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.
Winter: March
It’s late winter and thus far, a fairly typical one. It’s an odd thing when one can say that anymore. A very wet December, a cold dry January, snow and wintery mix in February. At this point most of the garlic has emerged from the soil and up through the mulch- some of it needs a little help. As ever, i am happy with the thick layer of straw. There will still be weeding necessary, especially on the bed shoulders but it alleviates compaction from the pounding winter rain, regulation soil temperature even if the day night temps do 50° night/day flops.
Between my time off farm and illness upon return, i got a bit behind. I have recently made progress processing planting discards into varietal garlic powders which will be available soon. Spring seeds are being started for eventual transplant in the high tunnel and soon the first round of potatoes will be planted. There were a number of inquiries for seed stock during my absence. If you haven’t received a response, please write again. There is still stock available for late winter/spring planting. The most forgiving of late planting are Silverskin, Creole and Artichoke types. There’s plenty of culinary grade available of all garlic as well.
I will be attending the Organic Seed Alliance Conference at the end of February and will have a display for a scaled down Variety Showcase put on by the Culinary Breeding Network on the 28th. If you are going and wish to converse, i shouldn’t be hard to find, just follow your nose.
Garlicana is looking for help on the farm in the spring and especially during the summer harvest. In many ways this is a standard farm internship as this is also a vegetable farm. Needless to say, garlic is the primary crop so if learning about the many facets of growing varietal garlic on a small scale interests you, do reach out and we can discuss details.
That said, it i am planning on scaling back fall vegetable production. This ought to allow time to devote to breeding work, other projects and just getting out for a hike in the National Forest before it gets logged or incinerated.
This has been a fairly normal Southern Oregon winter: rainy December, cold January, February snow. The colony of beavers has been very active. It has, however, been a very disappointing year for salmon return. I have not seen coho and while an occasional hopeful heron flew by, even the eagles have given up perching on the snag above a pool where one used to see the fish. In early January we took a drive through hills above the farm, an area quite familiar after living here for many years. This last summer, two fires swept through: the first likely ignited by a cigarette, the second, which started not long after the first was contained, by logging. It is very disorienting to go through landscapes transformed from lush forest to charred sticks over blackened earth. Most forest fires are a mosaic of low intensity understory burns and tree killing blazes but these fires had a large component of crown fire. With the winter rain, there are thousands of acres absent of trees to uptake the moisture and hold the soil. The inevitability of forest fires in the rural west is, to an extent, just a part of life here. This hardly the first close fire i’ve been through but the impact is still jarring. Then again, it’s no less so than large scale clearcut logging followed by herbicide spraying; fire is just less discriminating. The hydrological repercussions of the devastation wrought by mechanized deforestation or catastrophic fires isn’t merely high winter flow but in the years following, very low summer flow. This exacerbates drought, weakening shallower rooted trees, making them more susceptible to pests, pathogens and thus to more fires. The impact on aquatic species from macro-invertebrates to fish is as clear the creek after a rainless January and the absence of coho salmon a palpable loss. It need not be this way. It is worth noting that areas that were thinned, ladder fuels pruned, brush piles burned tend to be quite resilient through otherwise catastrophic fires. Those of us who use water for irrigation can do so responsibly. Then again, the scale of avaricious industrial deforestation outstrips whatever measures taken to mitigate its ruination.
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.
Please read the Contact/Order page before asking for prices, shipping information or the address.
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.
At this point, while there is 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 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.
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.
There are around 90 varieties of garlic on offer, comprising ten horticultural groups as well as a number of unclassified varieties, others that have been collected from the wild in Central Asia, and garlic developed from true seed. In addition there are 7 shallot varieties.
True Garlic Seeds
Garlicana used to offer true seeds. These were a byproduct of the still ongoing on-farm breeding project. While thousands of seeds are collected, this remains experimental. True Garlic Seed (TGS) is not a viable means to produce garlic as you would grow onions, it’s a long term project with inconsistent results. It can, however, be very rewarding and we are pleased to introduce many new and diverse garlic varieties If a nerdy, multi-year project to produce new garlic varieties appeals to you, Read more…
