Peppers, Part 2

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, datura, Sensation cosmos, French marigolds; grape leaves dead and dropping, apricot leaves dropping.

Beyond the walls and fences: Clammy weed, stickleaf, chamisa, broom senecio, golden hairy and purple asters; leaves on Virginia creeper killed by cold temperatures; Russian olive dropping leaves and uncovering clusters of berries; leaves on blue gilia and leatherleaf globemallow turning yellow.

In my yard, looking east: Winecup mallow, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, Rose Queen salvia, Shirley poppies; snowball leaves turning red; Japanese barberry leaves turning bright orange; sidalcea leaves turning yellow.

Looking south: Floribunda roses; first ripe raspberries of the season; cold temperatures killed the zinnias.

Looking west: Calamintha; leaves on Rumanian sage, Mönch aster, David phlox, Silver king artemisia and chives turning yellow; leaves on caryopteris turning yellow and dropping.

Looking north: Chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum; catalpa leaves turned brown and dropping; Bradford pear leaves turned dark red; cold temperatures killed yellow cosmos.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, nicotiana, impatiens, moss rose; tomatoes ripening, peppers drying.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Rained day and night Wednesday; after days of temperatures falling below freezing, we got our first frost Saturday morning; 10:45 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Red or green turns out to be more than a trick question sprung on visitors. Habits of taste may have been determined by the pepper plant’s growing cycle.

There are some 25 species of peppers, of which most eaten in this part of the world are some variant of Capsicum annuum derived from a selection or hybrid developed by Fabien Garcia at New Mexico State University. His inspiration was the Anaheim, developed for a California cannery around 1900. His first release, New Mexico Number 9 in 1921, was aimed at providing a uniformly sized, predictably mild pepper for commercial canners that would appeal to Anglos and could be grown around Hatch.

Peppers, of course, had been grown in northern New Mexico long before Garcia was born. In the 1830's, Josiah Gregg said red pepper “enters into nearly every dish at every meal” in Santa Fé while chile verde was considered “one of the great luxuries.”

A hundred years later chile had become one of the few cash crops in the Española valley. People would take their ristras into Abiquiú or Española where Bond and Nohl examined them carefully before accepting them for credit. They shipped the chiles north on the Denver and Rio Grande.

People in Chimayó remember that if their crop was rejected by store keepers, their fathers would go to places like Mora or Truches or Peñasco to swap the chiles for beans or potatoes or goat cheese. Some had connections through a relative in Mora. Elsewhere, Tila Vila remembers strangers would open their doors if they realized the pedlars were from “good” Chimayó families.

Despite the Latin name, chiles are perennial plants that can bloom their first season, but need time to do so at temperatures above 60. When the real heat arrives, they tend to bloom less until late summer. The bell-shaped flowers drop when night temperatures are above 75 degrees, and fruit development is delayed if daytime temperatures reach 90. The first peppers tend to be larger than the later ones.

To speed the growing season, Leonora Curtin says people used to plant seeds in April or May in tins or boxes they kept on their window sills until the weather warmed enough to transplant them. The move should have been made by May 3 for them to develop their glossy green skins by the middle of September.

Even then, the growing season for a pepper is so long it may never reach the red stage in the mountains or in a summer like this when drought and heat send plants into periods of quiescence. A typical green chile is ready to harvest 120 days after planting, but the red needs 165. By necessity, dried green may have become the standard.

Now we can buy good sized bedding plants. Each time I went into a garden center this past April, there was some man unhappy that peppers hadn’t appeared yet.

I finally settled on what was available, Sandia, a cross between the original Garcia pepper and an Anaheim which Roy Harper released in 1956 through New Mexico State. It’s primary virtue is that it matures earlier. During the summer heat, it sets fruit lower on the plants which makes it less vulnerable to the high winds that can come with the monsoons.

When I put the seedlings out the middle of May in a relatively protected area, they wilted every afternoon. The members of the nightshade family have shallow roots and need lots of water. They only stabilized after I stopped watering them each evening with a garden hose and gave them their own soaker that ran at least 15 minutes a day.

In July the light-green plants finally put out a few white flowers, that produced some rather fat, crooked fruits by mid August. About the time the chile roasters were leaving the end of September, the skins turned darker and glossier. The first of October they were turning red and beginning to dry.

There was a very short period when they were at their prime. People, both local and in Hatch, sweep through their fields several times a season picking the green chiles.

My neighbors across the road have four strings of red peppers hanging from their eaves, two long and two short. The latter look redder and fatter, as if the strings represented different croppings, and they were the most recent.

