We all have our winter rituals
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Ifelt the Earth move under my feet this week. No, I wasn’t listening to old Carole King records or visiting Wellington. It wasn’t a violent seismic jolt brought on by the pelvic grinding of our planet’s tectonic plates, but an imperceptible tweak in the Earth’s axial tilt, not much more than a tick on a clock as the Winter Solstice came and went.
Good news, my friends! Our hemisphere has turned her face back towards the sun. We’re officially over the hump. Summer’s coming!
OK, perhaps I’m getting a little ahead of myself, but it’s easy to see why our astrologically minded ancestors got so excited about the passing of the shortest day and the longest night. In ancient Scandinavia, they celebrated the Winter Solstice with a 12-day feast. They ate, drank, and offered sacrifices to the gods, praying for good crops the following spring should they make it through the rest of winter without starving.
We all have our winter rituals, although since the invention of the refrigerator and the supermarket, slaughtering, spitroasting, and scoffing an entire cow at a pagan community barbecue is no longer at the top of the list. Instead, we get our heat pumps serviced, dust off our slow cookers, swap salad bowls for soup mugs, ditch pinot gris for pinot noir, and plant garlic.
Garlic is traditionally planted on the shortest day and harvested on the longest. Just press a few plump, organic cloves into a bed of rich, free-draining soil, and come back six months later to fattened bulbs encased in papery pyjamas.
This aromatic allium isn’t difficult to grow, provided you put a little effort into preparing your soil. Source locally grown seed bulbs and make sure the cloves are still firm (give them a gentle squeeze; if they feel soft, eat them instead), and mould-free.
Before planting, work over the ground with a fork, shovel in wellrotted stable manure (or, if you live in the city, a bag of sheep pellets from your local garden centre), and finish with a sprinkle of balanced general garden fertiliser. Keep your plants wellfed with liquid fertiliser in early spring, then ease right off to cure the bulbs before harvest.
A decade ago, my father started chatting to a peripatetic pair of motorcycling Minnesotans at a camping ground in Karamea. He invited them home to stay, as is the Kiwi way, and Beth and Jeff are part of our extended whanau now. They fly here, or we fly there.
Two weeks ago, my husband and I visited them at their home in the Twin Cities.
They live at Lake Como in Saint Paul, where the wide, tree-lined streets are a verdant nirvana of communal lawns, squirrels, hummingbirds, and chipmunks.
At the historic palm-filled Marjorie McNeely Conservatory nearby, there’s even a two-toed sloth named Chloe. She just hangs out, sleeping mostly, impervious to the passing seasons.
Springtime in Saint Paul is paradise, but Beth and Jeff are selling up and moving south to Arizona this month, having had a gutsful of the winter ritual of shovelling a foot of snow off their sidewalk every morning.
The American humourist and billiards champion Robert Byrne quips that ‘‘winter is nature’s way of saying, ‘Up yours’,’’ but the season’s rather more passiveaggressive at my place. Winter doesn’t so much flip the bird as fall at my feet in a melancholic mess of fallen leaves and frostbitten perennials.
Raking up all those leaves is a boring job, especially along the driveway, but if I don’t get on with it soon, they’ll decompose into a muddy slurry, splattering our car with the authentic rural patina that distinguishes country SUVs from Remuera tractors.
Raking leaves, chucking frost cloth over my citrus trees, pulling out stubborn weeds, and sowing broad bean seeds: I have a checklist of chores to knock off before I can officially put my garden to bed and binge watch Netflix indoors instead.
Season four of Orange is the New Black will have to wait, at least until I’ve finished planting my garlic.