How much garlic do you eat in a year?

Figuring out the math of the pandemic garden.

Last year, for a brief while, the following fairly (if not completely accurately) described my life: I was an editor at a food magazine with a vacation house in Maine.

My experience of that life never looked like quite what you might think it did, and it certainly did not last. But there were some weeks in late summer and fall when we would bounce back and forth between work and school in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and weekends in Hope, enjoying the fading warmth and the sunflowers and asters and goldenrod that came with it. As temperatures dipped in Maine and the trees started to turn, the garden finished it's growing, and the late crops were ready to pick: the collards and Brussels sprouts that were picked frozen, the squash I had watched slowly swell all summer long. The corn grew wonderfully last year, but it was too starchy by the time I was able to harvest it. And in the midst of all of that there was garlic too, which is almost a requirement to grow in a Maine garden. Being able to bring a bag—or bags—full of Hope back to Brooklyn felt magical, and I daydreamed about having dinner parties during the frozen winter and being able to bust out a stash of homegrown beans, sauerkraut, or backyard apple cider. It also got me thinking about growing food in a different way: I wanted to be able to have a garden during the Maine summer months, but to plan it in such a way that I could eat from that garden throughout the Brooklyn winter too.

By that time the fridge was stuffed full of frost-bitten greens, but stash of homegrown garlic was already dwindling. The problem with having even a sizable amount of a very good crop—especially a storage crop like garlic or onions—is that you no longer cook with that ingredient as you would if it were from the store. Instead of a bit of garlic here and there to flavor a dish, I found myself drifting toward making things in which garlic was the star, not a supporting role. Why one clove when you can use five? Why flavoring something with garlic when you can just have the flavor of garlic? There’s no better way to make the most of something that took all of winter, spring, and summer to grow than to really show it off. But as I sliced and smashed and chopped my way through garlic crop 2019, the time to plant garlic crop 2020 came around, and the big question in my mind was, how much garlic do you eat in a year?

I still haven't landed on a perfect answer, but I did manage to get some hard-neck bulbs late last fall (I cannot abide by $20/pound seed garlic, so I buy some good local stuff to plant), and while I planted them later than I would have liked to, everything seems to be working out: the pointy green leaves somehow managed to come up out of the still-cold dirt, despite the long winter, and there are now nearly 70 garlic bulbs slowly growing in one straw-and-seaweed-mulched block of the garden. Will it be enough, as a far more serious homesteader-like couple I know around here, to achieve garlic security next year?

Needless to say, a lot has changed since last fall, both on a personal and global level. My magazine job disappeared, I cooked all of the garlic (and the squash and beans and greens), we left New York in mid March thinking we’d get out before things got bad, not realizing we were already sick. Despite being wildly sick, we were lucky to get through COVID-19 largely unscathed, but as of right now 217,000 people around the world officially did not, and the numbers keep climbing. With a global pandemic coloring even the simplest life decisions, questions of how much food will last how long have suddenly taken on a whole new meaning. I want to know not only how much garlic I might eat in a year, but how much of everything as well. Is it even remotely possible to grow it all, or at least a significant portion?

I wrote my storage-crop manifesto in January, long before any lockdowns in the U.S. were at all conceivable—which is to say I was already going down this prepper-garden road long before coronavirus became a domestic concern. But as I slowly begin to plant lettuces and greens and onions alongside the rows of newly sprouted garlic, I’m thinking more in terms of self-sufficiently than I ever have before. In the past, gardening for me has been more a mean to acquire the food I think of as luxuries—a way to get my hands on (hopefully) large amounts of peas, fava beans, tomatoes, and fresh herbs without paying farmers-market prices for the privilege of eating them. There’s the beauty and joy of a garden too, of coaxing a plant from seed to harvest and on to the plate. As many people are finding out in quarantine, as they regrow scallion bottoms and carrot tops and other kitchen scraps, it just feels good to be around plants, to take care of them. If you have enough of them, they can give you a lot back in the way of food too, which is quite the bonus.

My garden space has expanded every spring for the better part of a decade as I’ve either built new beds and boxes, or as I moved from apartment to house to cabin. This year will be no different. I think I’ve finally figured out why the one large bed in the garden never yields anything (located right next to the neighboring blueberry barren, the soil was likely super acidic), and I am also going to dig up some of the grassy alleys that run between some of the beds that were laid out by the previous owners of the house. I measured out the peas I planted on April 1 (not knowing it would snow three times during the course of the month, including one blizzard), and there’s 30 feet of them, which should yield 30 pounds of peas of all goes well. Will I get that much? Will I be able to freeze bags full to eat during the winter? Or will my pea-eating be limited to what it is during most summers (yes, peas are a summer crop in Maine, a fact that I have finally come to terms with): a snack eaten off of the vine, and maybe two or three truly pea-centered meals?

My track record of getting enough as a gardener has never been all that great. Gardening is usually, ultimately, a question of not enough or too much, with very few things falling in between. This year, I’m determinedly trying to get enough of the things that will last. Enough dry beans, green peas, and field peas. Enough turnips, pickling cucumbers, squash, flint corn, and garlic too. I’m growing lettuce as well, and tomatoes (for eating fresh and, hopefully, canning too), and other things intended to eat immediately after they are picked, not months after the fact. But in many ways I’m coming around the tradition of gardening that ruled in many places for so long, but especially here where the growing season is short and the winters drag on and on: to plant things that spend all of the warm months to mature, and lock the taste and nutrients of the fleeting summer in a shelf-stable package. For so long that’s how people had to think about food in order to survive, and it so happens that a lot of the crops best suited for that kind of sustenance farming are delicious too.

There was a story the other day in Montgomery Advertiser about Gee’s Bend, the famed black quilting town in Alabama, which was ostensibly about how the island community is grappling with coronavirus. But the larger subject was how the town’s unique black has been maintained both through its craft traditional and Gee’s Bend’s relative isolation. The line that stuck out to me, unsurprisingly, was a quote from local Mary Margaret Pettway, who said, “Believe it or not in the ‘70s when the recession hit, we knew nothing about it because we were still raising hogs, growing gardens, raising chickens.” Having a garden might not insulate anyone so completely right now, but it certainly could help string things along.

Now seems like the perfect time to again embrace what is in many ways a shared (although highly, highly varied) past of self-sufficiency that many of us aren’t all that far removed from. My own grandfather was around 10, in the late 1920s, when he used to spend summers picking raspberries on s small farm in Michigan owned by relatives, where on the back porch “hung the seed corn for the next year in neat strings like a narrow venetian blind” as he later wrote. There’s nothing romantic about growing your own food when not growing your own food means going hungry, but I think it’s about time that more of us who are able to (ie, have the space) give it more of a shot.

The other day, Story was helping me transplant some onions from last year that never amounted to much, and as we dug through the dirt to find what were sometimes very small bulbs, she had an idea. “Instead of going to the grocery store, why don’t we grow all of our own food?” she breezily suggested, like it was no thing. I laughed, and told her that we would try to do our best.