December 29, 2019

After all these years of growing garlic, I still get excited when the first bud comes through the soil and begins reaching for the winter sunlight. I always look forward to having bulbs and scapes, as well as growing the garlic itself.

It's fun to start out with but a handful of cloves and finish with bundles of bulbs hanging from the rafters. It’s a process that involves all four seasons - spring for growth, summer for the scapes and bulbs, late summer and fall for drying, and finally, winter for separating and planting. I have always liked how garlic comes full circle.

From the time the first bud appears until the plant is harvested, it’s really hard to know how the bulb will be – small with thin cloves or huge and fleshy. Many times, the success of the stalks and leaves do not tell the story, so it's a wait and see, although if ones follows a few common “how to’s”, the anticipation is usually rewarded.

Garlic is simple. It doesn’t like to have wet feet- neither too much water or a soil that is slow to drain, or a bit of both. Garlic doesn’t like competition – it needs to be spaced properly when planted and kept weeded. It needs fertilized, which is especially important in the spring when it comes out of the winter. When the scapes begin to form, they need to be removed before the plant transfers it energy to the flower. By removing the scapes, the energy is redirected back to the bulb.

The best part of growing garlic is that the entire plant can be used. We are all familiar with using garlic cloves, which is why we grow it in the first place. Scapes – my favorite - which have a tangy garlic taste, can be eaten alone, fried, baked, chopped, added to any dish, made into pesto, etc. The leaves and stalks, when dried, can be fed to wildlife and livestock. We feed these to our goats, who go crazy for them. Some goat people swear garlic and the garlic plant are a natural wormer. The bottom line is, there is nothing wasted for the effort of growing garlic.

It was just a few weeks ago that I separated out the cloves from a few of last summer’s bulbs and planted them in the hoop house. It didn’t take long for the magic to begin!

November 24, 2019

These past few days, I have been scrolling through my blog, reading posts and thinking that it is time to re-start my blog and begin writing again. I never stopped writing altogether- I have been working on material that I hope to edit into a second book of poems sometime in the future. Lately though, I have gotten the urge to revive the blog as well. In many ways, I’ve benefited from letting the blog go “fallow” just as much as letting the back field go fallow, as we have both used these past years to rebuild. And like the back field, I feel I am ready once more, and I am hoping to see what happens as I try to get things to start growing again.

December 30, 2016

I have slowed a bit and haven’t kept up with my blog as well as I used to.

Things have changed. Not for the worse or for the better, but just because they have.

Without the CSA, the fields are quiet, with knee high grass, browned by the sun and bent heavy with seed. There are no more tilled rows or raised beds. The strawberries are gone and so are the raspberries. The fences are rusted and loose from the posts. In places fences are dipped low where the deer jump it, and where the horses reach over to tear at Orchard grass that grows up against it. In more ways than it used to be, it is organic. The field is on its creative own, without my hands and implements to keep it organized. I no longer tell it what to grow.

The CSA ran its course. Maybe someday I will start a small version again. Going fallow had nothing to do with losing interest, but losing time. There just was not enough of it for me, Kath, or the persons who loyally volunteered. Our situations changed. And too, the market changed – farmer’s markets came to every town, aisles of “organic” food appeared in grocery stores, home delivery started, and people began to grow their own gardens and raise backyard chickens. A drive to the CSA seemed a wasted afternoon when other choices became easy. It seemed that farmers who once asked for support on the farm went into the towns and stores with tables and cellophane packaging, and became all they set out not to be. Once again, no one had to wash the dirt from their fingernails to feel good about their food. 

In a sense, we came full circle, but with more awareness of the difficulties.

That’s ok. I am not complaining. I have moved on. I can enjoy that many of my former customers now grow their own food, have chickens, and some have gone on to have their own small farms. I feel that all those who once worked this ground spread the right kind of change.  I’d like to think that during those few years when we were a CSA we all made a difference.

Now I mostly grow for myself and a few persons who ask for things. I still use my “hot house” for greens and vegetables, and this winter I am experimenting to see if garlic can be done under cover. I keep enough chickens to supply a few “customers”.  I keep two bee hives – not to save the earth, but because I like bees. I am smaller, and I find I am even more “green” now. I’m actually better.

And without the CSA, I spend more of my “spare” time with the horses, goats, chickens, and the nature here. I’ve had time to put together a book of poetry and continue learning photography. I have time to explore music and books. 

Where does all this leave the blog? We are still a farm, but not the same farm. And maybe that’s how I need to think of the blog- still my blog, but not the same blog. It too, needs to change. Not necessarily for the better, or for the worse, but because change is long over due.  With it, I hope to explore more and new things!

Good memories bring good tomorrows. I hope you’ll follow me when you can, stop in and say hi. Maybe visit for a while. That I hope will not change.