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.
Late Spring: June
It’s been a dry spring yet still quite lush, the hills are green, wildflowers are blooming. While there have been some hot days, overall, it’s been a mild spring. Fruit is forming on the orchard trees, nearby hay fields are just starting to be cut. I just mowed and spaded in my overwinter cover crop. The rye was up to 7 feet and every stalk was entangled with vetch and peas. After a few weeks, a summer cover crop, sorghum-sudan, will be sown. This will get mowed once at 4+ feet and grow up again. Then in late summer, it’ll get flailed and spaded in. Then onto the garlic crop. I am convinced that the soil building through cover cropping has been the most important factor in the improvement in the garlic crop. Speaking of which, the harvest has just begun for Turbans. Scape harvest will continue through late June. Usually there’s scaping on several shallot varieties, the Golden in particular. It’s pretty minimal this year which i would attribute to the mild Spring. We’re used to huge temperature swings from morning to afternoon and as well as cold and hot spells in Spring. This was seldom the case this season. There is brooming on a few garlic varieties and it still perplexes me what the cause is. I have theories, all of which i can find flaw in. Overall though, the crop looks good.
May:
Spring has really kicked in. The fruit trees are done flowering, deciduous trees have fully formed leaves, pollen from hay fields to trees is thick in the air and when the afternoon winds subside it settles on anything and anyone outside. Lilacs and dogwoods are in bloom and everything looks lush in spite of the fairly dry spring. There are so many shades of green and this is really apparent in the garlic crop. This is the time when the diversity of the plants stands out. Not just the coloration in the leaves but how different the leaf architecture between types and varieties from broad leaves whether rigid or floppy to slender vertical leaves or lateral fibrous ones. When i am selecting traits for breeding selection, this is the initial data gathering time. I like vertical leaves. Creole types have floppy leaves and if there’s a hail storm in the spring, the leaves will get lacerated. Not so with a more upright growth habit. Vertical plants are easier to cultivate around; then again, broad leafed plants can form a better canopy, shading the soil and the weeds. What traits are most advantageous to your conditions? I’m also on the lookout for accessions that are scaping early in hopes of extra early maturing plants. Good time for garlic nerds. Now i just need to get the potato crop planted…
Garlicana is looking for help on the farm, especially during the summer harvest, June and July. In many ways this is a standard farm internship as this is also a diverse 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, incinerated or privatized.
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.
Late March:
Well, it had been a fairly typical under until March 16th. Back in December there was a minor flood. The stream gauge was over 8 feet (winter normal is 3-4′). The creek crept over the bank, there was ponding in the field and standing water in the pathways between garlic rows. Water streamed at the foot a the stairs below my house. I have been through a number of flood events in my time here and have taken steps to reduce the impact, from berms along the bank to stacking four pallets inside the root cellar to put the potato sacks on. The December flood was alarming but after the water receded, i sighed, finished planting the shallots in gooey soil and got on with the next task. So after a massive storm came through overnight on March 15th, the morning found me moving anything realistic up to higher ground. Alas the garlic crop, in its rotation, is in a low spot in the field which by late morning, was submerged. As the creek water cascaded into the field, water poured in from across the road. The heavy straw mulch lifted, drip lines floated, eddies formed. Mulch washed up on the fence, stoppering the field until the water poured over, scouring out a driveway below. By late morning, wet snow fell and while it didn’t really stick here, it did at higher elevations and that slowed things down. The stream gauge peaked at 10.56′ at nearly 8000 cfs. The intensity of flood was exacerbated by both last summer’s two wildfires and the thousands of acres of clearcut logging on this watershed alone. The erosion caused by even the salvage logging operations has grave impacts downstream.
After all the drama of watching the torrent rush by the house, there’s a sense of dread at the clean up. Some of that will have to wait until the dries out as the ground is too soft for the tractor to move washed up trees and other debris. Fortunately i had help from neighbors with the garlic. After a couple of days, the field drained, leaving mats of straw and tangled drip lines atop swaths of garlic, crushing some plants, others poking out through the silty mulch. I don’t know how much garlic will perk back up once the weather turns. The roots are very well established so i don’t see loss from heaving. While heavy clay soil can become anaerobic when saturated for lengthy periods, the years of cover cropping, building soil, has been essential. Much as there’s loss of top soil from the velocity of floodwaters, the established cover crops captured silt and forest debris. When i get to peeling the silt encrusted straw caught up in the fence, this too will be worked in. Frequent fires, floods, drought, unless you have ideal conditions, this is what we have to adapt to. Hopefully the loss in the garlic isn’t too severe.
Winter:
It was 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.
