Garlic!!!!!

As of this morning (Monday), we have finally harvested the last of the over-wintered vegetables in our west field: we finally pulled our garlic. I say ‘finally’ primarily because everything else has been gone from the field for weeks and each time we mow the area down, we’ve had to carefully drive around the garlic patch — no longer!

Even though garlic is a very small part of our overall gross sales, we feel that it is crucial to our farm, so we spend a lot of time thinking and working on growing it well. Because garlic stores better than any other allium (with the exception of shallots), having a good garlic crop hanging in our garage gives us a sense of security for the winter CSA shares. Certainly, garlic alone wouldn’t make a share complete (no individual vegetable would, of course), but it can help round-out the flavors and cooking options available in the coldest months.

We approached this year’s garlic harvest with some trepidation. For one thing, garlic is still a relatively new crop to us. It is a crop we grew in our own garden and at the farm where we trained, but last year was our first large-scale garlic crop.

After buying our land in September 2006, we had to move pretty fast to get the ground prepped and the garlic in the ground, and the 2007 harvest showed signs of our haste. We also had a drier than average spring and no irrigation until May (garlic needs a lot of water during its spring growth phase). Consequently, last year most of the ‘hard-necked’ varieties were under-sized, but our ‘soft-necked’ varieties looked pretty good.

So, we selected the best hard-necked bulbs to plant as seed and primarily gave out soft-necked garlic all year. It worked out fine, but we hoped for a more consistent harvest in 2008.

Unfortunately, this year had its own problems. Whereas the first year we were hurt by low levels of organic matter and compaction, this year we struggled to keep ‘volunteer’ oats and grasses at bay. We weeded hard many times, but the grasses just kept re-growing, which we think reduced the airflow through the garlic. Either way, we were hit pretty hard with garlic rust, which is a garlic and leek specific fungal disease.

We’ve seen rust before on our leeks here and at the farm where we worked in Bellingham, but never in the level as this spring. We watched as the plants appeared to ‘shut down’ growth in response to the rust, just as they should have been bulbing up. It was very disheartening, but we kept removing grass in the hopes of saving the crop.

Fortunately, when we began digging on Saturday, we found beautiful bulbs of garlic. The hard-necked varieties look amazing — they are consistently large and heavy, and we will have enough to share with the CSA this year. The soft-necked varieties looked much like last year but slightly cleaner and better skins.

Overall, we’re very pleased with what we hung to cure in our garage this morning. We harvested a total of 3300+ garlic heads — out of which we set aside the best 10% to use as seed again this year, leaving us more than enough garlic for the upcoming fall and winter CSA seasons.

What about the rust and our garlic seed? Once we started actually seeing the rust action in our fields, we noticed it growing on more than just the garlic — the second most-affected plant was the volunteer oats, and we remember now seeing it on oats we sowed in 2006 as well. Our guess is that the rust is a potential risk in our fields regardless of the seed stock, so rather than toss out otherwise beautiful seed, we’re going to focus our attention on keeping the garlic healthy this winter in hopes to avoid creating the conditions that trigger fungal diseases — we’ve changed the direction of all our planting rows to east-west this year which has greatly increased the airflow down the rows, and we’re going to finally plant our garlic into better prepped ground to avoid a repeat of the weed disaster. Hopefully.

And, the big question: when can you expect to start receiving garlic in the shares? We’re not sure yet. First, we want to let the garlic ‘cure’ or dry so that it is easier to peel and easier on the stomach (fresh garlic can cause digestive discomfort).

Then we’ll assess our goals for the upcoming seasons. Again, garlic is primarily a storage crop for us. The summer onions are coming on soon which will provide added variety to your ‘allium’ selection, but we do hope to give out at least a few tasty heads of hard-neck garlic before the summer is over — a foretaste of the garlic feast to come!

In this post-garlic harvest week, summer continues — but we’re still waiting for many of the fruits to ripen. So, in the meantime, enjoy this week’s delicious array of early summer vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla