It’s amazing how fast it comes upon me, the cold, the
change, the diminishing sun, the slowly expanding night. I’m no doubt in denial, refusing to
acknowledge shorter days, the signs of fall.
We brought the plants in, mother in law’s tongue, springeri, Boston fern, all the houseplants that flourish outside in the natural
cycle of rain and sun but can’t endure frost.
The frost soon came and killed the coleus, petunias, marigolds, and finally
the geraniums. Last to live were the
pansies.
“Do you want to save these pansies? Should I bring them in?”
“Sure.”
My wife saved their life casually, with little conviction, on
a whim I think, but the pansies now live
atop the dining room table. How pansies
earned a reputation for being delicate I’ll never know.
I mowed over the peonies, cut down the perennial dinner
plate hibiscus, chopped the oak leaves, tilled the garden. And then it rained.
The rule where we live is plant garlic on Halloween, harvest
on the 4th of July. I failed to get my garlic in before the trick
or treaters came, and then it poured. Too
muddy to work. The rain halted the grain
harvest, flooded the jack o’lanterns, drove us all inside. And when we emerged it was fall, with winter
close behind. Suddenly we had to
prepare. Did it happen suddenly or was I
not paying attention? I swear to God it was
summer just weeks ago.
Today, November 7, six days past Halloween, I chose the spot
for the garlic. I rotate my crops a
little. Very little. I moved the garlic to the middle of my
skinned dirt strip of garden by the garage, on either side of the remaining
Brussels sprouts plant, directly under the young oak.
I screwed up irreversibly on that oak. I thought I could move it without harm when
it grew to six feet or so, but the nursery advised me if I had not balled the
roots, prepared it for transplanting, the tap root would be established and
moving it would most likely be fatal. By that time I liked it too much to cut it
down.
I had grown attached to it as a seedling. Soon after I realized it had sprouted, likely
buried among the asparagus stalks and forgotten by a squirrel, I cheered its progress as it grew
taller. Now it is a permanent part of
the place, a junior member of the fraternity of trees headed up by the huge
oaks in back. Some year soon, maybe
after the next, I’ll move the garden instead.
To prove that if you pay attention you learn something every
day, or to disprove that tired adage that you can’t teach an old dog new
tricks, I planted my garlic a bit differently this year. I picked up on something my friend, also a small-time garlic farmer, said about clove size
as it relates to the size of harvested bulbs.
H was talking about some new seed garlic he got locally. In fact he fished around in a can in his
garden shed and gave me four or five cloves of it. Said it came from big bulbs, and he figured
it would produce equally big bulbs in his garden.
It was that very white looking garlic, most likely a soft
neck. I prefer the purple stuff myself,
which is a little peppery, has more bite, and is a hard neck. I’ve been planting that each Halloween from
the leftovers of what I harvest in July for some time, believing I was adapting
it to the soil and weather on Fields Hill where I live. But I accepted
the foreign garlic anyway. What got me
thinking was what he said next.
“They’re big cloves, so you ought to get nice big
bulbs. You know, plant big get big.”
“Yeah.”
I said yeah like I understood completely. Truth is I’d never made that connection. When you take a garlic bulb apart, separate the
cloves for planting, there are big cloves and scrawny cloves. The cloves on the outside are usually bigger,
double the size or more, of the ones in the center. I’d been planting every clove, big and small,
for years. And every year I was
disappointed and baffled by the size difference of my harvested garlic
bulbs. The scrawny bulbs taste the same and
have smaller cloves. Aside from being
unhandy when cooking, requiring you to more cloves to get the same amount of
garlic, they are fine. But given the
choice I’d much rather all of them be nice big bulbs. Plant big get big. Why didn’t I think of that?
So this year when I made my five rows with the hoe and began
putting garlic cloves in the trench fat end down, I skipped those small
cloves. I put them in my pocket to take
to the kitchen. In the ground I put only
the big fat cloves. I’ll tell you how it
turns out. And yes, I planted that super
white garlic too.
After covering my garlic rows I put straw on top, laid the
rebar grids I got from Wedge on top of that, and seeded the rest of the garden
with winter rye. Just poured it into a
tin basin and scattered it around by hand.
After that I raked it in, covering it loosely with dirt. The birds might get some of it but I put on
plenty. It will sprout in the cold
weather, amazingly, and by the time I till the garden again in spring, careful
not to dig into the garlic rows, it will be six inches high or so. Not big enough to make grain, but thick
enough to choke out early weeds and good for the ground when I till it
under. I save some of the rye stems for
mulch between the rows. Winter rye is
nice stuff.
And with that I put the garden to bed for the winter. I think of those garlic bulbs from time to
time, hunkered down in the cold dirt, waiting for spring to poke their heads up
and see if it’s OK to come out again. Sort
of like me. When I plant the garlic and
sow the rye, winter is just around the corner.
Get ready everybody.
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