You know that feeling when you’ve just spent too long frigging around with securing remay on your garden beds and then you’re inside for a while and the wind picks up something fierce and it’s almost dusk and you run to the window to see what kind of mess you’ve got on your hands and it turns out by some inexplicable miracle for once the damned blankets are holding up and your heart sings a little and you walk back to the chesterfield with a little swagger in your step? That’s how I feel when I go to the ruminant folder of my inbox and find a submission. That’s right, friends. All those photos you’ve been meaning to send me but haven’t? That’s a garden with two hours worth of remay work strewn about like a plate full of cooked spaghetti noodles.

So, thank you to Trevor Aleman for causing my most recent, ephemeral step-swagger:

Trevor says: “This is a curing frame I made from 2X4s, 2X2s, screws, and lattice (plastic). I do not fasten the lattice so that it can be removed for easy cleaning. I twist the roots off of the garlic, peel the dirty layer off, trim most of the leaves off with a pruning plier and then organize the garlic to size on different shelfs. Seed garlic goes on top shelf so no one tries to buy it! I put the garlic many layers thick and never have a problem with storage. This is about 160 square feet of storage. We live in a very dry climate, so I just put some household fans on the garlic for 3-4 days on high, then low speed for a week or two, and the garlic is cured.”