Your Tomato and Garlic Specialists

Ha. In my last entry, I noted that I'd have lots of cardoons, barring any unforeseen disasters. You'd think those disasters would be more foreseen by now. Crappy potting mix is the probable culprit.

Anyway, I've taken to referring to this year as the "lost season". Because it pretty much is. I've been doing increased freelance writing, tearing the living bejeezus out of our old house (hopefully putting it back together someday), suffering from a terribly painful lower-back ailment and shuttling kids around between here and there.

But the tomatoes are thriving. The garlic is thriving. I had a teensy amount of flooding, but they pretty much survived that. So I will basically be nothing more than a tomato and garlic farmer this year. Not that those two crops won't keep me busy, as I have a pretty good selection of varieties among them.

So stay tuned for more info on tomatoes and garlic. Available SOON! A month or so, anyway.

The Garlic is In!

Much later than I would prefer, but it is in the ground, waiting for the wind to die down so it can be mulched.

1/4 acre. 12 varieties. 15 beds. 10,000 cloves in all. Give or take a thousand or two.

I'd post pictures, but I'm having some trouble getting any to upload. And I haven't had time to try and figure out what's wrong.

Well, back to the farm to put everything to bed.

Garlic Planting Time

Well, now's the time to beat cheeks and get the garlic in before it gets too cold for the little buggers to sprout. We've had some delays to work around -- our renter not getting his corn picked until yesterday, tractor issues and, um...farmer issues (lazi- er, procrastinatory practices).

Should be a pretty good week to do it. Only a little rain in the forecast, and if we can get the beds prepped before then, we (me) can certainly plant garlic in the rain.

Oh yeah, and don't forget to remind me. I need to buy straw this year. Tks.

Oh Yeah, That Blog.

Everywhere I go, people ask me: Where has the blog gone?

Well, it's been a busy week around here this week. Little Conlan fell (jumped?) off of the hay wagon last Sunday morning and broke his leg. He's fine, or at least as fine as one can be with a broken leg, but he's required a lot more attention. This is also his first prolonged exposure to television. Sigh. I guess I knew I couldn't keep him away from it forever...

The tomatoes are really starting to pop. I expect to have at least 50 lb. of first-quality available for Tuesday (hopefully more), and perhaps as many as 30-40 lb. of seconds available as well. I expect to have close to 200 lb. available per week when they really start hitting.

The Leg Incident has really cut into my garlic cleaning time, but I'll clean it to order if nothing else. Right now, it's still rocamboles (Killarney, Korean, Chesnok), but I'll start in on the porcelains next week.

Garlic Harvest...A Retrospective

I spent a lot of time last winter wondering to myself how on earth I was going to get a full quarter-acre of garlic out of the ground this season. Certainly, I wasn't going to be pulling it by hand, the way I did the eighth-acre last year and the 150 bulbs the previous year.

A grower I know in Iowa, Larry Cleverley, he unearths his garlic with an old Ford-Ferguson potato plow. I could try that. No luck finding one, however.

A grower I know in Fond du Lac, Bruce Braun, harvests his with a subsoiler. I found lots of those. Looked at them several times at a few local implements. Never bought one, though.

So there I was, staring at a quarter acre of a dozen varieties of garlic the day my garlic needed to come out of the ground. Holding a spading fork. It worked OK. Next year, though...a plow or something will make it that much easier. My back was killing me. Remind me to buy one before garlic harvest time in '08, n'kay?

Most of the garlic I grew this season was hardneck. 99.993%. Someday, I hope to have maybe 3 hardnecks and at least one softneck that I stick to each year. Enough of this dozen varieties nonsense.


Among the hardnecks, I grew more Killarney Red than anything else. It's a flavorful rocambole. Not mild by any means, but not strong. Textbook garlic flavor, I'd say. Another rocambole I grew a lot of was Chesnok Red. A real beauty, and a little stronger in flavor than Killarney. But again, not overpowering. My third rocambole was Korean Red. This one was interesting, because for some reason, a good percentage of my Korean Red crop this season exhibited softneck traits -- most notably, no topset and a SOFT neck. Weird. Still, this variety is excellent, though a bit on the hot side. But not so hot that you'd think you were eating crappy supermarket garlic or anything like that.


The other hardencks I grew were procelains. Music, which is an Italian heirloom as I understand it, has 4 to 6 large and very easy-to-peel cloves that taste exactly how you'd expect really good garlic to taste. Sort of mild, incredibly flavorful garlic. I think my favorite garlic is German Extra Hardy. It's slightly stronger than Music, and it's also really easy to peel and work with. Giant Siberian is my other porcelain. That one is a tad hot and generally pretty huge.

Some of the others I'm growing out to trial are Spanish Roja, a very popular rocambole; Georgian Fire and Georgian Crystal, one is hot and one is not; Romanian Red, which was quite a tall plant; a Mystery Cultivar, that probably just turned out to be German Extra Hardy; and two softnecks -- Inchelium Red and Tochliavri.

All in all, the harvest took 3 days with me finally forgoing the fork altogether and just pulling the damn things out of the ground, and my dad doing the bunching, tying and labeling. I hung 'em.

In a few weeks (or less), we begin the process of cleaning them for sale. I actually get kind of anal retentive (or perhaps it's OCD) and break out a few toothbrushes to get each bulb nearly sparkly clean.

Back when I still did farmers markets, I had a customer stop by my stand, pick up a bulb of garlic and tell me that it looked too pretty to eat. She thought I'd perhaps gotten it too clean. I told her "but it's food, it's supposed to be clean."

She looked at me as though she'd never thought of garlic that way before. Then proceeded to buy about a dozen heads.