Garlic Harvest

It was time to harvest the garlic.

Those winter-blasted shoots, which had endured the long winter of snowcrete and bitter frigidity, regreened and surged with the coming of spring.  But as May waned away, they were folding in on themselves, the long spears buckling and pointing earthward to where bulbs waited.  The plants were done.

I don't ever totally trust myself on the timing of that particular harvest, invisible as it is.  And so, even though the greens had told a very specific tale for a few weeks, I gave it a bit more time.  That, and I'd gently probe down into the soil around a few representative shoots, parting the earth with the gentleness of an archaeologist's brush.  Down, down, bit by bit, until fingertips met the swelling fatness of a fully formed bulb.  

Finally, finally, I was ready, and with a long trowel levered each bulb from the ground with great care.  Up they came, one by one, and as I carefully brushed the soil away, I could at last see the results of my planting.

Every year the garlic harvest is different, as individual cloves grow in unexpected ways.  This season, a significant minority of my fall planting had spawned free-standing satellite cloves, either around a primary bulb or as a blossom of unattached cloves.  The depth of the cold and the fierceness of the freeze might be the governing factor in that, but I can't say for sure.

No matter, because the harvest was successful and abundant, and I now again have garlic enough to last me the next twelve months, and more to spare.

That harvest now dangles in my carport, shaded from sun, protected from rain, and turning in the wind, where for three weeks it will dry and cure to perfection.

The Global Economy is Really Weird

Our global economy is such a peculiar thing, particularly now that it's been shaken by America's little excursion into Iran.  Here in the United States, we're grumbling about $4.00 gas at the pump, which is over a buck more than it was a month ago.  Is it worse than the oil shock of 2008?  It is not.  Is it worse than the 1973 Arab oil embargo?  Nope.  Back then, gas prices nearly tripled.  But it's unsettling.

Elsewhere in the world, across Asia in particular, it's not a question of inconvenience, but of actual shortage.  Emergency measures have been taken in dozens of countries impacted by the conflict, countries that don't have domestic stocks upon which they can rely.  There's the real risk that they'll have to stop manufacturing things in Vietnam and Korea and Singapore, driving up costs globally.  

There are other impacts on the global economy, ones that are even more peculiar.  

In particular, I've been struck by article after article ringing the alarm bells about fertilizer prices.  In order to keep industrial farm production chugging along, you need massive amounts of nitrogenous fertilizer, which is produced by the millions of tons using fossil fuels, natural gas in particular.   A significant proportion of that product then passes through the now notorious Straits of Hormuz, and that choke point is depriving farmers all around the world of something they've come to rely on.

It gets odder, though.  In most of those articles, one specific fertilizer is mentioned, over and over again.  The name of that substance:

Urea.

Yes, that urea.  It's exactly the same stuff that comes out of our bodies when we make-a-da-pee-pee.  It's in lesser concentrations when it flows out of us, of course, and not in a conveniently transportable granular form, thank God.  

If you take your very own urine, mix it with water at an eight-to-one ratio, and apply it to your garden, you'll have basically the same impact as spraying industrial urea on a crop.  It's not at the same purity levels, admittedly, and scaling it and stabilizing it for industrial farm use would require some effort.  Were we to do that, it would not be any more complex, ultimately, than using massive industrial plants to manufacture urea (using fossil fuels) and transport it across oceans (using fossil fuels).  

So in sum: an ill-conceived war in a far off place can prevent the machine of our complex global economy from producing and transporting a fertilizer, thus threatening crop yields across the planet.   And that fertilizer is a natural by-product of every human body.

Humans, as I will often note, are so weird.

Bad Apples

 

As the season for harvest arrived, the little apple tree in our front yard was finally yielding.  It's a dwarf Fuji, planted as a sapling half a decade ago, and it's really not done much up until this year.  

Last year, there were apples, but a historic drought meant they were half-sized, with flesh the flavor and consistency of balsa wood.

But this year?  After a spring in which the tree was spangled with blossoms, I carefully pruned away about half of the newly growing fruit, allowing the plant to pour its energies into what remained.  That, and a good season of rain?  They did the trick.  

