Scrotes stole my garlic.

A bunch of horrible little scrotes of about 12-14 years old have recently taken to invading my back garden and nicking things. Apples off the trees (very traditional), two crates of rotten windfall apples (why??) and, most recently, about 80 heads of garlic. I grew a lot of garlic this year from a posh selection box....



I was drying it out in the greenhouse. It didn't look much, just scruffy stems and unstripped mud stained bulbs. I was going to strip the outer layer off and plait them. Also, like most allotment produce, they weren't big show-stopping vegetables. They were smallish and lopsided. However, the kids seemed to think they were worth taking. They went back over the 8 foot high wall with them, stripped off the stalks and scarpered with the garlic. I looked out the window this morning and wondered what all the strange bits of dried stem all over the road was. Ah....

Thing is, what were they going to do with it? It's too "home made" looking to be worth selling. If a bunch of adolescents took it home surely their parents would twig they'd pinched it. Missiles? The local shops do get fruit pinched from their displays and it gets thrown at the neighborhood windows. But garlic is small. So why? Are we under threat from vampires?

Whatever. I'm pretty p-eed off about it as you might be able to tell. That box of starter garlic was a bit of an extravagance allotment-wise. I had the harvested bulbs tied together in big bunches by variety and was looking forwards to doing a bit of comparison testing on the different types. Now I just have some unlabelled odd bulbs I picked up from the road and a few stragglers that had got harvested late, also unlabelled. About 20 bulbs in all. Enough to see me through for cooking for some of this year, I suppose, plus a few to plant but none to give away and the whole point of growing varietal garlic lost.

Humph. I hope they stink of garlic for weeks and become social outcasts with no girlfriends and no party invitations. I hope karma catches up with them eventually and they develop embarrassing (but non-fatal) vegetable allergies. I hope something really, really nasty happens to them toilet-wise if they eat any. That was MY garlic!!