It’s just a matter of time and the ground will be frozen solid. That part we know. When that happens, is anyone’s guess. I remember the world from the Sixty’s when the ponds were frozen by Thanksgiving and the best ice skating was on those few days when the ice was black and no snow had fallen. We scarred the ice, mercilessly, with our blades.

In our growing zone, November is the month to plant garlic. Garlic is a nine month crop, like babies. I try to get in the field as early as possible, after the garlic festivals are over and the road stand winds down and the days are shorter, but delays are the name of the game. I never seem to get there – like the dream of the runner who can’t quite reach a receding, vanishing finish line.

Everything was running smoothly until I tried to hook up the field rototiller to the 3010 John Deere diesel. The clip holding the power take-off shaft to the power takeoff on the tractor did not clip on, the clip broken and frozen, and so the shaft could slip off if positioned wrong. Things went fine and I tilled the field once and had begun the second, the finished tilling -- the pass with the machine that makes the soil nice and soft and plantable -- when I began daydreaming and I lifted the tiller too high on a turn in the field, and the shaft slipped out and bang, I bent the shaft.

Meanwhile, for nearly a week, we have been cracking the garlic. To plant garlic, we need to break apart the heads into their many cloves. The smaller cloves, and damaged or diseased cloves, are set aside. Fingers get raw, blisters appear where none have ever been seen. A shot of Hennessey helps.

Care is taken to keep the various types of garlic organized and segregated: The Polish Carpathian, the German Red and the White Continental. My fourth category, Mystery Garlic, has already suffered the loss of its lineage and might be any of three types including Russian Red, or Hungarian Hot. Bad note keeping. It’s a big seller.

So, the cloves are all boxed and labeled and now, with the soil ready, I dump a couple thousand cloves into a warm water tub with liquid kelp and kelp powder. I soak them overnight. People ask, why? Folklore claims the kelp, an elongated-growing sea plant, will somehow transfer its “stretch” genes to the garlic, which is not likely and not, in the end, why I do it, this being screamingly unscientific, like saying drinking Yoo-hoo will make you better at yodeling. But, I do it to jumpstart the root growth from the basal plate, the kelp a fine fertilizer, even if it does not transmit DNA, and the warm water is known to kill certain spoors. I drain the garlic and give it a second soak.

The second soak is in hot water with a solution of industrial peroxide called OxiDate 2.0 which I dilute 100 to one. I soak the cloves for ten minutes, or longer. The OxiDate is a disinfectant and kills plant mites and fusarium fungi. Much like good gardeners will dip their specialty bulbs, lilies, etcetera, in a Clorox dip to clean them before replanting, the OxiDate is recommended by the plant specialists at Cornell University for this pre-planting cleanse. If I had more land to rotate my crops more efficiently, this would be less necessary, and maybe one day I will have a crop rotation plan which works. But not yet.

Drain the OxiDate and I am off to the fields. The river is flowing below the old pasture and I hear the kill on the rapids. A few flocks of blackbirds pass over head. As they are planted, the rows of garlic are marked with color-coded stakes.

The sun’s out, the Oxi-soak is done. I here go plant the next thousand.