Meaning, it was cold, consistently and sometimes intensely, and we got multiple rounds of frozen precipitation falling from the heavens. This was what I remember as normal from my childhood, but it's not been the standard lately.
Snow fell, and sleet fell, and the wind bit into one's face, and there was never a question of the season. Meaning, I wasn't doing much in the way of gardening. Sure, I'd pop out to my raised beds to clip a little bit of rosemary or thyme for a recipe, but that hardly counts. In the garden, nothing was growing. The asparagus was tucked away deep beneath a blanket of leaf mulch, waiting for the spring.
Only the garlic poked up above ground, shoots like green tassels rising above the frozen earth. I planted it in the fall, as I have for years now, and it dutifully grew right up until the temperature plummeted. I'd read somewhere that garlic requires sustained cold for the heads to clove, and so that's been the routine. Even after I realized that this is only true for hardneck varieties, which mine are very much not, I've continued that habit. It's a reminder of warmer times, and as a promise of flavor in a season of meals yet to come.
Most of what I planted months ago did come up, but here and there, there were blank spots in the rows, where the clove I had gently nestled in the earth simply dissolved into the soil. I got to thinking, you know, it'd be great to have a nice full complement of bulbs this year.
I still have garlic from late spring a year ago, sequestered in a breathable paper bag on a cool dark pantry shelf. Surely, I thought from prior experience, there must be some of that I could plant. They're softneck, and can be just as effectively planted in the early Spring, or so I've been lead to believe. It might catch up between now and a May harvest.
Why not give it a whirl?
In the bag, about a third of my old garlic was visibly alive in the darkness. With no light and no water and no earth to nourish them, shoots still pushed forth from the cloves, seeking even the tiniest hint of hope, drawing only from the resources within the garlic itself.
"Well," I said. "Look at you go."
I chose a few, separated out the most promising sprouting cloves, and took them out to the warming soil to grow. Where life strives in the darkness, it's hard not to want to give it a little break now and then.
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