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.
Update: April 2023:
It was a cool, wet winter and that pattern is continuing into spring. The clay soil remains in the 40s and while most varieties have emerged, growth is quite slow. While that’s not unexpected for garlic, even the spinach and lettuce planted in high tunnel are sluggishly growing. With such cool temps, it’s actually not too late to plant some garlic types: Creole and Silverskin as well as most shallots. There is still some of these available but the time window to plant is closing soon.
Garlicana is looking for help for 2023. In many ways, this is a typical farm residential internship, due to the great diversity of vegetable crops produced; needless to say, it’s very focused on garlic and a genuine interest is necessarily required. This would be an ideal place to learn a lot about every nerdy component of garlic and plenty about small scale organic vegetable production too. Please contact the farm if this intrigues you.
The USPS has discontinued offering “Region” boxes. At least two-thirds of the orders have been shipped out using these boxes which enabled reduced shipping costs, particularly for small orders. At this point, nearly all orders will have to be sent using flat rate boxes. This is very disappointing.
If emailing order inquiries, please understand that i will respond when able. Try calling as i can work while talking; you may get quicker response to you queries. Your patience is appreciated.
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 not 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.
At this point, there’s no True Garlic Seeds available. Until 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.
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.
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 occasionally offers true seeds. These are processed and cleaned in midwinter. Availability is limited and inconsistent. Offerings are a byproduct of the 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…