It yielded several dozen nice plump apples, of the size one might expect to find at Harris Teeter or a farmer's market.  I'd expected, as the apples had matured, that they'd be devoured by the neighborhood squirrels, the same critters that take about seventy-five percent of my tomato crop each year.  But none of them were touched, and I never had to go charging out of the house to roust a brush-tailed bandit from the branches.

The why of that seemed obvious.  The apples looked terrible.  There were plenty of them, sure, but by the time they reached maturity, they were all covered in a mottled blackness.  It started slowly, but the further into the season we went, the worse they looked.

I wasn't quite sure the cause, but as I don't spray any chemicals on my plants, I thought it might possibly be some form of blight.  A mold, perhaps?  But they didn't seem to be rotting, at least not so that I could tell.  There was none of the softness of decay.  They were plump, full, and looked a bit like they'd just finished a shift in a West Virginia coal mine.

Which was another possibility that occurred to me, to be honest.  Wave after wave of smoke from Canadian wildfires have swept over the region again this year, and coupled with the ambient particulates already floating about in this urban region, these filthy fruit would have received coating after coating from months of airborne pollution.

A bit of Googling, though, brought me to the conclusion that it was not that.  Instead, it was likely sooty blotch, a fungal infection that spreads over the surface of many fruit, particularly in moist conditions.  

I was curious, though, as the apples reached their fatness.  Might they be edible?  Reddit said yes, totally. Just wash them.  

So I picked one, and brought it inside.  The skin was foul, but unbroken.  I put it under the kitchen tap, and with water running slowly over it, took a bristle brush to it.  Scrubadubdub, I went, for a couple of minutes, working my way over every square millimeter of the fruit.  

At the end of the process, that same apple looked like this:

It looked perfect.  And when I cut into it, it was tart and sweet, the flesh firm and crisp.  There was no taste of anything but apple.

It's easy to judge the worth of fruit from their surface, to look at a coating of schmutz and grime and let that first impression mislead us.  Ye shall know them by their fruit, said my Master.  Sometimes, you need to give that fruit the scrubbing of time, patience, and effort to get to the sweetness beneath.

The Sweet Sticky Harvest

In my morning walkabout through my garden the other day, all was pretty much normal.  I knocked back some of the wild grape that's tangled throughout my sunflower patch, snipping away the choking growth.  I checked in on my butternut squash, which is starting to cure on the vine, the soft wan green tanning to faint yellow.  I watched bumblebees noodle about through the wildly abundant, sweetly pungent basil, which...as we're getting into August...I'm now allowing to bolt to flower.  No flower means no seed, and as I'm two years into basil that I've started myself, I'd kinda like to keep that pesto-fountain going. 

Finally, I went around harvesting okra pods with my best sharp steel scissors.  I've got two four by eight beds dedicated to that traditional Southern crop this year, and the pods are poppin'.  They sever with a satisfying snap, as real force is required to get through the thick stem.  The yield has picked up as the season has progressed. There's a nice fat gallon bag filled in the freezer, with far more yet to come.  Batter fried okra and bhindi masala awaits.

But as I moved to the second of the two beds, I noticed a shadowing on the leaves and flowers a single one of the plants.  Uh oh.  Okra is pretty resilient, but the truth of gardens is that everything in the world wants to eat them.  As I approached, my fading middle aged eyes only saw a dark stippled fuzz.  Fungal growth?  Perhaps.  I couldn't tell without my reading glasses, so I used my other senses. I reached out and touched the greyness with an index finger.  It was sticky.  I held my finger to my nose, and sniffed.  Sweet.

Not fungus.  Aphids.  Drat.  

I went and grabbed my glasses from inside, then peered at the leaves to confirm.  Yup.  Black Aphids, a great bumper crop of them.  They were sucking the life from the flowers, and were a grey living hoarfrost suckling on the shaded underside of the leaves.  

I'd had another species of aphid devastate several kale crops a few years back, but hadn't had these particular little devils about yet.   As I mused on how I might destroy them, I noted that the aphids weren't alone.

All across the thickly blighted leaves were hundreds of small black ants.  They streamed up and down the stalks.  They moved delicately across the dense masses of feeding aphids.  Ahah, I thought.  Farmers.  