In the 1980's, Roy Nakayama and Frank Matta, also of NMSU, crossed Sandia with “a Northern New Mexico strain” to produce Española, an even earlier maturing red chile.

The famed Chimayó peppers were smaller than others and may have been some special variety brought north by migrants from Zacatecas that self-selected itself into something special in that high environment. In the 1930's, the area along the Chama river produced more strings of chiles per acre than any other part of the valley, but none were considered as flavorful.

The distinctive flavor may have come from the seed’s genetics, from the altitude or soil or water, or it may have come from timing. The chiles may have reached their most flavorful stage at just the right time to fire up the hornos to dry them.

For the past two weeks morning temperatures have hovered around freezing. Pepper plants can’t handle cold temperatures. Mine are probably still alive because I put them next to a southwest facing wall protected by some shrubs that haven’t lost their leaves yet.

My neighbors have picked their corn and peppers, removed the corn stalks and squash vines, and left the tomato and chile plants with unripe fruit to continue to redden. At some point soon, the remaining chiles will need to be picked and dried, because the weather will change. When we get our first heavy frost, the internal cells will rupture, release sap and incubate internal mold.

Notes:
Bosland, Paul W. and Stephanie Walker. “Growing Chiles in New Mexico,” 2004 revision.

_____, Danise Coon and Eric Votava. “The Chile Cultivars of New Mexico State University,” 2008.

Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.

Epicentre. “Chile Pepper Varieties,” The Epicentre Spices website.

Gregg, Josiah. Commerce of the Prairies: Life on the Great Plains in the 1830's and 1840's, 1844, republished by The Narrative Press, 2001.

US Department of Interior. Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975, on 1930's.

Usner, Don J. Sabino’s Map: Life in Chimayó’s Old Plaza, 1995, includes quote from Tila Vila.

Photograph: Sandia chile beginning to dry, 23 October 2011.

Peppers, Part 1

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, dahlias, silver lace vine, datura, Sensation cosmos, French marigolds; grape leaves brown or yellow, apple leaves golden orange; woman down the road has been putting nightly covers over the plants that are still blooming in front of her house wall; man down the road planted alfalfa this week.

Beyond the walls and fences: Leatherleaf globemallows, clammy weed, goat’s head, chamisa, native sunflowers, snakeweed, gumweed nearly gone, Hopi tea, áñil del muerto, broom senecio, golden hairy, strap-leaf, purple and heath asters, mushrooms; cottonwood leaves turning yellow, some Apache plume leaves yellow, tamarix and choke cherry leaves turning orange; more Juniper berries a grey blue; gypsum phacelia seedlings grown larger.

In my yard, looking east: Winecup mallow, sidalcea, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, Rose Queen salvia, Shirley poppies; Autumn Joy sedum leaves have coral tinge, Maximilian sunflower leaves turning yellow and falling.

Looking south: Floribunda roses; zinnias turned brown, rose of Sharon leaves turning yellow, raspberry leaves bronzed.

Looking west: Calamintha, Silver King artemisia; sea lavender leaves mottled, red at the tips, then yellow and green toward the stem; purple coneflower leaves turning yellow or dirty brown.

Looking north: Nasturtium from seed, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, yellow cosmos from seed, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum; black locust, apricot and sweet cherry leaves turning yellow, Siberian pea dropping its leaves.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, nicotiana, impatiens; moss rose blooming despite many dead leaves.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: More birds flitting about the arroyo yesterday late morning; don’t know if it was the time of day or the time of year; harvester and small black ants.

Weather: First morning temperatures below 32; last rain 10/07/11; 11:03 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: As soon as you arrive in New Mexico and need to find a place to eat while you await the moving van, you’re confronted with the great question, red or green.

There’s no right answer. You say green. You like the taste of the peppers or don’t. The next time, you say red. You like, you don’t. You notice how others respond to your choice, and the time after you follow their lead.

Unless you’re from Texas, where they eat jalapeños like the rest of us eat celery sticks, it doesn’t hurt to do what others do in public, and eat what you like when you’re alone.

In theory, the distinction between red and green is simply a preference for a particular food preservation technique. If you pick a chile pepper when it’s green, it has a milder taste because the chemicals that give it the hotter flavor don’t develop until it ripens and the skin turns red.

In Chimayó in the past, people preferred to eat them when they were green, but used the red for medicine. Don Usner was told chile caribe was especially effective against colds and sore throats, while Leonora Curtin was told to use chile colorado for rheumatism.

