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 which include multi-season cover cropping. Soil amendments used are OMRI listed. The farm specializes in less common varieties and developing new varieties through traditional seed breeding methods.
November
Another dry month has passed. Frost has come, leaves have turned color and only partially fallen. However much rain is needed, the dry weather has been favorable here. As the knee incrementally heals, i’ve been able to catch up: spuds are stacked up in the root cellar, half the field has been spaded, cover cropped and harrowed, garlic beds are ready to plant and all pending seed orders shipped. It’s time to pop cloves and get them in the ground; that and get crops to market. While there is plenty of stock left on most varieties of garlic and shallots, do check for availability before ordering.
October:
It has been a very dry fall thus far with chilly mornings and hot afternoons. But for the inch or so last month it’s still crispy here. I don’t mind. For the last several weeks i’ve been dealing with a knee injury which has been a major setback on the farm: many pressing tasks were put off. Just this week i had help with harvesting well over a ton of winter squash and hopefully next week with potato harvest. Other crops may just fail without attention and garlic planting will be problematic. That said, i’ve caught up on seed orders. If you sent off an order and haven’t received it or if you emailed and haven’t heard back, please try again. The injury has been discombobulating. While stock has run down, there is still plenty of garlic and shallots.
September
For the last month my daily walks along the creek have been somewhat distressing as in all my years here, i have never seen the creek so low. The remaining pools looked stagnant though there was some hyporheic flow. A friend’s optimistic spin was that these pools serve as refuge during drought and he spotted some struggling coho, steelhead and, more abundantly, Umpqua dace; without the watershed restoration work done here, these pools might not exist. Not just the fish, many critters were drawn here from a hungry blue heron, to a very large cougar last seen sauntering up my driveway. It’s with a great sense of relief that with the first September rain, the creek is flowing again. Time to prepare the field for planting garlic, sow cover crops, harvest potatoes and squash, etc. I still have a few hundred pounds of garlic and shallots to clean but am on track to begin shipping this month. I still have plenty of garlic available though it’s worth listing substitutes on your order in case inventory runs short, particularly on Creole types.
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There have been numerous inquiries about the artwork on this site, most of which is by Fiona. This is but a glimpse into her outstanding repertoire. Primarily a print maker, her work can be seen here.
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.
