This morning's New York Times featured an article titled Secrets of a Garlic Grower. I paid closer attention to it than I might have some other week, in part because I spent last Friday afternoon cleaning somewhere in the neighborhood of five dozen garlic heads.

Prequel (scapes harvested from the growing plants):

From turnbull creek farm

Before (cured garlic waiting to be cleaned):

From turnbull creek farm

After (bulbs ready for market):

From turnbull creek farm

During my shift, I also harvested dragon beans and red onions for the market. For myself, I took home zinnias, black-eyed Susans, "Golden Boy" cherry tomatoes, chard, purple and Genovese basil, green beans, beets, and lettuce.

The tomatoes were a hit, both with the BYM and with his fellow pinickers at a gathering on Sunday. He later told me about someone being surprised at how delicious they were. I am reminded of a stanza from Marge Piercy's The Art of Blessing the Day:

This is the blessing for the first garden tomato:
Those green boxes of tasteless acid the store
sells in January, those red things with the savor
of wet chalk, they mock your fragrant name.
How fat and sweet you are weighing down my palm,
warm as the flank of a cow in the sun.
You are the savor of summer in a thin red skin.

And, yesterday, I came across these lines in Bulky Pick Up Day (Finishing Line Press), a new chapbook by my friend Dawn McDuffie:

A woman takes each ripe tomato,
places it on its belly and bisects it
along its equator until nothing is left
but a little heel with an umbilical scar.

- "What Was On The Table"