Unfortunately, unripe Capsicum annuum spoil when they’re picked, while red ones will dry and last a very long time. It’s very difficult to dry the unripe fruits because their skins toughen to prevent premature evaporation in this arid climate. The trapped water supports bacteria, that leads to rot.

People in México, probably those who lived in Teotihuacán northeast of modern Mexico City around the time of Christ, discovered they could preserve unripe peppers in their milder state by smoking them.

When Phillip II sent Francisco Hernández to report on plants from the New World in the 1570's, people on Hispañola, where Christopher Columbus had first eaten chiles 80 years before, were drying and smoking one species so it lasted it a year. Texochilli was a soft pepper, with a light spiciness and was “usually eaten with corn or with tortillas.”

Smoking peppers enough to remove all the water takes time. According to Wikipedia, chipotles are jalapeños that have ripened red and dried on the plant. At the end of the season in Chihuahua, the ones that ripened late are picked for smoking that can take several days. Chuck Evans experimented with smoking peppers over hickory wood with a modern rack smoker and found red pods took three days to dry at 110 degrees.

People realized that, instead of completely drying peppers with heat, they could simply heat chiles long enough to make the skins easier to remove.

In Chimayó, Benigna Chávez remembers they would roast red chile “in the horno, on coals of the wood.” I’ve talked to a young woman in her 30's in Santa Fe who says when she was a child her father would roast green peppers in the stove’s oven in pans. Now every August, a section of the local grocer’s parking lot is fenced off for the propane fueled burners that roast chiles dumped from 50 pound burlap bags into spinning wire cages.

Half cooked peppers still spoil if they’re not eaten within a week. In the past, Chávez said they “peeled it and tied it and hung it outside to dry on the clothesline” before putting the dried chiles “away in a flour sack that was not very thick so it would get air and hang it in the dispensa for the winter.”

When people are given their clear plastic bags of roasted chiles in the parking lot today, they still have to remove the skins and seeds, and cut them. Since electricity was introduced after World War II, many have frozen diced pieces instead of drying slices.

Such progress, of course, changes the taste of and for peppers. It also alters that primal New Mexico question, (almost) fresh or dried?

Notes:
Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.

DeWitt, Dave and Chuck Evans. “Chipotle Flavors: How to Smoke Chiles,” Fiery Foods website.

Hernández, Francisco. The Mexican Treasury,” edited by Simon Varey, 2000.

Usner, Don J. Sabino’s Map: Life in Chimayó’s Old Plaza, 1995, includes quote from Benigna Chávez.

Wikipedia entry on “Chipotle.”

Photograph: Peppers from different generations this summer left to ripen down the road, 20 October 2011.

Wild Licorice

What’s blooming in the area: Catalpa, purple-flowered locust, wild pink, hybrid tea and miniature roses, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, sweet pea, wide-leaved yucca, onion, daylily, Jupiter’s beard, purple salvia; buds on lilies; datura up.

Beyond the walls and fences: Russian olive, tamarix, Apache plume, four-wing salt bush, common and showy milkweeds, fernleaf globemallow, cheese mallow, tumble mustard, alfilerillo, scarlet bee blossom, white evening primrose, velvetweed, bindweed, gypsum phacelia, woolly plantain, escaped alfalfa, wild licorice, loco, western goat’s beard, native and common dandelions, June, needle, rice, and three awn grasses; buds on Virginia creeper. Winds have dislodged salt bushes from crevices high in the arroyo walls.

In my yard: Black locust, beauty bush, privet, Dr. Huey and rugosa roses, raspberry, chives, red hot poker, oriental poppy, winecup, vinca, golden spur columbine, coral bells, oxalis, baptisia, small-leaved soapwort, Bath pinks, snow-in-summer, sea pink, Maltese cross, blue flax, Hartweig and pink evening primroses, pink salvia, catmints, Rumanian sage, chocolate flower, coreopsis; buds on hollyhock, butterfly weed, bouncing Bess, Mexican hat, fernleaf yarrow, blanket flower and anthemis; morning glory seeds breaking through; daffodil leaves turning brown.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, moss rose; buds on nicotiana; tomatoes and peppers still wilting every afternoon.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbird, bumble bee on baptisia and catmint, small bee on catmint, small butterfly on blue salvia, hornet on pink evening primrose, cricket, harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Winds early in week, followed by smoke from the west; everything lay in suspension as the sun turned red and futile storms foregathered; last rain 5/19/11; 15:49 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Is the wild licorice blooming along the ditches near the village a native plant or a weed?

