I planted garlic today. Four types. Georgian Fire, Chesnok Red, Russian Red, and Spanish Rojo. I know nothing about what makes one type of garlic different from another. I chose them because they all looked plump and evenly papered in their separate bins at Moose Crossing.
I’ve never grown garlic before.
There is an old tiered raised bed in the yard that suddenly gets a lot more sunlight since I had the trees along the fence line trimmed in June. I planned to scrap it, but I am glad I let it go another summer sheltering a flourish of weeds.
Maybe someone shared pictures of their garlic in a Facebook gardening group I belong to, and I thought it seemed easy and like a good idea.
Over the summer I stumbled upon various articles about growing garlic that confirmed it was probably a crop that wouldn’t be destroyed – not by any number of natural disasters, but by the dull scythe of my own ignorance.
See, I’m not much a gardener. For many years, I bought whatever looked pretty, read the plastic stick or the back of the seed envelope, and did whatever it said. Sun, shade, water, weed.
And then?
Grow or don’t. I was elated when flowers and vegetables blossomed, but it was nothing personal when they didn’t. I usually work all summer and I am more drawn to the ocean in my spare time, so if my landscape looked like the gardens of the dead by August, well, there was a reason for that.
I started growing sunflowers in 2020, and had amazing success.
That’s when I started to think maybe I could be a “gardener,” and not just someone who “grows things.”
Now I plant sunflowers every year. I wait for them expectantly like relatives who live far away and only come back in August. Once their flower heads form, I check their faces every day to see if they’ve finally arrived. When they do, I kiss them all over like an ecstatic aunt.
I don’t know if I will have the same familial relationship with garlic. But what I do know is that carefully preparing the raised bed for something better than weeds feels hopeful.
Maybe it’s not great big hope. I really don’t have a whole lot riding on my garlic garden. There is no make-it-or-break here for me. And I will probably always lean more to the grow-or-don’t end of the gardening spectrum.
But planting something in these diminishing fall days for a future in the lengthening ones of summer feels like I have something to believe in. There is more to look forward to than turning the calendar pages this winter in the endless wait for spring.
There’s garlic!
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I fully intended to do the Write 31 Days challenge like my last two posts suggest, even though I started it late anyway.
I began a new job as an adult education director on Oct. 3 only to test positive for Covid that night. I lost two weeks to the infection. Though I believe my case was relatively mild, it took 14 days to get a negative result (during which time I opened my blog again and started poking around).
Since I finally went back to work, I’ve been busy cramming a month of career transition and a backlog of student intakes into the last two weeks.
While I abandoned Write 31 Days, it turns out that popping a few posts up on your blog is a kind of creative self-seeding. Ideas for things to write about keep coming to me. Reflections, recollections, records of what I find interesting or meaningful.
It was also cool that when my middle son asked me for my baked mac and cheese recipe, I could say, “It’s on my website!”
November is National Novel Writing Month, and while I have no intention of trying to write a book, I do have a new daily goal of writing something.
A blog post every now and then might be one of them.
Raye S. Leonard 