Ants are remarkable for many things, and one of the peculiar outputs of their distributed social intelligence is insect agriculture.  Aphids poop out honeydew, a sweet sugar-rich byproduct of their digestion, and so ants will gather and tend herds of aphids.  Think teeny weeny dairy herders, and you're not far off.  They'll eat some of the aphids, too, and while I can't confirm they use aphid leather as clothing, I wouldn't put it past the industrious little beggars.   I'd never seen it in action before, not that I can remember.    

It's cool if you're an entomologist, but rather less so when you're a gardener.  

The more I looked, the more I discovered the aphids, dense on the flower clusters, or squirreled away by the veins of a leaf.  Everywhere, they were tended by ants. My early fall okra harvest was under threat.  I mixed up a spray bottle or two with a mixture of soap and water, which weakens the aphids.  I doused every one of their colonies, and let that set for a while.

Then out came the garden hose, set on "Riot Suppression."  I revisited their leafy pastures, and blasted the aphids bodily from the plants.  It was rather satisfying.  

Ants are great pollinators, and generally garden-friendly, but once they've brought their livestock to feed, they've crossed a line.  They're not working with me, but against me.  The plants so carefully placed will wither and perish under that excess burden.  In pursuit of their sweet honeydew harvest, ant and aphid alike are taking more than the garden can give, and no gardener is obligated to tolerate that.

As I rewound the hose, I found myself musing on the ramifications of that idea.  I glanced for a moment skyward.  Nestled in the sprawl of the 'burbs, where all is steel and concrete and sticky sweet hyperabundance, I looked at the August sky, the blue tinged by the haze of far-off wildfires.  I considered how much more we take than can be given.  How much more we have than is mindful.

For a moment...in my mind's eye, and all...I visualized a great nozzle in the heavens, clicking the nozzle to "jet."

It wouldn't be the first time.

Beans and Berries and Sweat on the Brow

This morning, as the sun crested the small rise to the East, I was out in my garden picking the last of the blueberries. 

 The day was going to be fiercely hot, stinky sticky smothering hot, with humidity in the eighties and real temperatures potentially cresting one hundred degrees Fahrenheit.  It's the sort of day when spending time outside is best done early, the sort of day when the heat doesn't dissipate with the setting of the sun. 

The last of the succulent deep-purple berries hung fat on my bushes, though, and my greenbeans were poppin', so there was harvesting to be done.  After walking the dog, drinking my coffee, and attending briefly to the daily mess of world news, I took a couple of shiny metal bowls out into the yard and started picking.

I'd already pulled a gallon and a half worth of berries off of our two bushes, and so there wasn't much left worth plucking.  Just about a cup of ripe fruit remained, the berries perfect and ready, popping off their stems with only the very lightest of effort.  The dull faint tink of each falling fruit against the bottom of the stainless steel bowl was pleasing to the ear, chiming to mark the sultry end of my blueberry season.  

Then it was on to my four by eight bean patch, where I squatted and plucked again, pinching beans from stems with thumb and forefinger.  My trusty old bush beans, seedsaved for nearly a decade, were starting to produce.  

As I picked, the heat continued to rise, and sweat prickled across my forehead beneath the shade of my hat-brim.  I felt the effort in my middle-aged thighs as I squatted, moving counterclockwise around the raised bed.  I peered into the dense interwoven foliage, gently parting it with my hand, eyes moving from bean to bean, my mind sorting between those that are ready and those worth leaving for another harvest later in the week.  About a half-gallon of beans today, filling my larger bowl.

It's simple work, physical and wholly engaging.  For forty five minutes or an hour before the heat of the day becomes too much, it's no great burden.  But for a whole day?  For eight hours, even with breaks?  It would be utterly exhausting, and the endurance required to work in the fields seems...to my flaccid suburban flesh...herculean.

Gardening, I reflected as I popped plump beans into my bowl, is a good reminder of what it takes to bring food to our tables.  It's the most fundamentally necessary labor, but also the labor that we've chosen to ignore as a society.  It's viewed as unworthy of our effort, as the most menial and lowly of tasks, to be performed by those at the very bottom of the economic food chain.   It is the work of migrants and the imprisoned, not that there seems much difference between those two categories in America these days.

That such labor is disrespected is an abomination.  That it is a thousand times less lucrative than dooping around with some AI-enhanced blockchain folderol seems a perversion of the order of things.  It's an inhuman and unnatural misvaluation.  As a substantial portion of our culture turns snarling against those whose sweat and strain feeds it, this seems a form of madness.  Is it seething resentment at our dependence, that we rely utterly upon the work of others, and that our "superiority" is nothing but a mask for our weakness?  Perhaps. 

