We're so excited to tell you that this year's garlic saga is nearly complete. Garlic is our longest-in-the-ground field crop, as we put cloves in the ground in October. Garlic is one of the few crops we make the effort to save seed for, since there's no cross pollination to worry about with the replanting of cloves. There is a lot of old belief, also, that garlic seed saved and planted in the same climate will do it's absolute best each year as it's well adapted to the location.
Each year we save our biggest and best heads of garlic to be planted in the fall. They hang out underground for months and then start to pop up late winter. In our climate, the greens take some damage by cold nights, but the plants are very hardy. We carefully weed and fertilize the plants, clip Garlic Scapes off the hardneck varieties for delicious eating and to encourage the plant to put more energy into its cloves, and finally pull the plants as they begin to die back in mid July.
Our garlic (about 1500 heads!) is now filling up the previously empty tables in our propagation house, curing under a 30% shade cloth, and next week you'll get to enjoy the first cured heads. We're quite excited, as our leftover stored garlic from last year's crop has now started to sprout and then shriveled, and there's nothing like the flavor of new garlic.
I'll leave it there for this week, as we're up to our eyeballs in vegetable harvests, and I'm sure you're busy too.
Your Farmers,
Ashley and Caleb
Fun Fact: In Spanish a head of garlic is also called a head (cabeza), but its cloves are called teeth (dientes). I think this makes a lot more sense than a head of cloves!
