I planted one hundred cloves of garlic in early November last year. They came from all around New England: Fedco Seeds in Kennebec County, ME (Georgian Fire), the Buffalo Mountain Co-op in Hardwick, VT (Snowy Bird and Red Russian), High Meadows Farm in Putney, VT (German White) and my own 2018 harvest (varied).
The first green emerged in early March; the crop was harvested in mid July, dried for a few weeks, and finally, today, on a beautiful eighty degree day with low humidity, cleaned up for storage. The yield was about ninety four bulbs (plus or minus), including a couple of able volunteers. Best results, size-wise, were from Fedco and my garden. Garlic scape pesto is in the freezer ready to go. I love the contrarian aspect of garlic – it’s planted in the late autumn, at which time my gardening mojo is back in full force. And it’s the first green to remind me that spring really is on the way, before daffodils and maybe even crocus.
Yesterday I used some of the new garlic in a batch of fire cider that should be ready to go in a few weeks – good for whatever ails you, old timers say, particularly over the long winter. The summer is shifting, here in early August …
Three monarch butterflies have been hanging around our gardens this past couple of weeks (two seem to be a couple, flitting around everywhere together), and one of them laid some eggs on the underside of one of the leaves of this plant above. Those eggs quickly developed into ravenous caterpillars that proceeded to defoliate the plant, before moving on elsewhere. Some ended up on another type of milkweed three feet away, but so far none yet on still another type some ten feet away, where I half expected them to be, given multiple plants. Elsewhere near our home, there is no sign yet of any monarchs or eggs on a profusion of milkweed plants at the boat landing; they were inundated with them last year.
Addendum on 8/12: they finally found the milkweed ten feet away.
Addendum on 8/17: the eggs/caterpillars were actually those of milkweed tussock moths, otherwise known as milkweed tiger moths. See next post.
Old friend Mike Aiken (now back in Georgia after a decade-long sojourn in northern VT), sez further: “I can’t fully explain it but Vermont is so unique, ordinary, unspoiled, commonplace, interesting, beautiful, astonishing and ghastly that I can’t get it out of my system. I tell people it’s like your favorite jacket or pair of jeans and every favorite childhood memory and adult romantic interlude rolled into one, wrapped in a psychotic’s vision of bizarre weather.”
Photo taken at Brown’s Orchard and Farmstand, where I had some of their fine apple pie and cider to start out the day.
” Ya, we homesteaded for ten years..”, the man on the scaffolding told me as he nailed the quarried slate shingles to the side of his house. The statement didn’t surprise me one bit, given how the property itself stood out from its neighbors: no finely manicured lawn here, but a magical profusion of perennials, shrubs and berry bushes (red raspberry, black and red currant) where it used to be, and the whole place such a wonderful work in progress.
What did surprise me were the black currant bushes – laden with berries – the first I’d ever seen in New England. They had been banned for nearly a century in the US, a suspected vector for a fungus that significantly impacted the commercial viability of the Eastern White Pine. That ban was lifted in NY state in 2003, and Vermont also has no restrictions on their cultivation. I’ve been a believer in organic black currants for some time now, for the myriad of health benefits, especially for eyes.
A note on the processing: the photo was taken under a bright midday sun, not the best of circumstances for the nuances of color or light. It seemed to work best in post-processing as an INFRARED or this one, OLD POLAR.
