DIXON, N.M.

IT was a cool morning at El Bosque Garlic Farm when we gathered for the garlic harvest a few weeks ago. Named after the Spanish word for forest, these bottomland fields nestle in a valley between the Embudo River, a rocky tributary of the Rio Grande, and the rounded sandy red foothills of the Sangre de Cristo range.

Stanley Crawford, 73, a farmer-writer who loves garlic as much as words, was loosening the fat bulbs from the soil, guiding his Kubota L2850 tractor, with its sharp horizontal discs, to cut just beneath the bulbs. It’s a delicate operation, dislodging the roots without slicing through any precious bulbs of California Early, a soft-neck garlic variety that brings 75 cents a head at the Santa Fe farmer’s market.

Friends and family followed behind — in a ritual that harks back thousands of years, to the Egyptians, who worshiped garlic, which is native to the Caucasus — pulling the bulbs from the warm, sandy loam and laying them in little piles facing in the same direction.

I had come here as a garlic grower, in search of secrets for a better harvest back east, having read Mr. Crawford’s 1992 book, “A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm,” as well as “Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico,” an earlier work that tells the story of community water rights and his own stint as mayordomo, or ditch boss. (I’d also read one of his five novels, “The Log of the S. S. The Mrs. Unguentine,” which he calls “the best thing I ever wrote.”)