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: February
It’s mid winter and several inches of snow blanket the field with some early garlic shoots poking through. While December was very wet, culminating in minor flooding, January was, by contrast, quite dry, temperatures dropping into the mid teens. All unprotected field crops were damaged. While the garlic can handle frozen soil, the layer of mulch helps to regulate the freeze/thaw fluctuation. The snow here seldom stays for long and it’s a welcome change in the scenery. It does, however, highlight the absence of forest where it was either burned in last summer’s fires or rapaciously clearcut.
I was gone for most of January. There is much to do upon return: process planting discards into varietal garlic powders, start early spring seeds, work up the high tunnel, get more firewood. When the snow melts i will assess what is viable to harvest for market. There have been a number of inquiries for seed stock during my absence. If you haven’t received a response, write again. There is still stock available for late winter/spring planting. There’s plenty of culinary grade available 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.
Thus far, this has been a fairly normal Southern Oregon winter: rainy December, dry cold January, mid winter 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 flies 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 large scale clearcut logging 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.
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.
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…
