Eight months ago I decided I was going to try growing garlic.
Harvested the one on the right a little late and the cloves started to separate, but it’s all a learning experience.
Today, I have garlic. It began with a curiosity to see if I could do it (I don’t know why I thought maybe I couldn’t?). So, I read up on growing garlic in books and magazines and on one of my Sunday trips to the farmers market I bought myself some nice hardneck variety garlic from a local farmer. I had read that it’s best to plant garlic you buy from a local farmer because you know it is suited to your area. I bought myself and my significant other each a head because we both developed an interest and love garlic.
I’m typically a no-frills kind of gardener and just like to leave it up to nature, throw the seed in some dirt and water occasionally – let nature do the rest. But, I was so hellbent on having garlic that I bought this liquid kelp to soak the cloves in before planting to help them grow and all kinds of things. I planted by Columbus Day imagining the future fragrant smells of garlic coming from my kitchen, and as an added bonus – garlic scapes. I was excited for both Daniel and I to be growing garlic, I liked that I could feed his interest in backyard gardening and it was fun to have someone to compare gardening experiences with. I could just see us comparing garlic head sizes come June. Well, ten days later I was unexpectedly canned by Daniel after a few years of dating, and let me tell you – one of the first things I nearly did was stomp out to the side of the house and dig up “our” garlic and smash it to bits.
Those garlic plants as far as I were concerned were hateful garlic plants. Filled with his selfishness and cowardice, and thinking back on it now – they made me feel foolish. I think greater than my rage and anger at my ex for blind-siding me like he did, my feeling of foolishness for not noticing any of it made me angry with myself. I felt foolish for thinking 8 months into the future we’d be happily pulling up our garlic and cooking delicious dishes together. I felt foolish for thinking he might have thought that too. I was humiliated and there’s no worse feeling than suddenly being smacked in the face with someone you care about deeply not sharing the same sorts of feelings that you do.
Well, I refrained from digging up the garlic, but over the months that followed I cursed it. I cursed the hell out of his garlic, I cursed my garlic – fuck, I silently whispered death threats to all the world’s garlic crops. If Daniel and I couldn’t grow garlic together, then NOBODY would have garlic. The garlic became a symbol for him and I, and it just sat there TAUNTING ME for months and months.
When the 5 or 6 shoots that had come up through the ground mysteriously shrank to four, I hoped that his loss was double mine. Fuck his garlic and everything it stood for. “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”
March 2012 – pre-skunk attack.
Springtime came and my garlic plants were gaining an upward momentum and I had four lovely, strong stalks. I went out on the first nice early spring day and even took glamour shots of my garlic. They started to represent more than my hatred for being fooled, and for my time being wasted by someone I cared about – they represented that even through a cold winter they don’t die like your other garden variety plants (hah!), but they slowly and carefully begin their own special process of dividing the clove and sending roots into the soil biding their time in the quite dark underground until they shoot up through the ground in the springtime with gusto! That’s what I was doing – I had to lay low and figure some things out about myself during the winter. I had seriously lost my footing and needing to send some roots into the ground if I wanted to stand and move forward come the spring.
Days after the garlic glamour photo shoot, a skunk came and oh so sneakily, rooted out the bottoms of HALF my garlic plants, and left the stalks bobbing pointlessly in the ground. I was livid. I marched back into the house and while I filled the dishwasher I cursed the rat bastard animal that did this, I hoped he choked and died on my precious garlic. All that hatred brought back some residual prickliness about my breakup and suddenly without realizing it I was back to cursing him and his garlic – “I hope a skunk eats every last fucking garlic plant he has!” I didn’t even realize I was garlic-bashing aloud, until when later I told my mother I hoped a skunk ate all his garlic too, and she said “Yeah, I know, you were going on about that earlier.” Clearly, I was not over it.
Let me get one thing straight, I don’t hate my ex. I never will, I don’t think I could. But, I hate the way he made me feel when I realized how much of my time he wasted, and how cowardly of him it was to let our relationship to go on for so long when he had mentally and emotionally checked out while I fell deeply in love with him. I also just fucking hated this bizarre love-child-garlic scenario I insanely envisioned for the future.
From then on, I guarded my garlic like a mother bear with her cubs. Those two garlic stalks grew lush and green. The scapes seemed to appear over night, and curled so beautifully in Medusa-like fashion. I took them with me in May when I dog-sat for a friend in Brooklyn, in the same apartment where my ex broke up with me the first time I dog-sat for her.
I ceremonially chopped the scapes up and made “fuck you and your garlic” omelets and plates of “suck my dick” sauteed spinach and ate them in the very place where he tried to explain himself.
Nobody was going to eat this garlic but me, and nobody was going to waste my time anymore either.
Recently, I saw on Facebook, that my ex is going to Ecuador to climb and visit with friends for awhile. It’s fucked up, but nothing could make me happier. The day he broke up with me he said “If you need me to disappear, I will.” What better way than to go to another country?! I’ll only be in NJ for another 2 weeks before I leave for New Hampshire for two months to work on the farm, but it sort of feels like two weeks where I can move a little more freely, breathe and rest a little more easily. Not worry that I’ll run into him in Port Authority (which makes no sense because he almost never took the bus, but it’s a recurring nightmare I have), or feel like I can’t go to the rock gym with my best friend.
So after all this, it seems rather fitting that on the day before he leaves the country for a lengthy period of time, I finally harvest this garlic that went through these eight emotional and rather life-changing months with me. In some ways I feel like it’s all coming full circle, and tomorrow when I wake up I will have gotten a little bit more of that space back in my life that turned into a big void that Daniel once filled…I’m also getting that space back in my yard where my cursed garlic grew. This garlic no longer symbolizes us, but feels more like it symbolizes me and what I’ve been able to accomplish. Obviously, I’ve still got some work to do on my feelings and how I handle them when it comes to Daniel and the breakup, but I’m in a better place now than where I was eight months ago.
One with more garlic.
Meatbeasta 