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: January
Winter is here. The once bright leaf litter is brown and the ground is saturated after a very wet December. Minor flooding from late December rain inundated low spots in the field. After a couple days, the water table lowered, the lake in the field became a pond, then receded; the soil, where trodden, a gooey muck. For the most part, the crop (in raised beds shaped with hilling discs and a drag chain) was above water but a day or two of flood at this stage ought not harm the garlic. Prolonged inundation can lead to anaerobic soil conditions and that’s a recipe for rot. The final task was a dense planting of cloves for greens production in the high tunnel. The planting & mulching for the 2025 season is finally done. Phew! Next task: processing planting discard cloves into varietal garlic powders.
Unfortunately, i have not seen coho and while an occasional hopeful heron flies by, even the eagles have given up perching on the snag above a pool where one used to see the fish. Perhaps when this latest deluge subsides, the water clears up, a few late comers will make it up the tributaries but it’s unlikely. During a break between storms, 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. Now with the heavy 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. It is worth noting that areas that were thinned, ladder fuels pruned, brush piles burned tend to be quite resilient through otherwise catastrophic fires.
It’s not to late to plant. 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. I will be off farm from mid-January and will not be around to fill orders till the end of the month
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, 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.
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 productive 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.
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 i am planning on attending the Culinary Breeding Network’s Sagra Del Radicchio event on December 8th.
There are around 70 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…