In the early twentieth century, Elmer Wooten and Paul Standley described the legume with its prominent white spikes and prickly pods as a “common weed in cultivated ground and along ditch banks.” Among the places it grew were Zuni, San Juan, Ojo Caliente, Chama and Raton.

More recently, a group in Colorado wanted to know which plants were part of the natural under story for cottonwoods, willows and salt cedars, so the land could be properly restored along the Rio Dolores when tamarix was removed. They found Glycyrrhiza lepidota was an indicator for a willow canopy.

It was the same kind of quest for the remnants of the real rather than the ruderal that sent Lenora Curtin down a wagon track near La Ciruela in the late 1940' where she found a woman with ten children near a “willow-sheltered streamlet” who told her that she drank a strained extract of crushed licorice roots three times a day from the third day after giving birth to her first menses. She especially recommended it “in cases of retention of the afterbirth.”

Curtin doesn’t reveal anything more about the woman.

Angelico Chavez, however, tells us his great-great-grandfather, José Encarnación Chaves, helped found the village in former Comanche territory after the United States established Fort Union in what is now Mora County in 1851. The mountain community, originally settled by people from places like Belen, boomed in the early 1880's when it supplied ties for construction crews of the Santa Fe railroad, then withered away. Chavez’s grandfather Eugenio moved to Wagon Mound around 1885.

More interestingly, Chavez tells us José Encarnación’s grandfather, Christóbal Chaves, married a woman whose family was from Mexico City, María Josefa Núñez. His mother was appalled when he married outsiders, but his grandchildren began to call themselves los Chaves Mexicanos. Eugenio came to believe his own grandfather had come from México.

When he died, his cousin Bernardo Chaves wanted to marry the widow. His first wife had been a plains Indian servant. She refused.

It’s traditions associated with María Josefa which are important for wild licorice. Many of the plains tribes had discovered the same thing the Europeans knew, that a saponin in the root of many members of the genus was good for treating coughs and the throat in general. Only the Europeans used it as a gynecological aid.

In first century Dioscorides included licorice in his section on herbs used as abortifacients, without explicitly saying it would serve that purpose. John Riddle found it used thereafter in formulas for treating delayed periods or removing the remains of the placenta. He believed its efficacy in the first instance arose from the fact it contains estrogenic chemicals.

Recently, Finnish researchers may have discovered why it works to clear the body after labor. They found children of women who ate licorice flavored candy when they were pregnant were more likely to have impaired cognitive functions that led to behavioral problems. The group hypothesized that the active agent, glycyrrhiza, weakens the embryonic sac and thus inhibits its ability to act as a protective barrier from harmful chemicals that pass from the mother into the fetal brain.

The knowledge of wild licorice in northern New Mexico may have developed in several phases. Since lepidota is the only species growing in North America and its range doesn’t extend into México, people raised in places like Durango may well have forgotten the plant. The trait local settlers noticed was that the root foamed in water like the amole or yucca, and so it was called amollilo.

The folk knowledge derived from the Spanish Glycyrrhiza glabra could have arrived separately, and then spread. Curtin found a woman in Chimayó who mixed it with rice in water as an emmenagogue and another who used the unstrained pulp in water to produce “a good cleanser of the uterus.”

While it’s easy to think there was one group of settlers who came with Juan de Oñate and who returned after the Pueblo revolt, the histories of Angelico Chavez’s family and of Chimayó suggest that, under that seeming uniformity, there were a great many opportunities for new ideas to be introduced and enough internal migration to diffuse medicinal lore and plants.

The woman, or women, who first used the plant didn’t have to have seen the Spanish plant, only an imported root. The preparation Curtin heard described, mashing the roots in water, is much simpler than the European technique of crushing them under millstones, then boiling them and evaporating the liquid to produce sticks.

What’s not widespread is wild licorice. Its deep, fleshy taproots demand a moist environment. While the long pea-shaped flowers are fertile, the reddish-brown seeds have relatively low germination rates. To compensate, a single plant expands into a colony from creeping rhizomes which can be transplanted.

The area where the Santa Cruz flows down from Chimayó to enter the Rio Grande was once a wetland where wild licorice could easily have grown. However, after the Santa Cruz was damned and the area drained to eradicate malaria, much of the original riparian vegetation disappeared. The plants growing along the local ditches could be survivors from that past or something introduced, a potential weed in an increasingly suburbanized community.

