October is the perfect time to get garlic in the ground. Well, mid-November is the new early October apparently. Some things only happen when they’re meant to, or in this instance when the obstacles finally give up against the persistence of the farmers.

I don’t remember who told me this, but I once heard that a good farmer wasn’t someone who was skilled or talented, but rather was the person who keeps taking the punches and punches back last. That seemed to be the idea behind wrapping up this year’s fieldwork. As we got our potatoes harvested and the plot tilled and turned over, we went through three tractors and a handful of other tools that kept breaking or malfunctioning, keeping us from being as productive as we would like. 

With time against us, and weather cooperating about half of the days we had to do the work, we found time to fight with our malfunctioning plastic mulch layer—only to spend a following Saturday fixing the rows where the plastic had pulled out of the ground. 

Another week later and we finally found the time to get the garlic itself in the ground, but wait—the ground was too dry now and we couldn’t break through the hard pack to sow the cloves.

Another week went by and with anxieties spiking every time we looked at the buckets of seed garlic in the foyer, we finally had a bit of rain to soften the soil and get the planting done.

No more messing around. We called in the big guns and enlisted the help of my wife’s father to bring his fancy new tractor over and drag our transplanter around. Shiny new tractor on site, and the tractor fan club had to get involved. Both boys came running out to help with the new toy. The oldest wanted to ride in the chair on the back, but it turned out he was still a bit short to reach the ground in order to plant seed. The youngest went straight for the cab of the tractor where the buddy seat called his name, and “Poppa” promptly hooked him up with a cartoon on his phone while the tractor chugged along. 

It wasn’t too long before both boys were entertaining Poppa while he drove. Chelsea and I rode on the back, planting as fast as we could. We went on until we ran out of seed and daylight. Not wanting to give up when we were so close, we adjourned to the basement to peel more garlic for the remaining seed we needed to cover the plot. 

Following church the next day, we went back to it, finishing the last two rows and bringing in round bales to top mulch all the shallowly planted garlic. It only took us the better part of two months to put all the pieces together, but our last big bit of crop work was in the books. 

The way out here we take a lot of punches—some expected, some less so—but beaten and battered, we keep punching back until the Good Lord grants us victory. We might still lose after all this if our seed doesn’t come up in the spring, but we can’t say we didn’t try. We’re attempting a new method this year by planting in the plastic mulch before using hay mulch. Ideally this will keep our garlic free of all grass and weeds and allow it to get more of the nutrients in the ground than the weeds would steal. We even had the idea to double down on our creativity and plant next year’s onions in between the rows of garlic. After the winter, we can pull the heavy straw off the top of the plastic, rather than just using it to mulch the spaces between rows, although it would be its own weed barrier over and around thousands of tasty onions growing alongside the garlic. 

Will it work? Who knows? There are a lot of punches we haven’t been hit with yet, but we’ll keep on planting and making adjustments until we get it just right and come out on top.