Tucking In the Garden for Her Winter Rest

by Emma Troyer

Hello, Garden. It’s nice to see you. It’s been a long time…

One could say it was time for us to start seeing other people. You understood, and you kept on. I only visited you every few days over this last stretch of summer, popping in for handfuls of sage and basil, the only things that kept growing when the earth turned to parchment. I justified my inattention, telling myself I had other things to do – baby nieces to meet, events to plan, and a hundred suppers to cook. And I knew you would wait.

Or, I thought so. Yesterday I came to inspect you, that predictable late-season fondness putting wind back in my sails. I found you had gone right along without me. Zinnas and cherry tomato vines tangled in a passionate embrace, calendula had already dropped their seeds, and the fall beans I planted from a high-riding lark back at August’s end had purple blossoms, despite their true leaves having been netted by squash bugs.

Here’s what else I saw: Monarch cocoons on the fennel, monarch cocoons on the parley fronds, monarch cocoones draped along the woody stems and stalks of everything left standing like a holiday garland. And it does feel like a holiday, because finally it has rained.

That’s what you needed, Garden. Not me.

Taken under your influence, next thing I knew I was ankle deep in soft dirt, pulling out corn stocks and tossing them into a pile to be chopped into mulch. The broom corn towered beside me, seedheads hanging low – not sad, but a little weary. I planted the broom corn with the thought of giving chickens a treat, from seeds Beth Dougherty put into my hand at a homesteading conference two years ago. Each year, they seed themselves and come back. And the chickens do enjoy the pearly purple kernels.

While I worked, Kit, the orange kitten, bounded onto the scene like his tail was on fire and set to digging around the cover crop. He chased a flutter of moths around the flowers, caught one, then let it go. The noises he made in the corn sounded like a herd of kittens, but silent companion that he is, he said not a word. Working – not hardly. But helping? Always.

The strawberry patch beckoned me next. Talk about turning a blind eye. Since I relieved the plants of their bright jewels in July, they have sent out so many runners and welcomed in so many weeds that rows are completely indistinguishable in places. The runners themselves have sent out runners. That’s why the popcorn must be torn out – to make room for the established runners I will transplant and keep. Beside and between strawberries, I’ll plant my fall garlic. The potency of garlic will deter pests from bothering the strawberries, or so they say. It’s worth a try – most things are.

Fall season. Hardneck. Music. The little brown paper bags of bulbs are waiting for the cool to set in. What could be a lovelier name for garlic than Music? I thought about the first garlic, and who might have been the first person to take a handful of soft-necked bulbs and twist them into a braid. Utility and beauty, married, best appreciated when serving one another.

Utility suggests garlic isn’t necessary. Neither are strawberries, come to that. And certainly not flowers, especially the frivolous kind that bloom once, wither in a few days, and become a memory, making you wish you had at least snapped a photo first. And yet, these things are full of uses. Garlic will flavor our pastas and steaks, lend fragrence to our stews, and be nature’s antibiotic when we are in need of relief from sore throats or earaches. Strawberries will top our bowls of ice cream, spread their rubyred gloss over biscuits and turn our winter smoothies pink. Even the flowers I grow – calendula, lavender, echinacea – are even now steeping in oil and vodka to extract their properties to soothe, repair and strengthen.

Would one of these, beauty or utility, be enough on its own? We needn’t speculate. Creation has already bestowed both. Standing here in the cool dirt, I’m just grateful.

I do not particularly love gardening. I don’t keep doing it because I love to. Like every gardener, I’m personally offended when pests destroy my well-intentioned and purposefully organic crops. I am not a mathematical or even remotely scientific person, I do things mostly according to instinct. Sometimes my instinct hasn’t been informed of all that my soil needs, and I end with yellowing celery and hopelessly compacted potato beds.

Even when I manage to keep things weed-free and beautiful, with gardening, appearances don’t always tell a true story. Rather, it’s below the surface, in the families of microbes and the air cubbies where the worms shelter, that the story is told. That story is completed, of course, in the harvest. My potato harvest this year was small and unimpressive, but determined. With it, I measure my success. I learn what I need, I sigh, and vow to do better. This is what gardening has taught me.

I garden, not for the pleasure, not even for the harvest, but because it is part of my life philosophy. Take care of my own. Produce in equal measure to what I consume. Remember that food comes from the earth, through work. I garden to keep myself consistent with these beliefs. It keeps me humble, too, and keeps my face tipped to the sun.

There is a part of gardening, however, that I truly do love. The idea of it thrills me to my toes and keep me awake in the early morning hours, scheming – and that is preserving.

This is where the bounty really becomes real, when you haul in basket after basket of goodness from the garden you watched with bitten nails during the dryest spell, and you marvel. Where did all of this food come from? On my kitchen counter, it becomes a quantifiable mystery. I love the setting satisfaction of seeing my shelves painted in the yellows, greens and reds of canned vegetables, and the bumpy bags of wild berries stacked in the freezer. Jars of saved flower seeds, crushed herbs, and dehydrated rose hips make our kitchen look like a medicine woman’s cave. Everywhere you turn, bundles of dried flowers whisk across your face. Just the way I like it to be – bombarded by beauty and usefulness.

In these final weeks before the frost, the last tomatoes will be cooked down into glorious sauce. Herbs will be clipped and hung from the ceiling. The popcorn, husked now, sits waiting in a basket on the stairs. Cabbages will be buried in deep rows of dirt, upside down with their roots sticking out, just like the farmers of old did it. I read about this trick in the book Gap Creek years ago, and last fall I finally tried it. We had crisp, sweet cabbage fresh from the ground in February. I can find nothing about this method on the internet; it must be a rusty jewel of wisdom too old for that, passed down only by the ones who still remembered doing it themselves.

You gave me a lot Garden. Now, I give you a last looking over before the cold puts you to sleep. A little tucking in, a little hemming of your frayed edges, a little sprinkling of cover crop to soak into your crevices and soften your clods. There won’t be much you’ll need from me now.

Planting Garlic in the midwest (we are in zone 6b):

FOR SPRING GARLIC, plant in the fall, as soon as the days cool off – you don’t want the bulbs growing too much green stem before they go dormant. Plant after October 1st in loamy, well drained soil, each clove about one inch below the surface and spaced at least 6 inches apart. Cover well with leaves or straw to insulate. Garlic will establish itself, go dormant after the first frost, then start growing again in the spring. We usually harvest ours in early to mid June.

FOR SUMMER GARLIC, you can plant in the early spring for a late summer harvest. These bulbs usually don’t grow as large as those planted in fall – just like tulips and daffodils, they prefer winter dormancy. But if you simply cannot bear the thought of running out of garlic, it is a good idea to plan for a spring and late summer crop.

Garlic stores quite well at room temp or in a cool basement for many months. Hardneck varieties store longer. Soft-necked is easier to braid, but I braid hardneck every year. (You just need a little more determination.)

Cover Crops for Winter:

Cover crops keep soil happily occupied and returns lost nutrients. A brassica mix will winter-kill, and the tender shoots are greatly enjoyed by our rabbits. Rye grain grows excellently for us. It out-competes weeds and is also a particular favorite with the rabbits, but will not winter-kill, so it’s not ideal for no-till beds.

In my opinion, there is no prettier cover crop than buckwheat. It is useful for chicken feed, for drawing pollinators, and is just lovely in bouquets when flowering. Plant in fall when everything else is dying back. Buckwheat will also winter-kill.