Product Description

From his New Mexico mountain home, award-winning author Stanley Crawford writes about growing garlic and selling it. The book is a favourite not only for its assemblage of garlic and farming lore but for what it tells us about how to live a satisfying life. This beloved book, first published in 1992, is now available only from the University of New Mexico Press.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1522275 in Books
• Published on: 1993-03-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Amazon.com
Unless you're a vampire, you know that garlic is a critical element in good eating. For most people, this knowledge comes from happy experience with garlic-laced cuisines (and what notable culinary tradition is without it?), not book learning, and not working the fields to produce the aromatic bulb. For Stanley Crawford, the love of garlic comes from both scientific study and three decades of labor in the field to produce the exquisite bulbs, knowing full well that "if you grow good garlic people will love you for it." Crawford deserves similar affection for Garlic Testament, a lyrical memoir of his work as a farmer in northern New Mexico, one that combines autobiography, gardening hints, and a quiet philosophy of life. "Farming and writing are both labors ... conducted on flat planes in relative solitude," he writes, but in this fine book--which compares well with the work of fellow farmer-writer Wendell Berry--Crawford opens his gate and invites our company. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly
More than 20 years ago, Crawford ( Mayordomo ) and his wife Rosemary settled in a mountain valley an hour outside of Santa Fe. They made the adobe bricks with which they built a house and started both to raise a family and to work what is now a four-acre farm. While the author writes that they "were a little too old to be hippies, though we tried," the couple's turning to the land was a thoughtful, considered move. This elegant and unsentimental account of how Crawford learned to grow his principal crop, garlic, and what that process has revealed about himself and his place in the world is probing. An eloquent paean to physical effort and to the land he cares for and depends on, his chronicle is a treasure trove of planting lore, from the autumn planting of garlic cloves to the winter-long "hibernation," the sighting of first shoots in spring, the formation of seed stalks in early summer, the harvesting soon after, and the less satisfying process, to him, of selling his produce, including statice and squash, at farmers' markets in Santa Fe and Los Alamos. Crawford's keen observations, penned in well-hewn prose, are as reflectively nurtured and pungently powerful as his crop of choice.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A contemplative, ``overeducated'' writer turned small-time farmer tells of his adventures planting and harvesting garlic on a semi-arid plot of land in New Mexico. This fine memoir takes up where Crawford's superb ode to farming, Mayordomo (1988), left off. Crawford divides his narrative according to the seasons: autumn is for planting; winter is for waiting; spring is for hoeing; and summer is for the hectic harvesting of garlic, basil, flowers, and vegetables. In chapters with such cryptic headings as ``Uprightness is All,'' ``Garlic Ghettos,'' ``The Flying Clove,'' and ``Pyrotechnics,'' he delineates different aspects of living on the land, interspersing lucid descriptions of apparently mundane chores with meditations on the mysteries of life. Crawford's prose is always deliciously spare and understated: ``Winds arriving late in the day...the vultures are circling closer and closer to their roost and readying themselves to drop, with darkness itself, into their dead trees at the very last moment of light.'' At times his musings seem a bit precious (``[farming] does not wash me clean of my share of privilege as a citizen of the wealthiest and most consumingly rapacious country in the world, but through this labor I know...what it is to live that life with windows on no other''), and his descriptions of certain aspects of farming--such as his decision to switch from cottonmeal-seed fertilizer to synthetic fertilizer to animal manure--go on and on. It would have been nice, too, if Crawford had included more on the history and culture of garlic. Somewhat self-conscious and static in spots, but, still, an evocative book written in clean, often startlingly beautiful prose. (Illustrations.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Amazingly well written
This is one of the best-written books that I have ever read. Each word is well-chosen, effective, and yet easy to read. At one point in the book, he alludes that he has written poetry previously. Each of the 39 chapters is a few pages long, presenting a brief essay on something related to garlic farming in New Mexico. There's an obvious love and care that he gives to his work (both garlic farming and writing), and he's able to show respect for others who have not chosen this path. The book also presents some information about how garlic is grown, but it's by no means a gardening book. It's a descriptive story of the cycles of the growing season. Like in his other excellent book, Mayordomo, the author also shares his community with us - talking about how farming, farmers markets, irrigation, and such intertwine a community, even one that contains members who originally went there to "get away from it all."

The Courage to Follow Your Dreams - to Nowhere?
When Henry David Thoreau left the comforts of civilization to build his own house with his own hands and deliberately live close to nature, his experience at Walden Pond became a classic in American literature. Even today, many of us trapped in the mundane horrors of urban life long to escape, as he did, to a small plot of land somewhere outside the realms of commerce, overcommercialization, and petty-minded consumerism.

Novelist Stanley Crawford had the courage to do more than dream about it. He left California for the rigorous, simple life of a New Mexico garlic farmer and, like Thoreau, has written a wise and thought-provoking book about his experiences. His account spans a year in the life of garlic, tying topics as diverse as the nuclear bomb and the challenge of maintaining community to the rhythms of building one's own house from adobe and learning to plant and harvest responsibly.

After closing the cover of this book, I was ready to drive to New Mexico and seek out Crawford in the Farmer's Market, to buy my own bulbs of top-setting garlic and somehow bring some of the beauty of his life into my own. I may never stand in Santa Fe behind his pickup, buying a woven garland of organic garlic to hang in my kitchen, or perhaps I will travel there and stammer some foolish words about his writing as I hand him a handful of crumbled dollar bills. In some sense, the physical journey has become irrelevant: Crawford's New Mexico has already illumined my heart and wakened me to the rhythms of my own life. I don't have the strength or the patience to tend a field or a garden, manufacture adobe or create a home, brick by brick. But I, too, have a place in the world, and eyes to see--A Garlic Testament is one of those books that wakes us from habitual slumber and reminds us, as Thoreau so aptly put it, to advance confidently in the directions of our dreams, and to put the foundations under our castles in the air.

Excellent resource for growing garlic & market gardening
I've enjoyed this book for several years and often suggest it to people wanting to grow garlic or sell at farmers' markets. It is an excellent resource, providing a first-hand experience in both garlic, small-scale farming, and direct marketing in an easy-to-read format. For people who enjoy plants, this book reads like a novel as we follow the author and his thoughts through the season. I find it quite representative of life on a small farm, with interesting philosophical perspectives on life, family values, farming, and relationship between the farm and the community. It is easy to identify with the grower and I eagerly looked forward to the next chapter. Each chapter captures the picture and thoughts of a particular time, yet the growth of the crop and its place in the larger picture provides continuity between chapters. Highly recommended and enjoyable. Technically accurate regarding garlic cultivation. Good insight into small-scale farming in New Mexico.