Where Has All the Garlic Gone?

John planned on having fish for dinner last night, and seeing that I'd used up the last lemon and the last of the garlic for the Goulash soup, we had to go out to get a lemon and some garlic. I suggested that we make a little bit of a scenic tour out of it and John suggested that we check out some of the local vegetable markets. So we did.

Our first stop was at one of our usual grocery stores for a lemon. Not a problem. Then we decided to check out one of the markets for garlic, because we can usually get good garlic locally. They were sold out. But they did have pumpkins!

Unfortuately, I don't do pumpkin. We went to another farm market. They had the grand total of 3 heads of garlic left and they didn't look very good. They were a little on the soft side and falling apart. We chose not to buy them. The market where we usually get our garlic didn't even get enough of a crop this year to be able to sell any.

Was this a bad year for garlic or something? We spent quite a bit of time hunting down garlic. In the end, we went to the shop where we buy most of our vegetables, Quality Greens, and bought a couple of heads of California garlic. Even those were not that impressive. The cauliflower, on the other hand, is wonderful; we had some earlier last week and it was delicious!

All in all, it was a disappointing outing. But the sun was shining and the pumpkins sure looked good (and there was even an alpaca in the pen behind the pumpkins in the second picture!).