The transition from one status to the other, from valued native to unwanted weed, may be as slow, as subtle and undeliberate as the family legends that transformed the reality of María Josefa into the romantic grandfather of Eugenio.

Notes:
Chavez, Angelico. Chavez, 2009.

Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.

Julyan, Robert Hixson. The Place Names of New Mexico, 1996, on La Ciruela.

Korb, Julie E., Cynthia Dott and Sara Bombaci. “Understory Plant Community Variability among Tamarisk, Cottonwood, and Willow Canopy Types along a Regulated Reach of the Dolores River, Colorado - Implications for Ecological Restoration ,” Tamarix Coalition website.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998; summarizes ethnographies of plains and other tribes.

Räikkönen, Katri, Anu-Katriina Pesonen, Kati Heinonen, Jari Lahti, Niina Komsi, Johan G. Eriksson, Jonathan R. Seckl, Anna-Liisa Järvenpää and Timo E. Strandberg. “Maternal Licorice Consumption and Detrimental Cognitive and Psychiatric Outcomes in Children,” American Journal of Epidemiology 170: 1137-1146:2009; most candy sold in this country as licorice in fact is flavored with anise, not licorice.

Riddle, John M. Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, 1992, discusses Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica.

_____. Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West, 1997.

Wooten, Elmer Otis and Paul Carpenter Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915.

Photograph: Wild licorice growing on a ditch bank near the village, 20 May 2011.

Garlic

What’s blooming in the area: Tamarix, tea roses, Apache plume, Spanish broom, silver lace vine, honeysuckle, red yucca, onions, Queen Anne’s lace, tumble mustard, few hollyhocks, larkspur, fern-leaf globemallow, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, milkweed, bindweed, datura, alfalfa, Dutch clover, purple loco, native dandelion, goat’s beard, hawkweed, paper flower; brome, rice, and three-awn grasses; corn up a foot; first alfalfa cut; buds on Virginia creeper; few native sunflowers up; cottonwood cotton blowing.

In my yard looking north: Catalpa, miniature roses, daylily, red hot poker, golden spur columbine, Harweig evening primrose, butterfly weed, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Moonshine yarrow, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, anthemis; nasturtiums up; yellow cosmos producing second leaves; red sour cherries.

Looking east: Dr. Huey rose, winecup, coral bells, Jupiter’s beard, baby’s breath, Bath’s pink, snow-in-summer, bouncing Bess, coral beardtongue, pied and last year’s pink snapdragons, sea pink, Maltese cross, pink salvia, pink evening primrose; buds on sidalcea; Sensation cosmos coming up reluctantly.

Looking south: Prairie and rugosa roses, sweet peas.

Looking west: Rumanian sage, purple salvia, catmint, Husker’s Red beardtongue, spurge, blue flax; buds on sea lavender and speedwell.

Bedding plants: Zonal geraniums, moss rose.

Inside: Aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, birds in cherry, gecko, cabbage butterfly, bees on catmint, large black harvester and small red ants.

Weather: Some mornings cooling off to mid-40's, others staying warmer; fire in the Jemez has been burning more than a week, sending pink smoke across the valley; last rain 05/14/09; 14:37 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Garlic is one of those plants I never could grow. Both here and in Michigan, I was too cheap to order something from a catalog, so planted bulbs I bought loose in the supermarket. A few would come up, but die in the heat. I finally stopped trying.

Then, about the time I started this blog in the spring of 2006, I was being invaded by grasshoppers. When someone suggested garlic oil, I dropped cloves around the garden thinking maybe evaporation would work More practically, I bought a pesticide at the local big box.

Two years later, in 2008, I saw something that looked like garlic leaves in the back drip line in March, near the cherry and apples in May. In June, the quail kicked up something that looked like a bulb under the locust. I dismissed the similarity. I’d scattered the cloves on the surface, not buried them.

Last February, I saw something under the cherry. This year, there were suspicious leaves in back in February, under a sand cherry in April, and under some apples in May. Last weekend I looked out the window and saw, from above, what definitely looked like a garlic bulb partly uncovered under the cherry. The lower leaves were browning and the stalk tipping.

Allium sativium is one of those plants that’s become so cultured by man, it no longer can reproduce itself by seed. Botanists believe the original may have been Allium longicuspis that produces seeds between the Kopet Dag and Tien Shan mountains in central Asia. A form that no longer develops seeds, but still flowers on a looping stem and produces tiny bulbils is found in eastern Europe and parts of Iberia. The Mediterranean garlic we eat today no longer bolts, produces more cloves and stores longer.

