Hallelujah, Alliums

I'm so excited to plant garlic again, and this image of all the little cloves splayed on the bed is pretty cute - though better in person - I had to take it. These cloves will all be sprouts in a few weeks.

But anyway I'm curious about the effect of planting garlic right off the sidewalk. My roommate does not like the idea of planting food there because she thinks dogs will piss on it. But I think planting root crops there makes sense, and food might as well be grown there, and garlic is oh so useful.

Garlic (Allium family with onions, leeks. We have some chives growing in the garden, and I'd love a little practice growing leeks.) is a wonderful food/medicine. It contains a couple cool compounds - allicin, an antibiotic, and allixin, an antimicrobial and antioxidant demonstrated to have reduced cancer in mice. Allicin is responsible for garlic breath. The medicine is in the poison. I'm eaten raw cloves when I felt a cold coming on, and even though that never fails to give me nausea, it seems to stave off the worse stuff.

Other fun facts: garlic was used to prevent gangrene back in WWI and WWII. It boosts testosterone levels. In folk medicine traditions out of Europe, garlic was hung in windows, or rubbed on chimneys and keyholes to ward off vampires. Perhaps you need to know that.