After growing beautifully all winter and into the spring, producing amazing scapes, and seemingly doing everything as expected, the garlic finally succumbed to the effects of a cool, wet spring and started rotting in the ground before producing decent cloves. The cloves in the picture look deceptively nice, but are actually incredibly under-sized, each only about the size of a quarter. I am totally bummed out. This would be an unfortunate loss any year, as garlic is a staple item in our kitchen, but this garlic was even more important- it was supposed to be the foundation of our seed garlic to grow on our farm next year. After growing this variety year after year with no disease issues at all, I’m somewhat in shock to have had such a stupendous failure the one year I really, really wanted it to do well.
When I was running a farm, I frequently heard people marveling at the market table, asking me how I grew this or that because it had failed in their garden which they believed showed that they just weren’t any good at growing food. Yet the real secret behind the beautiful market table is the crops that you don’t see on there because they didn’t germinate, succumbed to pest or disease pressure, etc. In fact, each year, every farmer has crops that don’t do well. That this isn’t the downfall of the farm is the beauty of diversification, a principle that is central to organic production. If I were a garlic farmer, this year would be a huge disaster. However, our garden is chock full of other crops, including kale that is literally growing faster than we can eat it, cabbage that are beginning to form nice, firm heads, and tomato and zucchini plants that are flowering like crazy. Just like those shoppers at my market, it can be easy for me to define things by what didn’t go well and look at the garden and see only the pathetic remains of the garlic bed. But in reality, this is simply the give-and-take of organic production. It’s okay for the garlic to fail because in our garden, as it will be on our farm, there are countless other crops doing well to take it’s place on the dinner, or market, table.
There are still about twenty or so garlic plants out there that seem to be doing okay. (I knew the others weren’t because you usually harvest garlic about 3-4 weeks after the scapes are removed, when 3-5 of the plant’s leaves are still green. Most of the plants in our garlic bed had entirely brown leaves within a week after the scape harvest.) So I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the remaining garlic plants are able to hold on and produce good-sized heads so we can at least take a small batch of seed garlic with us. But with the last two days consisting of on-and-off pouring rain, all I can do at this point is hope.
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