Or perhaps we're just fools.

Perhaps we are as brimming with hubris as the Spartans, who imagined that their monomaniacal worship of Ares made them stronger than their slaves.  For without the humble helots who grew the crops and tended the livestock, all the martial disciplines of Leonidas wouldn't have kept him alive for a week.  Or are we like Midas, perhaps?  Are we about to break our teeth on grapes gone hard to our touch, feeling our thirst rise as we peer down at the unquenching metal of our Mammonists desire that now fills our glass?

A little less time in the false halls of golden delusion might clear our addled minds, and return us to right appreciation of the things that matter.  

A little more time in our gardens, with the fruit of the earth before us and sweet honest sweat on our brow. 

 

Blueberries and Catbirds

As the first wave of summer heat spools up, my little garden is almost ready for the second wave of harvest.

Asparagus is the tip of the spear, rising when spring first whispers at warmth.  Those delectable first fern shoots are now long gone, allowed to grow to their natural man-height, a riot of delicate whiskers and poisonous berries.

This week, I'll be gently digging out my overwintered garlic.  Their great-great-grandmother bulbs were Trader Joes organics, which I bought five years ago to plant rather than eat.  They're an indeterminate softneck variety, which I plant copiously in early fall.  Last year I got 25 bulbs, and as I'm of the "triple the garlic" persuasion in any recipe, they go to good use.  This year, I'm hoping for thirty out of two four-by-eight beds.  It's the most I've ever grown, and I may even try intercropping this year, as Nosferatu's Bane seems to ward off early season deer depredations. 

While the garlic hangs dangling in the shade of our carport to cure, I'm also turning my attention to the blueberry bushes in front of my house.  They're a twelve year old planting, and at this point every year they're fat with bunches of ripening blueberries.  Hundreds of berries hang heavy on the bush, and as they blush green to pink to lavender, I'm always convinced we'll maybe this year have enough for a pie.

Until the grey catbirds arrive, that is.  Unlike the local mockers that have taken up regular residence in one of our boxwoods, catbirds aren't seen much around my garden most of the year.  But when the blueberries arrive, it's a catbird feeding frenzy.

Now, I don't mind sharing.  Setting aside something for our avian friends is a fine Mary Poppins thing to do.  For a few years, I'd tried putting "bird netting" over the bushes.  But "bird netting" required building a frame, without which the mockingbirds and catbirds just ate the berries right through the mesh.  Then I tried putting small fine mesh bags around individual bunches of berries, leaving others for the birds.  This worked for one half of one season.

But unlike our fractious, combative, disposable sparrows, who'll also feast upon the berries but were clueless about how to circumvent the bags, catbirds aren't morons.  Like their mockingbird cousins, they're inquisitive and adaptable creatures, and they quickly figured out how to pull those mesh bags off. 

For the last few years, I've gotten no more than a couple of handfuls of berries, and the catbirds have feasted.

So this year, I tried a new tack.  I covered three quarters of my plants with some drawstring fine mesh bags large enough for me to stand in.   But not all, never all.  

Do not harvest to the edge of your fields, as the Law puts it, and that applies to humans and catbirds alike.   That, I thought, will surely do it.  They'll go for the easy pickings, and we'll be copacetic.

After putting the nets on, the very first thing that happened?  

I netted a catbird.  Glancing up from my laptop "office" by the kitchen window, I saw a wild fluttering of grey wings inside the netting.  Rather than eating some of the dozens of ripening berries I'd left easily available, it set hungry eyes on the portion I'd set aside for myself.

The net being fine mesh, the persistent little critter wasn't tangled up at all.  It had just figured out a way to nose through the inadequately tightened drawstring opening, at which point it realized that getting out was going to be a little more challenging.  It flapped around in a panic, the berries forgotten.

I wandered out, and after opening up the netting, with some encouragement got it to fly away, meowing anxiously.

Don't get greedy, little birds.  Don't get greedy.

Why I Will Mow In May

Spring has sprung, and that means that the ground cover in my front yard is suddenly growing again. Grasses and chickweed, bugleweed and clover and dandelions, a wild heteroculture suddenly surging upward in a riot of green and ten thousand tiny flowers. That means that it’s mowing season again. 

