Exmoor Lockdown Diary 15 - The Garlic Man, The Happy Village and The Potter
What I wouldn’t do for a huge box full of fresh spring vegetables during this coronavirus lockdown. The idea has had me thinking about various people I’ve interviewed down the years - growers of fabulous vegetables across the West Country peninsula.
I also happened to remember going to a Somerset community that was once named “The Happiest Village In England” to do a story for my newspaper - and on the way back from Hinton St George on that occasion I called at Muchelney to see my old friend, the potter John Leach…
You can hear all this in the podcast featured here. - And it begins with talk about garlic. In fact, I’d say West Country veg doesn’t get much better than the garlic and the shallots grown by my old pal John Rosewell, of Barrington in Somerset.
As sales pitches go, the idea that someone might approach the region’s top chefs carrying strings of garlic which have gone through the “Slap-ma-Girdle treatment” might not appear to be the most sought-after of unique selling points…
But it’s a USP that has worked well for Somerset farmer John Rowswell, who uses prunings from his Slap-ma-Girdle apple trees to smoke the giant sweet garlic he grows.
“We use Slap-Ma-Girdle, Tremletts, a Dabinett, a Red Streak or Kingston Black - and they all give it a really wonderful aroma,” said John, explaining that the smoking process can extend the period he sells the garlic.
“Sometimes we put a bit of cherry in the mix and that makes it different again,” he added.
Hot smoked garlic with vegetables
The new West Country garlic season will begin in the next few weeks: “We start with the skypes (or stalks) and we take them off so it forms a bigger bulb - if it’s left it will go to flower and then you get a very poor result.
“So we take the skypes off and those are sold - chefs fry them up and serve them with steak. They are absolutely delicious,” added John who became famous a few years ago for developing his own variety of shallot at Barrington, near Ilminster.
The Barrington Banana has now been featured in countless newspaper articles and on TV, but it is the garlic which gets the delicious smoking treatment.
“I’ve been growing it for 35 years - we have a couple of acres of it in this sandy soil which is very, very good for garlic. We started thinking about having smoked garlic to extend the season and we were planing to build a smokery - but then a guy set up a small unit near us and he came here to buy garlic - so I decided he should smoke it for us.
“We took it around the restaurants and they absolutely love it,” said John.
But it does come at the cost of hard labour… “All garlic is very labour intensive and we could do with three days of heavy rain to boost it right now,” he told me.
“We’re just going up there to put on some chicken manure and blood, bone and fish, which we apply by hand so it just goes on the garlic - we don’t want it going onto everything. And then we put a rotator up between it to clean out the weeds, and go back with a hoe.
“I have the smoked garlic with cold meat or fish - or you can just eat them on their own,” beamed John Rowswell. “They are like jelly babies, they’re so sweet.”
Potter John Leach at his Muchelney Pottery
