Wartime Wednesday: Planting Garlic

After 3 weeks (2 ‘official’, 1 trial) living on a modern version of the wartime rations, Ryan and I are calling it a day. We’re not hungry, and we’re not bored with the food. What we’ve found is that we live within the ration of meat, fats and dairy products quite happily. I guess this is because we are flexitarians (or reducetarians), and have been consciously reducing our meat consumption for some time, bulking out meals with vegetables and/or pulses, as they would have done in wartime. (And we’ve long been barraged with health warnings about eating too much fat!) Of course, we also have the benefits of a household fridge, and an array of foodstuffs that just wouldn’t have been available in wartime, particularly as the war wore on and people’s stocks of spices and flavourings ran down.

So we’re not going to bother weighing out the rations any more. But we’re not giving up on our wartime project, and I’m hoping to try at least one wartime recipe each week, and to blog them on Wartime Wednesdays.

In the meantime, I have found time to pop outside and plant the garlic. I normally do so with my dibber, which in true wartime style is a repurposed porridge spurtle. It was a gift, many years ago, and as I make my porridge in the microwave, I never used it for stirring porridge. But it makes a great dibber. However, it had gone missing. As I mentioned, I want to try planting the garlic much deeper this year – 6 inches deep – so I used a trowel to open up a slit and pushed each clove down into it. It’s easy enough in the soft soil of the raised bed. Of course, I found the dibber on the way back to the shed, perched on the edge of the last raised bed it was used in.

Garlic wasn’t unheard of in 1940s Britain, but it wasn’t popular.