Some folks don’t like mowing, viewing it as an onerous and pointless chore. But I’ve always liked it. As a teen, I looked forward to mowing the yard, because it was utterly satisfying. Sure, it needs to happen pretty much every week, but it’s one of those things that you do that has a definite result. It’s not abstract, not uncertain. It’s not a Zoom to develop a plan to create a task force to consider writing an overture to the General Assembly, as much as that warms the Presbyterian heart.

You do it, and it’s done. Like a made bed, or a sink emptied of dishes, it's as satisfying as a contented sigh.  

There's been a pushback against mowing lately, one of those earnest "well-actually" Newthinks that pop and meme about in our addled collective subconscious.  

Mowing is bad.  Don't mow.  Don't mow for the whole month of May!  No Mow May!  Let the pollinators pollinate!  Let the grass grow, man!  Let your freak flag fly!  It's habitat, too, bro, cultivate habitat, for our little crawly friends.

Which it certainly is.  Ever take a long walk through a field of tall grass at the height of summer?  Though I grew up in the urban megaplexes of DC and London and Nairobi, I remember doing that.  One particular afternoon hangs in memory, a hike near the rural Virginia home of a family friend when I was thirteen.  I remember how alive that meadow was, the slow windblown eddies across the surface of it, how the waving grass leapt and whirred with hundreds of grasshoppers.   I remember the brightness of the sun, and how alive everything felt.  I remember the tickle of the grass against my arms, against my bare legs.  

And after we got back, I remember not just the tickle, but the ticks.  The dozen-plus ticks I found clambering on my legs, on my back, in my socks, in my shorts, and squirming their way with thirsty intent towards my tender regions.  Even thinking about that now makes me itchy.  

Tall grass is habitat, without question.

That said, I'm no fan of the synthetic, lifeless monoculture of the American suburban lawn.  It's false life, with all the uncanny valley wrongness of astroturf or a reanimated relative.  It's why my own lawn is speckled with flowers and variety, all of which is evidenced here on this page.  But if you don't mow, you and your children and your dogs and neighborhood chipmunks will suffer.

Because mowing is not merely aesthetic. It serves a purpose.  That purpose, for me, goes well beyond reducing bloodsucking parasite populations.  

I am a gardener.  In my yard, mowing serves my compost piles, which I rely on to hyper-locally produce the earth that fills my nearly 300 square feet of raised beds.  For them, mowing is absolutely vital.

Back in the Fall, every single leaf that fell from the thirty plus trees that shade my back yard went into a pile, because, well, it’s compost. Six months worth of coffee grounds and filters, every peeled carrot shaving and bit of onion skin for half a year, all of it has been blended into that giant pile of dead leaves. It’s easy to look at that brown mound in winter and see nothing. It seems inert, lifeless, just a lump of matter. Which it is, right up until the moment you feed it with mowed greens in the Spring.

Because mowing a lawn is an act of harvest.  It's profoundly and directly useful, and I look forward to it as I look forward to collecting up fallen leaves in November.

All those lush green May clippings are rich with nitrogen, which is a veritable feast for the millions of teensy tinesy little microbes that have been sitting patiently among the leaves in one of the five by eight fenced compost piles in my backyard. Dump a couple of bags of cut ground cover onto the pile, give it a good oxygenating pitchin’ with a pitchfork, and the little microbiome of that pile comes to life. It’s no longer a pile of cold leaves, but teeming with life and the promise of life.

I go out, and I turn it on a wet day, and the pile smells good.  Not of rot and death, but sweet and alive.  It's warm, too, radiating heat as the energies of hundreds of millions of organisms thrive in the cuttings from my efforts.  Steam rises from it, filled with the scent of rich organic earth being birthed.  

My mowing last May is feeding my growing beans and tomatoes, my squash and my potatoes.  It will fill my table this summer.  The excess will go to the Little Free Produce stand of my church, joining with the outputs of other gardeners to feed those who have need.  That cycle of life and generous intent repeats, year by year, tied to the ebb and flow of life and the seasons.

So I will mow this May.  It isn't a drab and dismal duty.  It isn't a mindless, pointless ritual serving the cold demands of a soulless suburban deity.  

It's participating in the joyous bounty of creation.