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Garlic
To plant the garlic, we wait for a weather window to melt the 6" of snow and ice that Sunday's storm brought. The sheep are more patient than I am; and that is perhaps a matter of their curious taste. The safe thing about growing garlic on a sheep farm is that if the sheep do jump the fence they won't browse the garlic, along with onions, tomatoes and peppers they don't like the taste.
Poem is doing well now that she's turned 13 months. Here she is in a "Down" position (not a "Sit" position, or a "Stop" position while standing) patiently waiting for me. Notice that the ewes behind Poem keep an eye on her; they must always know where a nearby dog is. Everything works and so will the garlic...
Recently 200 pounds of seed garlic were given to me by a grower in Canada who could not plant it because his ground froze. Here I am last week on my Massey tilling manure into the soil where I over-wintered 120 ewes last year. I’m excited about growing garlic again, and this field is lovingly fertile. Snow is forecast tomorrow; but if before the new year we get a weather window warm enough to thaw the ground, we'll plant and have garlic in the Spring, grown strong & sweet thanks to the sheep.
This afternoon Poem and I walked across the garlic field when we went to look at the sheep. As expected I broke through the ice crust with each footfall but surprisingly so did little 29 lb Poem, so fragile in places it was. I love to have fun with my dog and my dog loves to have fun with me--and it was Christmas day--we hipped and hopped breaking the ice like Brooklyn gangstas, like I was Biggy and she was Smalls. We were "goofin," as they said in Flatbush when Frank was king.
The exposed patches of ground, or really of sheep manure, were not frozen but stiff from the temperature that fell with the afternoon light. Where Poem and I broke through the ice crust, the manure underneath was soft, squishy and very plantable. The snow and ice crust functioned as a mulch, and mulch is what garlic grown in cold climates needs to keep it from heaving when the ground freezes. If we're lucky, the snow will mulch the garlic for us. Some days I have to smile.
Today Dominique and I took the clean-up rams out of the two breeding groups and combined the ewes. Clean-up rams (I use two or three per ewe group) are put in the breeding groups after the main breeding rams have been with their ewes for two ovulation cycles, 36 days. Clean-up rams will breed ewes the breeding rams didn't settle; they guard against a possible infertility of the breeding ram. The dates the breeding and clean-up rams go in and out of the breeding group are calendared. I want to know when lambs are due and who the sires are.
Lambing will begin on the 31st of March, 2008 (the rams went in 5 months earlier) and continue through the 27th of May, 2008, 5 months from today which is the duration of a ewe's gestation. Most of the lambs will be born in the first three weeks of April and will have been sired by one of the two breeding rams I used this year (#241 from the Sierra Park line or #378 from the Bullamalita line). Any lamb born after May 4, 2008 will have been sired by the clean-up rams and be considered a 'syndicate lamb' as I won't know for sure which of the clean-up rams sired it. The clean-up rams come from the same sire line (Sierra Park or Bullamalita) as the main breeding ram; even though I won't know the exact sire of a late lamb I will know the genetic line that sired the lamb. That information will determine the breeding of that lamb when it becomes a sheep and is fertile 18 months later. Good record-keeping prevents inbreeding and enhances hybrid vigor in offspring, which means seeing a big healthy lamb at its dam's teat in the Spring..
Sunday, working in ankle deep mud that was a degree above freezing. Look at the iced-over mud at her feet Sunday afternoon as the temperature dropped. Sane people would not have planted garlic this late in the cold year but we are not sane people, we are farmers.
We were blessed by the fact that the field was not visible from the road; we were not seen by people driving by who 'know better' or knew that at any time before the clove had rooted, the ground could freeze hard, then thaw, then freeze again and heave most of the just planted cloves out of the ground.
Farmers are gamblers, we always bet on the weather; yet no matter how good or bad a farmer is, half the time the farmer loses. Good farmers must be good losers or become accountants.
Here Dominique puts a post in to string a row that will guide the planting of the cloves in a straight line along the bed so weeding in the Spring will be easier. "Weeding in the Spring?" did I hear you say, my good optimist, 'as if there will be any garlic growing then to weed.' But farmers must be optimists to wager against the elements for a living as they do and they must be singers to sing over and drown out the voices that question them.
Each bed has 4 stringed rows which are spaced about 12" apart; the garlic cloves are placed in dibbled holes from 6" to 8" apart along the row.
The spacing is theory because at these temperatures you do what you can do, where you can do it, and keep moving to try to stay warm. You don't look back and you keep on singing. Garlic charms. It is the stuff that stops vampires from sucking the life force from the Universe. That tale of garlic's spell is as old as the dibble, the pointed wooden tool by Dominique's left foot.
The dibble was probably man's second tool, being the other end of his first tool, the hammer which was used to break open gathered nuts and to occasionally smash the heads of fat French rats, early delicacies, which were excellent roasted with garlic, or so the Lascaux cave paintings tell us. The dibble is ingenious; it makes a hole that soon covers itself after you punch it in the ground to plant a garlic clove. It works as well today as it did for our Neolithic ancestors; that's what engineers at Monsanto found out after spending several years trying to modify the dibble so they could patent a new and improved version of it, but like the vampires before them they failed. Garlic not only charms, it rules.
During a break from the freezing weather in late December, Dominique planted close to 9,000 cloves of 8 varieties of garlic in about 3400 row feet with a spacing between cloves of 4" to 5". Next, the planted cloves had to be mulched; but where would we get the straw this late in the year, and what would we pay if we could find it. Luckily, these questions were answered before the next hard freeze.Instead of paying $8.00 a bale from a local straw scalper, Dominique got it from Greenmarket farmer, Phil Hoeffner in Montgomery, for $4.00 a bale, delivered. The negotiations were over the phone; she didn't know who we were buying it from until we saw his name on the truck delivering it..."hey, I didn't know I was talking to you"...from then on we were working with family.Here Dominique breaks open a straw bale to mulch the garlic rows; this will help prevent the garlic from heaving-out when the ground freezes, thaws and re-freezes. The mulch will also suppress weed growth in the spring. If the garlic comes up I'll need a bigger truck to get it to market. I'm shopping for one in the price range of what the garlic will bring in, Yankee farmer that I am.
Two weeks ago Dominique and I pulled the rye-straw mulch off the garlic. The shoots were pale, spindly and 2 inches tall, now look at these “little soldiers.” Garlic will grow 4 feet in height and flower in what is called a scape just before harvest in early July.
In the photo, behind the garlic to the left of the nearest silo is a lean-to shed that we call the shepherd’s room; it is also where we dye the yarn. Further left of that you can see the boys hanging out in a barren area (sheep will eat grass down to dirt) around a round bale of hay. This year the grass is slow coming on; it has been cool and dry. But yesterday, after a dry spell of two weeks, it did rain; in a day or two, when the soil temperatures rise, the grass will begin to grow faster than the sheep can eat it and at pasture they’ll be.
On the horizon, you see silos which are next to the barn where the girls are lambing; they are due to finish up Sunday. On Monday or Tuesday, with eager Poem, we’ll slowly drive the ewes and their baby lambs down the hill to the green pasture at the left of the garlic field where they will graze through the summer months. We got through another winter.
Summertime
And the livin' is easy,
Fish are jumpin'
And the cotton is high.
Oh yo' daddy's rich
An' yo' ma is good lookin'
So hush, little baby,
Don't you cry.
George & Ira Gershwin
Porgy and Bess