Winter Solstice

I don't want to speak too soon but this might be the year I finally make my peace with Winter. I hate being cold, and I have a tendency to get the Winter Blues if I don't see the sun for more than a few days in a row. But I feel like spending time in my garden nudges me a little more every year towards appreciating Winter. 

This year I was planning a Fall planting of garlic, but I was late. It ended up going in the ground on the eve of Winter Solstice. In our climate garlic can go in as early as April, but there is an old tradition about planting garlic at Winter Solstice and harvesting it at Summer Solstice. I do love the symetry of this, and so I didn't feel too bad about planting later than I had planned. 

Finding a bit of free time when it's not raining can be hard this time of year. I got the garlic in with a series of steps taking around 30 minutes each. Little bite sized pieces of free time, over the course of a week. One day, I dug up half the kumera. The next day I dug up the second half. Another day I dug the soil up, removing any weeds or stray kumera roots. I raked most of the fallen leaves from my Japanese Maple and buried them in the soil to slowly compost. I dug the finished compost out of the bottom of my compost bin and dug that into the soil. A few days later, I added a bag of store bought compost and I scattered in my orgainc fertilisers: dynamic lifter and sheep pellets. 

The next day I got out my stash of grocery store garlic and started separating out the cloves. You can buy garlic for growing from a garden centre, but the stuff at the grocery store works too. In New Zealand, it has to be local garlic, not imported from over seas (I have hear that the forgein garlic undergoes some kind of processing that makes it not viable.) Sort through the cloves, picking the biggest and best for planting, makes a nice peaceful rainy day job. They should have no rotten spots, bruises, or broken skins. 

The chosen cloves

Once I had my cloves all picked out, I just had to wait for a bit of time when it wasn't pouring down rain. This came a couple days later, on the day before Winter Solstice. I had an entire square meter to plant, which was enough for nearly 30 cloves at 15 cm diagonal spacing. For us garlic lovers, this is really not too much garlic. 

It felt really good tucking these beautiful cloves in the ground in a precious moment of sunshine on a crisp Winter morning. I'm starting to understand that there is a lot of beauty to be found this time of year. You just have to look a little harder.

A clove of garlic tucked into the soil and ready to be covered up