Garlic is sensitive to differences in soil, temperature, moisture, altitude - in short, all the elements in its habitat. Plants that bolt in Spain won’t in Japan. Cloves grown for cooking in southern California weren’t likely to do well in Michigan in the 1980's. Since the early 1990's, most inexpensive garlic comes from China, and isn’t any more likely to thrive in New Mexico.

Seed catalogs offer garlic in the spring, and imply it should be planted early in the season. I tried. A few will germinate. However, garlic is a lily that prefers to be planted in the fall when it develops roots to winter over. When late winter temperatures climb into the low 40's, garlic loses its dormancy and grows best when temperatures are in the mid 60's. When days grow longer and temperatures rise, the leaves begin to die and the bulbs ripen like the one outside my window. It doesn’t follow normal farm and garden planting cycles.

The best know area garlic grower is Stanley Crawford, who moved to the Dixon area in the late 1960's when artists and "hippies" were gentrifying villages on the roads to Taos. His first plants came from some dug in the spring by a friend from an apple orchard in the early 1970's. Another gave him some garlic tops to try from another orchard.

Nothing much happened with either. Then, a few years later, he discovered them growing. It takes bulbils around three years to grow large enough to sprout.

He noted that his rocambole garlic resembles that sold in braided clusters from México, and wonders if his came with the conquistadores. It’s certainly true, Spain is the origin of New World garlic. Eugene Lyon has found shipping records that show garlic was included in the food supplies of the Nina on Columbus’ third voyage in 1498. By the time Hernán Cortés arrived in México in 1519, it was being sold in the Aztec markets of Temixtitan.

The bulb is one of the plants Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá thought the Santa Domingo could grow when he arrived here with Juan de Oñate in 1598. Alonso de Benavides reported it growing in Santa Fé in the late 1620's. However, by the time the interior department was surveying the area in the depression, no garlic was mentioned, although Don Usner did find two women who remembered ajo growing around Chimayó when they were children.

Between Benavides and Amada Trujillo and Tila Villa, the Spanish had been evicted and returned, famines had come and gone, and trade with northern México had been disrupted. Seed stock could have been eaten, new bulbs that could grow here could have become unavailable, and people may simply have forgotten how to grow it.

The common diet still included the conquistadores’ wheat, but the rest was adopted from the pueblos, corn and beans with chile as the primary spice. What garlic plants were grown or bought might have been medicinal and too few to be noticed by outside observers.

Dixon was organized as a land grant in 1725. Any crops were either brought from another settlement in the Española valley after the reconquest or came from México with the annual cordones to Chihuahua, just north of where garlic grows today from Zacatecas south to Puebla.

The Embudo Land Grant, that includes Dixon, was nullified by the federal government in 1898, throwing land ownership into question about the time Stark Brothers’ Delicious apple was stimulating the development of large orchards in the west.

It’s just as likely, someone in the recent past bought one of those riastras from the mountain valleys of México, broke out the cloves and planted them in a Dixon orchard.

It doesn’t really matter. His garlic is one that grows in the rio arriba, not in full sun as the guides all say, but under trees and in grasses, like mine which came from a grocery that caters to local Spanish speakers and grows unaided where it pleases.

His customers tell him his tastes much better than what they buy in stores. I’ll never know the taste of mine; when you have only a few plants you tend to think of them as pets.

Notes:Benavides, Alonso de. Memorial que fray Juan de Santaner de la orden de S. Francisco presenta a la Magestad Catolica del Rey don Felipe Quarto, 1630, republished 1996 as A Harvest of Reluctant Souls, translated and edited by Baker H. Morrow.

Cortés, Hernán. Letter to Charles V, published as second letter in Hernan Cortes Letters from Mexico, translated by Anthony Pagden, 1986 edition.

Crawford, Stanley. A Garlic Testament, 1992.

Etoh, Takeomi, Hideki Watanabe, and Sumio Iwai "RAPD Variation of Garlic Clones in the Center of Origin and the Westernmost Area of Distribution," Kagoshima University, Faculty of Agriculture Memoirs, 37:21-27:2001, compares Iberian and central Asian garlic.

US Department of Interior, Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975.

Usner, Don J. Sabino’s Map: Life in Chimayó’s Old Plaza, 1995.

Villagrá, Gaspar Pérez de. Historia de la Nueva México, 1610, translated and edited by Miguel Encinias, Alfred Rodrígue and Joseph P. Sánchez, 1992.

Photograph: Garlic, 15 June 2010.