A garlic testament : seasons on a small New Mexico farm
(Book - Regular Print)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 240-241).

From his small farm high in the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the award-winning author of Mayordomo explores the vivid mysteries of earth, wind, water, seed, bulb, and stalk. Autumn tillings, parakeet-blue winter days, and rich, hectic weeks in summer when garlic, basil, flowers, and vegetables are harvested for markets in Taos and Santa Fe--each season transforms both the landscape and the remarkable plant, top-setting garlic, that has become Stanley Crawford's passion.

Sizing up the gap between textbook farming and learning from the land itself, Crawford here explores the intimate, exhilarating relationship that develops between a farmer and the earth that slowly yields to his labors. Crawford was an "over-educated" Anglo writer who came to live in a small Hispanic village in northern New Mexico. There he learned from neighbors how to shape adobe bricks from mud and with them build a house; learned the complex, humbling arts of plowing.

and fertilizing. Discovering the original life cycle of garlic, selling his organic produce in Los Alamos, where the first atomic bombs were constructed, and raising a magpie are some of the adventures of this contemporary Thoreau. These are woven into a wry, lyrical, and thoroughly engrossing exploration of what it means to live on, and with, the land. Threaded with the history and culture of a plant prized since ancient times, A Garlic Testament is soul food not just.

for gardeners, but for all who hunger after a way of life that nourishes both body and spirit.