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 August 2022:
I am presently accepting seed orders while cleaning garlic and shallots. If emailing order inquiries, please understand that i will respond when able. You can try calling and as i can clean garlic while talking, you may get quicker response to you queries. Your patience is appreciated.
Note that prices have increased. This is primarily due to the price of diesel. While prices at the pump may fluctuate, when the tractor fuel was delivered, i burst out laughing. When actual costs of farming, of producing unsubsidized food and seed have steeply increased, the cost of the product has to be increased.
I am going to be downsizing the farm next season, 2023. Between the increasingly unpredictable weather and losses associated with as well as the scarcity of labor help in this rural locale has unduly challenging. So next season the offerings and volumes will likely be reduced.
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.
There is now a Garlicana Instagram page. It’s slow start with few posts as time has been devoted more towards farming than photography. Among the skills acquired over the years of farming, hasn’t exactly included proficiency in social media usage and, one might surmise by looking over this site, i’m more prolific with words than pictures.
Garlicana is still looking for an intern for the 2022 season. 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.
A note on 2021: For all the ill effect of drought, conspicuous consumption of water by industrial scale pot growers and toxic levels of smoke from nearby fires, there was some signs of resilience. This last summer, when much of the creek that runs through the farm had disappeared upstream beneath bedrock and river-stone cobble, there persisted two sizable pools here. This can be attributed to both the presence of beavers whose food supply was enhanced by the planting of willows and watershed restoration efforts including the placement of root wads, rock/boulder weirs, planting of native species, etc. So when the rest of the creek was dried up, there remained fish in the creek, western pond turtles, beavers and myriad species taking refuge in a place where stewardship is prioritized over profit.
Please read the Contact/Order page before asking for prices, shipping information or the address.
A year or so 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…
