Processing Garlic

Today, I pulled the garlic, harvested beginning of July, out of the attic where it had been drying, cut the stems off, and stored them in a crate for the long haul.  It was a good garlic crop, growing enough to eat  a head of garlic a week- not bad!  Though, that doesn't count what I'll pull out for seed.

Which brings me to "processing garlic," and what that really means.  It means planning for the future.  It means saving for what's to come.  Hoping for a future.
With the land's future here in question, it also puts so many things for me into question.  In some ways, I feel like that garlic that is growing, growing, growing, and is growing so much that it starts to reach out and up towards the sky a stem for a flower to blossom.  The scape.  And I know that if I don't snip this reaching, this "going to seed," I will loose the strength that's to be had in my roots.

Ironically, this summer, I harvested the garlic scapes with three kids from our street: Shawn, Ty, & Mo. It was a good and fitting task for them that they seemed to enjoy.  Snip, snip, snip and we had a basketful.  Then, we came to the bed that at the time was the front of the garden.  I had planted garlic specifically there last Fall because I knew the garlic is the first thing to show its green growth and thriving self, and I wanted that to be the first thing that people on the street could see in the Spring.  I wanted people to remember last year's growing beauty, I wanted to get the momentum rolling with that spirit in the Spring.  So, there we came, to the front bed with the garlic bursting out.  They were the biggest garlic scapes out of the whole crop- maybe the best soil & best sun- maybe they just liked the special attention out front like that.  They were the best heads to use as seed for the next Fall.  Though, when Ty asked me "what happens if we don't cut this?"  I explained to him that it flowers and goes to seed.  I had seen pictures, as in this print by Peter Schumann of Bread & Puppet Theater:

but I had never seen it in person.  So, I said to Ty, yeah, OK, let's leave it.  Don't cut it.  Let's watch the flower grow.  See what happens.

Frankly, it ended up not being that much of a spectacular experience, I don't think Ty would have even noticed had I not pointed it out to him.  The most interesting thing was just how tall it grew.  So tall, and strong, that little flower stem.  And the flower was incredibly understated.  Mostly white, with a white covering that slowly revealed the seed heads.  Small little buds popped out with seed to tickle the finger tips.  Of course, I knew that those seeds, if planted, were not to become the virile garlic cloves that these had birthed it.  But I wondered- ah, perhaps, this is how one breeds new kinds of garlic- by letting them go to seed, cross-pollinating, opening up whole new worlds of possibility.

This is how I feel about the Project we have been working at here.  Who is to know what will come of this place, if the garden will remain in the future, or remain for even long at all.  Much like the head of garlic, it too will need to be harvested one day, or else left to rot in the ground.  Either way, just by this garden existing in the first place, a similar process is happen as that garlic going to seed.  We may not produce the strong future of a garden and culture that thrives in gardeners and home food producers just by planting this garden here in "the hood," but just by "going to seed," or exploring new possibilities with planting this garden on an otherwise desolate and abandoned lot of land in a low-income black neighborhood,  we are allowing ourselves to "cross-pollinate" and create new populations and strains of life that we wouldn't even know exist otherwise.  It is a similar metaphor as "planting a seed," where you may not see the changes you have created in something for years and years to come- and even then, you may never witness the greatness of a redwood when you see a small seed riding the breeze. 

So, there it is.  With the future unclear of this place, I look to the garlic flower, to the seed, to the garlic, to the scape, and keep faith that things are bigger than what I can see or know.  I will think on the future garlic crop, enjoy the fresh garlic now, and look to the flower in the front of the lot, and know it's dropping its seeds with every wind.