Winter is starting to end and the next crop is starting to grow!

Last year, we found all sorts of Wild Garlic growing out in the woods, which was incredible. There are a lot of excellent health benefits to Garlic, so to have free Garlic in the woods for us to gather is a huge blessing. Six months ago, I featured it in an Edible Outdoors post.

I’m not sure if the Garlic growing in the woods around here is truly wild or if it was naturalized from an old garden, but either way, there are some really patches of it growing.

One of the very first posts from Hive account@papa-pepper was an amazing, simple, and beneficial recipe.

At that time, seven months ago, I was still trying to figure out how to make a post and what to post on steemit. The “recipe” was basically to just fill a jar with raw Garlic and then cover it with raw Honey.

Over time, the Garlic actually absorbs the Honey and almost becomes “candied.” It's like the Honey gets infused into the Garlic and sweetens the whole clove. These raw Garlic cloves then mostly lose their strong flavor and become a sweet treat!

It’s so delicious once the process is complete that the Hive account@little-peppers will eat them up and ask for more. The process can take a few months to complete, but once they are ready, they will quickly disappear. I had hoped to make up many jars of these, but, unfortunately, I only made one this year.

Here is all that we have left.

The health benefits of Garlic are many. Not only is it a nutritious food with low calories, but it also is excellent for the immune system, and contains antioxidants. Since Honey is another amazing food with anti-fungal and anti-bacterial properties, we like to combine both of them to support our overall physical health.

Not only did we enjoy some cloves in the Honey, we also braided some up to dry and store for winter. Months ago we had a couple braids of Garlic hanging in the sun. Now, they are hanging in our pantry. Here is a picture from the end of last summer after I had made a braid with the Hive account@little-peppers.

I made two long strands of them, thinking that it would be enough Garlic to last us until the next harvest. So far, so good, because we have only worked our way through the smaller strand.

As Monster Truck the Pepper is showing, the shorter braid is completely used up and it is time to start on the second one. Whether it will last until the next wild harvest remains to be seen, but we can already see that the next harvest is starting to grow!

Thankfully, the Garlic reproduces on it's own very well. At the top of each mature Garlic plant last fall was a small cluster of baby cloves. Without any intervention from humans the baby cloves will eventually fall to the earth and begin to grow. Since we harvest a lot of the wild Garlic last year, we wanted to make sure that there would be more to come, so wherever we found some growing we made sure to spread the baby cloves around when we uprooted the plants.

Now that it is staring to warm up a little, we can see the green shoots of new Garlic plants bursting through the leaf litter on the forest floor all over!

In some areas, the forest floor is almost covered in Garlic shoots! Obviously, that is excellent news for us, and it sure gets us excited about this next growing season and the harvest that follows!

We are so amazed and blessed by things like this, and it makes us appreciate creation all the more. Time and time again incredible edibles can be found in the wild. They can grow and reproduce, bringing harvests year after year, all without any care from a gardener.

To get in there and work the soil and plant the seeds can be an excellent time too, but to reap a harvest where you have not sown is great too! It'll be nice to get some Garlic established in some other areas as well, and to continue to utilize this incredible resource.