Home > Work > A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm
1 " You pay homage when and where you can. I love the smell of the bulb as the earth opens and releases it in harvest, an aroma that only those who grow garlic and handle the bulb and the leaves still fresh from the earth can know.Anyone who gardens knows these indescribable presences--of not only fresh garlic, but onions, carrots and their tops, parsley's piercing signal, the fragrant exultations of a tomato plant in its prime, sweet explosions of basil. They can be known best and most purely on the spot, in the instant, in the garden, in the sun, in the rain. They cannot be carried away from their place in the earth. They are inimitable. And they have no shelf life at all. "
― Stanley Crawford , A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm
2 " Cultivated crops, like words, like language, are things that glide into view out of the murkiness of the past. I think of my words as mine, but the chances are than even after fifty or sixty or seventy years of chewing on them, writing them down, word-processing them as a speaker and as a writer, I won't succeed in putting a single new one into circulation. Same with plants, with crops, as a gardener and farmer. What we're given in words and cultivated plants has been worked over for hundreds of generations before it comes to us, and the chances of our adding to it are very slim. What we add is illusion: each time we're born, the world looks new, is new, which gives us a strange kind of leverage against the weight of accumulated biological and cultural existence, which means for a while, off and on, now and then, under certain circumstances, we believe we are the owners or managers or the franchise operators of this world, not the other way around, and that we have invented almost everything in sight, from the words that drop so easily from our mouths to the plants we grow in our gardens. "
3 " To dream a garden and then to plant it is an act of independence and even defiance to the greater world. "
4 " All human livings in industrial society are ultimately based on agricultural production and mineral extraction. One of the ways these processes are transferred upward and outward is through endless cycles of buying and selling. Which is to say that one cannot live in this kind of world without being involved in these cycles, nearly or remotely. "
