Garlic

Yesterday a planted a lot of garlic. What I wanted to do was harvest a lot of garlic and then plant some more for next year, but last summer’s garlic wasn’t ready yet. You see, it was supposed to be planted in fall but, because of life, it got planted closer to spring. And now, all these months later, it’s not ready.

I don’t know if it ever will be.

Perhaps the mistakes of the past will stay buried in the ground, stagnating until finally they get thrown into the compost. I plant a lot of things and some of them never germinate, or get choked out by weeds, or fail to thrive in inhospitable soil. Gardeners don’t usually get bent out of shape about it.

So yesterday, I planted next year’s fall garlic. It’s the right time of year, the rain stopped for an hour, and thanks to Forrest’s hard work, the dirt was easy to work and full of worms and humus. Everything came together perfectly. I have high hopes for this garlic.

It still might not work out.

We had a beautiful lavender bush when we first moved in, which died off one year. Since then, I have been trying to get lavender going again. I’ve planted it a dozen times - from seed, from plants - it doesn’t matter. We have the perfect climate for lavender - out on the peninsula there are acres and acres of lavender farms. But every year, no matter how much I fertilize, care for and try to make it work, it doesn’t.

Now, garlic is a lot less finicky than that, but there’s something about planting something that is a bit of a gamble. Gardening is a lot of work and often it’s done in less than pleasant circumstances. At the end, more often than not, there’s a harvest, but every gardener I know can tell you what didn’t work in their garden this year. Or what they’ve tried to grow a dozen times and never quite been able to coax into fullness.

But we keep doing it, don’t we? Digging a trench in the muddy dirt, separating stubborn cloves and shoving them down into the dark. Covering them over and then…waiting. Hoping that whatever work we’ve done is enough. And then, if harvest time comes and it’s not, we till the bed again, add some compost, and take another chance.

Because there is always, always, always next spring.