“Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” – Rumi

I know nothing about garlic except that I sometimes buy it at the supermarket and put it on the pizza I make in the winter. Edwin Schiele and his wife Debby Jaffe run Long Days Farm, which has the classiest and most artistic stand at the Farmer’s Market, which is open in our town on Sundays.

Long Days is a small farm at the southern tip of our county. Edwin and Debby started as home gardeners and have stayed faithful to that, they love fresh vegetables, sell eggs and organic chicken feed, tomatoes, onions, eggplants, pole beans, yellow watermelon and fatali.

We get fresh fruit, vegetables, bread and Round House Pizza every Sunday at the farmer’s market, I wish we could eat that well all year.

I never thought about buying garlic, but Edwin’s stand is eye-catching. Apart from the garlic in the stand, there are beets and peppers and raspberries that melt in your mouth. But the garlic stands out.

My photographer’s eye keeps drawing me to Edwin’s stand, his daughter Anna, I believe, helped him to design it – his stand was very different last year.

Farmers are not known for their design sense.

Their displays are clean and attractive, but spare.

The first thing Edwin’s stand did was make me want to take a picture of  it, I never imagined garlic looking so good. Then, I found I am starting to get interested in garlic.  I’ve been reading about it. In my family, i do the shopping and the cooking, and I’ve started to explore the different kinds of garlic – there is a pamphlet at the stand and read about them.

Long Days sells hard-neck garlic. The plants produce scapes (curling green stalks with a seed heads on top) that they sell in the spring. Most of the garlic grown in the U.S., says their pamphlet, are soft-neck, which grow well in mild and dry conditions, especially California.

There is, of course, even a Garlic Seed Foundation, a non-profit cooperative devoted to the love of good garlic food. I never knew. I think the best things in the world are driven by people like Edwin and his family, bringing passion and creativity to the things most of us would never otherwise know or think about.

That is also why I love living her – people like Edwin are drawn here to live their lives.

Edwin sells five different varieties of garlic, all display in tilted baskets, along with vegetables and berries that are grown on the farm.

This kind of creativity and imagination – and commitment –  always inspires me. I’m with Joseph Campbell. If  you work only for money, you are just another kind of slave.

I’ve been shopping at farm stands for many years, and I’ve never seen one that looks quite so colorful and distinctive. Farming is an intensely creative work to begin with, I think every farmer is an artist, one way or the other.

When I find myself drawn to taking a photo of something, I am eventually drawn to figuring out why.

Edwin loves to talk about garlic, and urges people to grow their own. I keep taking his photo, and I figured it was about time to focus on the garlic.

Imagination is everything, said Albert Einstein, it is the preview of life’s coming attractions. I think I’m going to be cooking with garlic soon.