Garlic’s salad days

JOHN MacLeod writing about wild garlic (Mail) states that ‘it first sprouts in March’.

It may where he is, but where I am, in Kintyre, I begin harvesting the leaves in mid-February.

Used as a salad, they are strongflavoured, but cook them and the flavour disappears. I now add chopped leaves – and plenty of them – to soups and stews after cooking, and find that the flavour survives.

Following the appearance of the lovely white flowers – and I see some tiny buds emerging already – the leaves tend to coarsen and I stop gathering them.

ANGUS MARTIN, Campbeltown, Argyll.