Garlicana is a very small farm located in the southern end of the Cascade Mountains in Oregon. Here a diverse array of garlic and shallots are grown without the use of toxic chemical fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides or fungicides and careful attention is paid to sustainable soil practices. The farm specializes in less common varieties and developing new varieties through traditional seed breeding methods.
early Autumn: October
Autumn is a welcome change here. The nearby summer fires here are well contained but will continue to burn until the winter rains come. All told the fires burned over 6000 acres with large swaths of it crowning. It came to around 700 yards of the farm. As the fire traffic subsided, the log truck traffic has increased drastically. While rain is certainly needed, the dry weather has been a boon here. While i got really behind during the fires, things are running okay now. The field has been worked up, beds prepped for planting. Nearly a ton of winter squash was harvested and cleaned. There’s only half again that much potatoes left to dig. Mornings are chilly but warm dry afternoons have been conducive to making progress. There’s still plenty of seed stock available overall but varieties grown in small volumes are selling out so unless you are okay with subs, do check for availability.
Orders for fall are now being accepted. If you have queries, contact me. Try calling if you don’t get a quick response to email. It’s a landline so i won’t get your texts if you try to do that.
If the contact form doesn’t work, just email directly to garlic@garlicana.com (i actually prefer that to the contact form) and let me know.
When you send in your check, if there is neither a form nor piece of paper that includes who you are, your email and shipping address, i will neither send your order nor cash your check. Preferably there’s an order form with the varieties and quantities listed as it takes me time to search through emails to find your order on the computer which i generally do not bring into the garlic pack room but at least a reference to an email i can look up.
At this point, there’s no True Garlic Seeds available, there is True Seed Progeny. Until consistent farm help can be found, there’s simply not the time to sort them out. That said, i am intend to make available some small volumes of promising varieties derived from TGS that i have not necessarily named. I generally trial new accessions for several years. There are so many that it’s kind of a process of deselecting them. There are varieties that have useful traits but aren’t charismatic enough to come up with names and continually offer and yet, they are fertile and worth growing to make crosses. These accessions will be derivatives of varieties that have been pledged to OSSI, thus all offspring will necessarily remain in the public domain. If interested, inquire after harvest this summer. There is no list of these a quantities are limited to 1/4 each.
Please read the Contact/Order page before asking for prices, shipping information or the address.
A few years ago Garlicana did an online presentation for the Culinary Breeding Network’s Winter Vegetable Sagra. There was a whole week of presentations on garlic available here. Also, barring any unforeseen problems like catastrophic wildfires, health problems, etc. i am planning on attending the Culinary Breeding Network’s Variety Showcase event in the big bustling city of Portland on 8 Sept.