Into the Who Knows What...

We will harvest the garlic this week. The handful of flower heads that are out there in the plants (the ones that we pull for the garlic scapes but inevitably miss a few) are standing straight up now. Like alien antennas, they send a message, “Harvest us now, or we will invade!” We’ll haul these motherships to the little hoop houses that we use to harden off transplants, protect them from the rain and morning dew, and let the plants cure for winter keeping, and also, for autumn planting, so that we can have garlic next year.

This year I hope to do something that I’ve intended to do for a very long time. The flower heads of the garlic are funny. They bloom into what I describe as a firework of tiny, potent garlic cloves; an orb of clove babies. They look like cloves, feel like cloves, taste like cloves (but stronger) and I wonder if they act (they must) like cloves as well. That is to say, can we take these clove miniatures, plant them in clusters this autumn and get little garlic plants in the spring for fresh scallion like eating? Perhaps this year is the year to find out. If that did work, we would essentially have garlic all year long. From now, when we are harvesting fresh garlic, to the Autumn and Winter with cured garlic, to spring with a garlic “scallion”, to early summer with garlic scapes. Like many things in farming, we’re going to have to wait 7 months before we know if we’ve done the right thing. 

We are in peak season now. There is more going on that we can possibly manage. We are at the moment in the gala when the Opera singer is moments from the high note in the aria that shatters all the champagne glasses, dousing everyone in drink. And then it’s all down hill from there. Though that may sound like a bourgeois metaphor, after that happens all the guest have to pour out in the anarchy of the city streets, covered in drink and wondering what just happened. So it’s a little feral as well. Bourgeois and feral.

Though we will continue to plant the weekly items like salad, kale, spinach and so on right into mid-September, the push is now. We just need to make it through July and see what we are able to put in place (carrots and beets are getting planted today for the final crop) and what we can salvage (so much more weeding to do) before she hits that high note that sends us out into streets for who knows what. I always hope that the who knows what turns out to be a-okay.