Garlic

Garlic is my favorite vegetable. Over the course of the growing season, it is harvested three separate times. First, before the plant’s bulbs form, the plant is harvested as green garlic. Green garlic tastes fresh and green and only mildly spicy. Next, garlic scapes appear. The are cartoonish in their curliness. They’re fun to harvest – you walk through the beds of garlic, snapping the scape from plant. They break from the plant with a juicy pluck and they leave behind a garlicky goo. After harvesting scapes, my clothes smell like garlic through multiple rounds of laundry. The scapes are a sign that the garlic is maturing and soon the big harvest arrives.

This year on the farm, the garlic matured two weeks earlier than expected. In addition to our usual harvest and production work, a storm of people were set loose on the beds of mature garlic ready to be pulled from the ground, bunched and strung over the rafters in one of the old tobacco bars on the farm.

The harvest is satisfyingly systematic. A tractor driver joins us in the field, driving over the rows of garlic with the undercutter implement, making it easier for harvesters to pull the bulbs out of the ground. Piles of plant are left in the furrows by the harvesters, and following behind them are people bunching the garlic in twine tied into slip knots. There are multiple garlic varieties grown side by side and we’re careful to keep them separate. We drive a pickup truck into the field and lay the bunches in the truck’s bed. One person drives, one person receives the bunches on the truck, and everyone else picks up the bunches from the field en masse, handing them off to the receiver as the truck inches along. After this reaping we take the garlic to be strung up in the barn where it will dry and cure. Unlike the fresh green garlic, these bulbs are potent, the smell of their earthy spice hangs in the air of the barn.

My favorite part of the garlic cycle is the replanting. Some of the harvested garlic becomes seed. The bulbs are peeled and split, and each clove is planted. Each clove becomes another full bulb. All you need is one clove of garlic and in a few seasons you’ll have rows and rows of garlic.