A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm

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Summary: The farmer's life.....
Review: Anyone who enjoys whole foods cookery, herbal healing, and organic gardening will appreciate Crawford's observations. Those with a philosophical bent will appreciate them even more. His reflections on a life lived close to nature are a bit like those of Thoreau or Jefferson, but Crawford appears to also be very much the guy who brings fresh produce to your local farmer's market.

Few of us have probably given much thought to the growing of garlic bulbs, which really consist of "cloves" that can be divided and planted or used to season everything from marinara sauce to stir fries. You might have noticed the green sprouts that begin to emerge from cloves of garlic kept too long in your refrigerator, but Crawford suggests garlic plants are difficult to grow because their life course is different from that of many other plants. Garlics have adapted to life in stressful places where rainfall is not always forthcoming but when they need moisture, they need moisture. To avoid death, the bulbs spend a good part of the year "resting" or dormant. In a chapter called "Waiting" Crawford says that's exactly what the garlic farmer does. Much of the year, garlic like other bulbed plants are in hiding, and the farmer must be patient and wait until they are ready for the harvest.

But Crawford's interaction with plants isn't only about garlic. He relates how he "tasted the landscape" as a child in his native California-peeling and chewing the white pulp of anise growing by the side of the road in winter; sucked the syrup of nasturtiums, smelled the pepper tree berries, and searched the orchids for loquats, limes, and mandarin oranges. Today, children are not so fortunate. Pollution, chemicals, other noxious matter have made much of the landscape dangerous. Crawford toyed with both conventional and organic farming. He says he wishes to ask those who enquire whether his products for sell at the weekly market are "organic" if they lead organic lives. Do they earn their money in organic ways. He says, "Perhaps in the poisonous desert of the city there is little else you can do besides seek out what you hope is "pure" food. In addition to being informative and philosophical, Crawford's book is provocative.

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Summary: Amazingly well written
Review: This is one of the best-written books that I have ever read. Each word is well-chosen, effective, and yet easy to read. At one point in the book, he alludes that he has written poetry previously. Each of the 39 chapters is a few pages long, presenting a brief essay on something related to garlic farming in New Mexico. There's an obvious love and care that he gives to his work (both garlic farming and writing), and he's able to show respect for others who have not chosen this path. The book also presents some information about how garlic is grown, but it's by no means a gardening book. It's a descriptive story of the cycles of the growing season. Like in his other excellent book, Mayordomo, the author also shares his community with us - talking about how farming, farmers markets, irrigation, and such intertwine a community, even one that contains members who originally went there to "get away from it all."

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Summary: The Courage to Follow Your Dreams - to Nowhere?
Review: When Henry David Thoreau left the comforts of civilization to build his own house with his own hands and deliberately live close to nature, his experience at Walden Pond became a classic in American literature. Even today, many of us trapped in the mundane horrors of urban life long to escape, as he did, to a small plot of land somewhere outside the realms of commerce, overcommercialization, and petty-minded consumerism.

Novelist Stanley Crawford had the courage to do more than dream about it. He left California for the rigorous, simple life of a New Mexico garlic farmer and, like Thoreau, has written a wise and thought-provoking book about his experiences. His account spans a year in the life of garlic, tying topics as diverse as the nuclear bomb and the challenge of maintaining community to the rhythms of building one's own house from adobe and learning to plant and harvest responsibly.

After closing the cover of this book, I was ready to drive to New Mexico and seek out Crawford in the Farmer's Market, to buy my own bulbs of top-setting garlic and somehow bring some of the beauty of his life into my own. I may never stand in Santa Fe behind his pickup, buying a woven garland of organic garlic to hang in my kitchen, or perhaps I will travel there and stammer some foolish words about his writing as I hand him a handful of crumbled dollar bills. In some sense, the physical journey has become irrelevant: Crawford's New Mexico has already illumined my heart and wakened me to the rhythms of my own life. I don't have the strength or the patience to tend a field or a garden, manufacture adobe or create a home, brick by brick. But I, too, have a place in the world, and eyes to see--A Garlic Testament is one of those books that wakes us from habitual slumber and reminds us, as Thoreau so aptly put it, to advance confidently in the directions of our dreams, and to put the foundations under our castles in the air.