Garlic

What’s blooming in the area: Tamarix, tea roses, Apache plume, Spanish broom, silver lace vine, honeysuckle, red yucca, onions, Queen Anne’s lace, tumble mustard, few hollyhocks, larkspur, fern-leaf globemallow, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, milkweed, bindweed, datura, alfalfa, Dutch clover, purple loco, native dandelion, goat’s beard, hawkweed, paper flower; brome, rice, and three-awn grasses; corn up a foot; first alfalfa cut; buds on Virginia creeper; few native sunflowers up; cottonwood cotton blowing.

In my yard looking north: Catalpa, miniature roses, daylily, red hot poker, golden spur columbine, Harweig evening primrose, butterfly weed, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Moonshine yarrow, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, anthemis; nasturtiums up; yellow cosmos producing second leaves; red sour cherries.

Looking east: Dr. Huey rose, winecup, coral bells, Jupiter’s beard, baby’s breath, Bath’s pink, snow-in-summer, bouncing Bess, coral beardtongue, pied and last year’s pink snapdragons, sea pink, Maltese cross, pink salvia, pink evening primrose; buds on sidalcea; Sensation cosmos coming up reluctantly.

Looking south: Prairie and rugosa roses, sweet peas.

Looking west: Rumanian sage, purple salvia, catmint, Husker’s Red beardtongue, spurge, blue flax; buds on sea lavender and speedwell.

Bedding plants: Zonal geraniums, moss rose.

Inside: Aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, birds in cherry, gecko, cabbage butterfly, bees on catmint, large black harvester and small red ants.

Weather: Some mornings cooling off to mid-40's, others staying warmer; fire in the Jemez has been burning more than a week, sending pink smoke across the valley; last rain 05/14/09; 14:37 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Garlic is one of those plants I never could grow. Both here and in Michigan, I was too cheap to order something from a catalog, so planted bulbs I bought loose in the supermarket. A few would come up, but die in the heat. I finally stopped trying.

Then, about the time I started this blog in the spring of 2006, I was being invaded by grasshoppers. When someone suggested garlic oil, I dropped cloves around the garden thinking maybe evaporation would work More practically, I bought a pesticide at the local big box.

Two years later, in 2008, I saw something that looked like garlic leaves in the back drip line in March, near the cherry and apples in May. In June, the quail kicked up something that looked like a bulb under the locust. I dismissed the similarity. I’d scattered the cloves on the surface, not buried them.

Last February, I saw something under the cherry. This year, there were suspicious leaves in back in February, under a sand cherry in April, and under some apples in May. Last weekend I looked out the window and saw, from above, what definitely looked like a garlic bulb partly uncovered under the cherry. The lower leaves were browning and the stalk tipping.

Allium sativium is one of those plants that’s become so cultured by man, it no longer can reproduce itself by seed. Botanists believe the original may have been Allium longicuspis that produces seeds between the Kopet Dag and Tien Shan mountains in central Asia. A form that no longer develops seeds, but still flowers on a looping stem and produces tiny bulbils is found in eastern Europe and parts of Iberia. The Mediterranean garlic we eat today no longer bolts, produces more cloves and stores longer.

Garlic is sensitive to differences in soil, temperature, moisture, altitude - in short, all the elements in its habitat. Plants that bolt in Spain won’t in Japan. Cloves grown for cooking in southern California weren’t likely to do well in Michigan in the 1980's. Since the early 1990's, most inexpensive garlic comes from China, and isn’t any more likely to thrive in New Mexico.

Seed catalogs offer garlic in the spring, and imply it should be planted early in the season. I tried. A few will germinate. However, garlic is a lily that prefers to be planted in the fall when it develops roots to winter over. When late winter temperatures climb into the low 40's, garlic loses its dormancy and grows best when temperatures are in the mid 60's. When days grow longer and temperatures rise, the leaves begin to die and the bulbs ripen like the one outside my window. It doesn’t follow normal farm and garden planting cycles.

The best know area garlic grower is Stanley Crawford, who moved to the Dixon area in the late 1960's when artists and "hippies" were gentrifying villages on the roads to Taos. His first plants came from some dug in the spring by a friend from an apple orchard in the early 1970's. Another gave him some garlic tops to try from another orchard.

Nothing much happened with either. Then, a few years later, he discovered them growing. It takes bulbils around three years to grow large enough to sprout.

He noted that his rocambole garlic resembles that sold in braided clusters from México, and wonders if his came with the conquistadores. It’s certainly true, Spain is the origin of New World garlic. Eugene Lyon has found shipping records that show garlic was included in the food supplies of the Nina on Columbus’ third voyage in 1498. By the time Hernán Cortés arrived in México in 1519, it was being sold in the Aztec markets of Temixtitan.

The bulb is one of the plants Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá thought the Santa Domingo could grow when he arrived here with Juan de Oñate in 1598. Alonso de Benavides reported it growing in Santa Fé in the late 1620's. However, by the time the interior department was surveying the area in the depression, no garlic was mentioned, although Don Usner did find two women who remembered ajo growing around Chimayó when they were children.

Between Benavides and Amada Trujillo and Tila Villa, the Spanish had been evicted and returned, famines had come and gone, and trade with northern México had been disrupted. Seed stock could have been eaten, new bulbs that could grow here could have become unavailable, and people may simply have forgotten how to grow it.

The common diet still included the conquistadores’ wheat, but the rest was adopted from the pueblos, corn and beans with chile as the primary spice. What garlic plants were grown or bought might have been medicinal and too few to be noticed by outside observers.

Dixon was organized as a land grant in 1725. Any crops were either brought from another settlement in the Española valley after the reconquest or came from México with the annual cordones to Chihuahua, just north of where garlic grows today from Zacatecas south to Puebla.

The Embudo Land Grant, that includes Dixon, was nullified by the federal government in 1898, throwing land ownership into question about the time Stark Brothers’ Delicious apple was stimulating the development of large orchards in the west.

It’s just as likely, someone in the recent past bought one of those riastras from the mountain valleys of México, broke out the cloves and planted them in a Dixon orchard.

It doesn’t really matter. His garlic is one that grows in the rio arriba, not in full sun as the guides all say, but under trees and in grasses, like mine which came from a grocery that caters to local Spanish speakers and grows unaided where it pleases.

His customers tell him his tastes much better than what they buy in stores. I’ll never know the taste of mine; when you have only a few plants you tend to think of them as pets.

Notes:Benavides, Alonso de. Memorial que fray Juan de Santaner de la orden de S. Francisco presenta a la Magestad Catolica del Rey don Felipe Quarto, 1630, republished 1996 as A Harvest of Reluctant Souls, translated and edited by Baker H. Morrow.

Cortés, Hernán. Letter to Charles V, published as second letter in Hernan Cortes Letters from Mexico, translated by Anthony Pagden, 1986 edition.

Crawford, Stanley. A Garlic Testament, 1992.

Etoh, Takeomi, Hideki Watanabe, and Sumio Iwai "RAPD Variation of Garlic Clones in the Center of Origin and the Westernmost Area of Distribution," Kagoshima University, Faculty of Agriculture Memoirs, 37:21-27:2001, compares Iberian and central Asian garlic.

US Department of Interior, Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975.

Usner, Don J. Sabino’s Map: Life in Chimayó’s Old Plaza, 1995.

Villagrá, Gaspar Pérez de. Historia de la Nueva México, 1610, translated and edited by Miguel Encinias, Alfred Rodrígue and Joseph P. Sánchez, 1992.

Photograph: Garlic, 15 June 2010.