerance. Cockscomb, which has furry looking sunset colored flowers, is an ornamental member of the genus Amaranthus, which contains both the weedy pigweeds (tumbleweed, redroot pigweed, smooth pigweed) and amaranth, a grain high in iron that is commonly used as a nonallergenic ingredient in babies’ teething biscuits. Although herbs are perhaps the most acceptable edibles for public gardens, my sense is that most people still put their herb beds in the backyard. Pansies are the bigger cousins of violets and bear edible flowers that come in a number of audacious combinations of blues, purples, oranges, and yellows. But really, how many of us, in garnishing a salad, think to go to our front gardens and pick a handful of pansy flowers?

Of course, one reason not to plant edibles in the front yard is the possibility of vegetable theft. The very concept would seem ludicrous to me had I not experienced it in our very first garden. The summer I was first married, our vegetable garden was approximately five square feet alongside the back of the house we were renting, and a zucchini that probably weighed four pounds was taken one weekend. I felt cheated, of course, of the opportunity to cook it. However, as we lived near a complex of subsidized housing, I rationalized that if someone is hungry and wants vegetables, far be it from me to refuse. I have also heard numerous cases of community gardens being either vandalized or robbed. The injustice can seem harder to bear if the people tending the garden need the food just as much as those taking it.

But I think the real reason we don’t plant food in the front yard has more to do with our wanting to separate ourselves from farmers and farming life. Yards are supposed to be miniature estates, showing that we have the wealth to use land decoratively rather than for subsistence. Although few of us have enough yard to feed ourselves completely, most of us could at least put a dent in our grocery bill and our waistlines by eating more homegrown vegetables. In World War II, “victory gardens” were considered patriotic. Why, now, are they considered counterproductive to our cash economy, or embarrassing indications of lower class status? Why is slow food a move- ment of the rich? As a wise student, Rosemary Flenory, noted in one of my classes, soul food has been with the poor for generations, and both slow food and soul food involve cooking hearty, homegrown meals with respect for love and tradition thrown like spices into every pot. We can grow food and be farmers, epicures, or simply frugal people. Whether we pick the edible weeds or sow the heirloom vegetables, the shameless production of vegetables at home ennobles us.

Much as I admire Fritz Haeg’s front yard vegetables and rebel- lious garden artistry, one problem he doesn’t address thoroughly in his book is how cold or dry seasons offer a serious challenge to aesthetically pleasing vegetable growth. Eliot Coleman’s writings on year round gardening in Maine may be a necessary supplement to Haeg’s book for those of us with long winters. Wild garlic certainly could be harvested even in colder weather. Although wild garlic is not the most glamorous vegetable, it might have just the flavor to add interest to a locally produced northeastern winter diet. Baked potato and wild garlic chives, anyone?

All that said, still, garlic was not working among the community center’s lovely bulbs, and Fritz Haeg’s book was not yet out. One afternoon in the fall I walked over to our bulb garden after a rain, vowing to take advantage of the wet soil to get some of the wild garlic out by the roots. Without a trowel or weeding tool just gloved hands I got perhaps one bulb out of a hundred and ended up simply getting leaves for the remaining ones. At the same time, I pulled up (by accident) one crocus bulb. Since they were planted by five and six-year-olds on a hot, dry day in late September, I suspected many of those bulbs are not far below the surface. A hoe used on the wild garlic would probably slice many of the crocus and daf- fodil bulbs in half, or dig them up. I’d like to think I made the garlic plants more vulnerable to freezing, or at least slowed their growth, by topping them at this stage. This plant is fairly rare in lawns (and sparse when it does grow there), which suggests to me that either it doesn’t like being mowed or doesn’t compete well with grass. I can hope that mowing is what hurts it because, if so, maybe my lame attempt at hand eradication was more successful than I think, but I’m not holding my breath.

On the other hand, maybe eradication shouldn’t be my goal after all. Maybe I should walk proudly over with a kitchen apron every few weeks and take Emily up on her offer of long ago. Perhaps I should be working harder at salesmanship instead. If I fail indi- vidually at eradication, maybe when I make it look desirable, the other neighbors will eradicate it for me. Maybe in a few years I’ll be complaining that someone stole all the garlic I was cultivating in the community center garden, just when I was ready to make some early spring garlic mustard and wild garlic pesto.