
When I first moved to North Hyde Park, VT my wife kept a small vegetable garden and I helped her with it when I could. My wife Tina is an expert gardener. Even though she never had any formal training in horticulture, she
can grow just about anything and has beautiful expansive plant and flower gardens here and in Florida. In 2015 I started growing garlic.
I was working full-time as a rural mail carrier on the Wells River/ Newbury route. With a 130-mile round trip to work, an 85-mile route and some long days, I needed to grow something like garlic that didn’t require a lot of attention.
I started with a little over two hundred of six varieties. Five years later, I grew over one thousand. In 2022 I planted over two thousand of three varieties.
The next summer was extremely wet and most of my garlic bulbs
were smaller than normal. It’s hard to market small garlic, but I still sold some and gave away a lot to family and friends. Last year I decided to grow less and
better garlic, mostly for our own use. In November, I planted 165 Russian
Red, a little over 100 Northern White, and 58 Music that I got from 4 Corners Farm in South Newbury VT. I recently harvested them and they are now
hanging in my barn drying.
Not long after I started growing garlic, a woodchuck got into my wife’s vegetable garden. The country boy way of handling that would be to send them into the next world. But my wife would have none of that, so I put
up a fence. The woodchuck dug under the fence. I kept filling the holes with rocks and he kept digging around them. Eventually the woodchuck won and we found it was easier to buy our vegetables from local farms. There’s a woodchuck hole right in the middle of my garlic patch.
Every October, after the woodchuck has hibernated for the winter, I rototill right over its hole. Every summer, after the garlic has started growing,
the woodchuck digs out through into my patch again. It doesn’t bother me
though because it never touches the garlic.
The only thing we have growing for food now besides the garlic, is rhubarb, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries and apples.
Tina started planting blueberry bushes about fifteen years ago and kept adding a few more, year after year, so now we have thirty-four of them. A
lot of the bushes are still maturing, but we can usually pick a couple quarts a day during peak season. We have a big wild blackberry patch just beyond my woodpile. Tina spends hours picking and making blackberry jam. She makes several cases of blackberry jam to eat and sell.
The raspberries are done for the year. I picked the last handfuls of blueberries the first week of August and the blackberries are on the wane.
I will be processing my garlic in September after it is well dried, pulling out the biggest cloves to replant and preparing the rest for winter
storage. And then we will be eating fresh apple pie for breakfast. With a thick slice of cheddar cheese, of course. I am still a Vermont Yankee after all.
Ken Batten grew up on a small sheep farm in West Topsham VT. He was a logging contractor, soldier and rural mail carrier.
He now lives in North Hyde Park VT with his wife Tina-Marie. Ken can be contacted at kenbatvt@gmail.com or PO Box 5, N Hyde Park, VT 05665
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