Garlic

I was doing fieldwork on a Saint’s Festival when I first learned about home-grown garlic. We were having dinner on a rooftop deck. It was a lovely late summer evening, and the deck was surrounded by a wide variety of planters filled with flowers. Off to one side, however, was a section given over to tomatoes, peppers, and other food crops. My informant told me that his father had a much larger garden a few blocks away, but it was nice to have the convenience of picking a really fresh tomato when needed. Then he pointed to the elaborately braided bunch of garlic hanging just inside the kitchen door. “The garlic from the markets is who knows how old, and it’s easy to grow your own.”

Not too much later, it was time for us to get into the streets. The main part of the festival is the procession. There, I met the priest who served as the chaplain for the society and learned about the event’s history.

Over the years. I worked with members of several ethnic groups who lived in that city. I spent a lot of time in their gardens. In fact, I created a series of programs, termed the Hidden Countryside, which showcased them.

The finale of that work took the program and some of those gardeners to Washington to participate in the 1988 Festival of American Folklife.

Learning

I recorded a lot of material for the programs I created. But I also incororated part of what I learned into my own life. A lot of how I thought about gardens, and gardening changed by working with the Polish, Portuguese, and Italian gardeners, especially. Doing anthropology is not just studying another culture. They study you in turn, and sometimes you incorporate into your own life things from theirs. It could be recipes for baking, a method for carving, or growing garlic. And, yes, many of us in anthropology have problems keeping our work and home lives separate! Many of us don’t even try. But back to garlic.

I was told the garlic helps keep away some insects in the garden, so in a small garden, intercropping it with your other plants is a good idea. Unlike most crops you plant garlic in the fall. This may be why so many suburban gardeners don’t grow it. You get it planted and established when the rest of your gardening activities are winding down for the year. I plant my garlic in september after I’ve harvested my crop. I select enough prime cloves to give me the garlic I need for next year. This a guessing game, and sometimes we run out, and have to buy store bought.

Over the time between planting and frost the cloves sprout and establish a small root system. They over winter where they were planted, and begin to grow again in spring. Itook the photo I’m using of the 18th of May, and these are nice healthy garlic plants.

Try it!

You can buy garlic from almost any seed provider. And now is a great time to procure your “seed” garlic. However, the first year I tried it, I used a store-bought head of garlic – it was an experiment, and I didn’t want to spend money on the project. Some people buy garlic to plant every year, and there are a number of varieties to try. But I tend to save cloves from my own garlic heads for planting.

Try it. It won’t take up much space, and after using homegrown, you may never want store-bought again.