Housekeeping Chores

by Mimi Hedl

In these dog days, the garden scenes change daily. The once ever-present gray-headed cone flowers have become seed for the finches; the tiger lilies in their brilliant orange, drop petals. As I survey the landscape in quiet moments, I lift my head to the sky, the clouds, watch the turkey buzzards soar high above, see the cardinals flit towards shade in the shrubs and feel grateful I was asked to care take of this piece of earth. I take this responsibility seriously, as we do when we raise a child. Over 43 years I’ve watched it change from a hay field to three acres with more biodiversity than imaginable.

Since I can’t keep up with housekeeping chores inside I go with the motto: “My house is clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy”. I don’t pretend to have control over the garden chores either.  I drive to and fro on these hot July days and notice other gardens. Many look abandoned, unloved. Weeds grow tall, plants have died, and no gardener’s in sight. Only the most dedicated keep up. I say the names of the weeds growing and calculate how much seed each one will produce, how easy it would be to cut them down. Then I realize my observation is unfair. Who knows what kept the hopeful gardeners from carrying on the work, what other passions claimed their time, or any multitude of reasons. I can’t claim innocence in this department. Just this summer I began tackling a problem I should have addressed years ago – rogue garlic.

We grew 1000’s of heads of garlic in our early years. We rotated crops, so garlic grew everywhere. There’d always be those few heads we missed and if we remembered, we’d dig those too, bonus heads, we’d call them. I’d plant garlic around each new fruit tree, near the berry bushes and who knows where else. Well, I do now, because suddenly I started noticing where they were reproducing. Like I said, EVERYWHERE.

Why is it that when we finally notice something we’ve ignored we become compulsive and have to act, immediately?  If the garlic hadn’t produced seed heads, they’d still be happily reproducing, as it’s the seed heads that announced the rogue garlic to my distressed eyes. If you’re not acquainted with the life cycle of garlic, here’s a short explanation. Each clove of garlic will make a head of cloves. If you leave that head in the earth, each one of the cloves making the head will try to make another head. So if the head has 8 cloves, 8 heads of garlic could grow in that space. Talk about the miracle of the loaves and fishes, this one a big coup for garlic.

If that wasn’t enough to ensure garlic immortality, most garlic varieties will produce a seed head. Sitting on top of the garlic stalk you’ll see a fat, round, ball with small seeds, each seed about 1/3 the size of one kernel of unpopped corn. And you wonder how many seeds are up there? Oh, anywhere from 20 to 50, sometimes even more. The attentive gardener won’t allow this seed head to live. Once the head begins to form, the enlightened gardener nips it off and uses this garlic scape in summer cooking, the power of garlic to control the world averted.

Once Ron developed Parkinson’s and wasn’t able to mow, I had to figure out a way to manage our homestead. I stopped mowing large areas and made paths through the three acre homestead. Of course this meant that anything that wanted to grow, could. We used to joke about mowing being Missourians favorite sport because so many folks religiously mounted their riding mowers and mowed acres and acres of grass. This hobby has one benefit – nothing but grass can grow in those areas.

I dealt with one emergency at a time. Always something trying to take control, be it wisteria, tansy, mints of all varieties, bamboo, fire on the mountain – I’ve battled them all. Some took years, like bamboo. Others required a watchful eye over the summer and into the autumn.

I had congratulated myself this spring because I had no aggressive-plant-emergency and could concentrate on the equivalent of sweeping and dusting. How foolish, foolish of me. As my daughter would say, I cursed myself. That period of pruning and lovingly weeding seems like a dream, as soon thereafter, I noticed the rogue garlic. Not in one spot, not in two or three spots, but in so many spots I felt dizzy. I tried to calculate how many plants I could dig in one session before I’d even put a fork in the ground.

Because I was impatient, I tried pulling out the heads. We’d had lots of spring rains and the heads came out easily. About 20 heads into the project, I noticed there were tear-shaped garlic “heads” next to the small head of garlic. I know this is way too much info for the non-gardener, but this is another sneaky way for the garlic to insure its survival. If I hadn’t paid attention, I wouldn’t have seen these other garlics, they would’ve remained in the soil, and next year I would feel crazy because there’d be just as many rogue heads of garlic as this year.

This slowed down my work. I had to dig out each head, slowly looking for the garlic tear drops, with no stalk, only shriveled leaves and the tear the same color as the soil. I started my routine at about 5:30 am and worked for an hour each morning. I had a carpenter’s apron around my waist so I could drop the tears into the pocket. Each garlic head with stalk and topset went into a pile. I tried not to look at how much I had to do, but I did find myself counting, with some dread, bordering on panic. “I’ll never finish the job!” I’d say in my teenage voice.

I kept up this routine for several weeks, storing all I’d dug in the woodshed for later attention. Then, with my sharp pruners, a shady spot under the sweet gum, the radio playing Democracy Now! I’d cut 100 or so seed heads, then turn the garlic the other way and cut off the garlic head, small though it was. You can see what I ended up with. Did I feel foolish? No, not a bit. If next year just as many would appear, I’ll probably scream, then get to work. It can’t go on forever.  Can it?

I’ve boiled some of the seed heads in water just for a drill and made an insect deterrent for the squash plants and eggplants. It’s pungent and I may have stumbled on a positive side to this fiasco. My plan is to boil all the heads when I have a good fire going this fall, give some to other gardeners, or let them freeze over the winter, possibly a combination of them all. Then the spent garlic can safely go to the compost pile. Without destroying the garlic’s ability to reproduce, all my work would be pointless.

Each one of us gardeners has our demon, or demons. Paying attention seems critical. Not letting plants make seed is the most effective way to control how much housekeeping we’ll have to do. I much prefer daily maintenance and not these emergencies, but the emergencies seem to come with the territory. Two steps forward, one step back.

Once I’d put in my hour in the early morning, the rest of the day had me engaged with other sights, other problems, like keeping the rabbits out of the late summer beans, or admiring the tomatillos and the salsa verde they’d provide. Will the figs mature before a frost? The pollinators always keep me entertained. How does that big fat bee get into the American bellflower?!