It’s October in the South. We will soon be free from days full of sunshine and comfortable temperatures. My gardening will come to a halt…. just as soon as I finish transplanting daffodils, sifting my compost, and putting my garlic cloves in the ground. Garlic is well-suited to fall planting. Plenty of rain and cool temperatures will get the cloves off to a good start. The standard gardening wisdom is to plant the biggest cloves to get the best bulbs which are always found on the outermost edge of a garlic bulb. The smaller, interior ones are eaten or used for something else.
I can’t help but wonder every year as I plant the bigger cloves, why the smaller ones are not put in the ground. They look, smell, and taste like the bigger ones. I’m pretty sure that garlic bulbs form from the inside out, so these smaller bulbs would be the first to develop, the first-born. They remain small as the other bulbs form around them, squished into place by sibling pressure.
I grew up in a small town that made me feel like that, squished into place. I graduated from high school with kids I had known since kindergarten. Some of them were held in place by large extended families; some were held by events beyond their making. It was a fly trap town. Enlarging my circle of friends and experiences, I finally landed with people and places where I had the opportunity to “live up to my potential”. I’ve had some help along the way, as well as a good portion of luck in removing my binders and blinders.
This year I will make room in the garden for these smaller bulbs just to see how they do. Just to see if they can live up to their potential.
Perhaps all they lack is opportunity. And luck.
~Karen Smith
I love that are open to experimentation …. Both with the garlic and with life in general. What fun there is to he had (and new richness in our lives) when we leave ourselves open to change!
Karen, I love how you used garlic bulbs to illustrate how people’s potential can be squished by by surrounding circumstances. Here’s to removing obstacles of all kinds to human and plant potential
When I first started reading this I could intuit that the story was the ground work for an analogy. Such is gardening, such are the layers of soil that both nurture and nature the next generation. I feel so fortunate that you were able to squeeze out of the bundle of garlic by using the Gardner’s upper hand, by being dedicated to growth and doing the ground work that you know is essential to fruition. There is a lot to be said about gardening. Thank You for sharing your garden!