TJ had a dream. He often spoke of it. The two of us held long conversations about the dream. In the dream he was planting garlic, lots of garlic, rows and rows of garlic, thousands, tens of thousands of heads of garlic. And in the dream each year the tens of thousands would double and he would be Mr. Garlic, King of the garlic growers. He wouldn’t sell a single bulb until he had a hundred thousand!

 

Maybe ten years ago, TJ helped me plant a field of garlic and he got the bug and planted a small field of his own on a property his father owned off 17K. It was a small backyard plot, and the dirt was dark from years of decaying leaves and from being in a swampy depression. TJ ran landscape fabric and burned holes in the fabric to plant the cloves through, and he did a lot of things right, but the yard was shaded by large oaks and when it came time to weed the holes (even landscape fabric needs weeding) he lost out to distraction and the call of life for a young man. His crop was not a complete failure, but it was weak.

 

TJ bought a garlic planting machine from China. We couldn’t read the instructions. They were in Chinese. That did not help. It did not work in our bony, stony soil and must have been designed for planting in sand. He sold it. 

 

He tried planting in a nearby neighbor’s field and worked his butt off planting, but once again the weeds were a determining factor. 

 

He thought what he really needed was some bona fide Orange County black dirt. That was his real dream – to get some black dirt. Life went on. He got married, had a sweet baby, changed professions, became a land surveyor. Through it all, he kept alive his dream of growing garlic, of getting some black dirt and doing it right. 

 

TJ called me early this summer. “Hey, I got some black dirt,” he said. “Want to come in with me and plant some of your garlic down there?”

 

He rented one acre of black dirt down one mile from Pine Island in the lower portion of the county’s black dirt region about a mile from the Jolly Onion Restaurant, once a fixture of the region, now closed. 

 

We discussed the specifics. I suggested he get the soil tilled right now and plant it in a cover crop so he can till the cover crop under a few weeks before planting. We had no way of transporting tractors and things, but he did get the landlady to mow the acre he was renting, and he talked a local farmer down there into tilling it and scaping off the thicker detritus. His investment was substantial. He started buying garlic to plant. Good stuff, German white and some German red. Expensive. He bought new landscape fabric to cut down on the possibility of cross contaminating pathogens between fields. 

 

He was working his surveying job, studying for complete surveying creds and caring for a baby, so he had few open slots during the week to plant his field. He started planting early in October. Wednesdays were his days. His wife helped.  They had their afternoons in the black dirt field. The sun was out. They ran their fabric, burned the holes, planted, thousand by thousand. Eleven thousand in all. All by hand. All on their knees.

 

 By the time I got there, his first plantings were up and green and looking very impressive.

 

I have never spent much time in the black dirt. It’s a mysterious place, full of onions and Polish people and mythology, Native American hunting grounds and Jimmy Sturr’s Polka Band.

 

The little field road to his one acre is on top of a black dirt road, hilled up from the drainage ditches, and it’s like riding on top of a Dutch dike, water on both sides, and the landscape has the feel of the great potato field polders in the north of Holland where the water is pumped out of the fields more often than it is pumped on them. When I asked a black dirt farmer about advice planting in the black dirt, she responded, after a very difficult summer with our heavy rains, “get land that doesn’t flood.”

 

We don’t know if that little bit of black dirt, that little field with ditches on every side, will flood nor how it will respond to a drought, but we are in it.

It’s encouraging for America to find young people willing to put in the time and sweat necessary to live their dreams, especially in agriculture, the ficklest of maidens. Does TJ need to buy another garlic planting machine, this time with instructions in English? It might work in the black dirt. I’ll keep you posted.