At this point we have harvested everything from the field and our attention turns to planting the 2023 garlic crop. Garlic has been a sore subject of mine this season as we suffered some tough losses. Weed pressure is notorious in garlic fields as the alliums never fully occupy their bed space. Even after hand weeding once and cultivating weekly the pigweed, bindweed, and thistle got ahead of us early last summer. The intense competition limited the garlic’s ability to finish and I decided to pull it early before the heads had reached their full potential. The heavy blanket of weeds also limited soil drainage and caused issues of rot throughout the crop.
While a wiser man might consider removing garlic from his crop system, I have decided to increase the bed feet we are planting this year. Starting next week we will begin planting 9,600 cloves of garlic, or 4800 row feet. Over 10 varieties of both hard and soft necks will be planted to offer for eating and planting in 2023.
The reasons I love to grow garlic are many. Being edible throughout its life cycle is a main attraction to the crop. Green garlic in the spring makes for delicious stir-frys and early season offerings through our markets and CSA. Come June, the scapes start popping. Swirling their way out of the tops of our hardneck varieties, they add beauty to our stand and build a stoke around this hyper-seasonal item. Eventually you have the beautiful heads that grace most of the meals in our kitchen throughout the winter.
Garlic’s pungent flavor is unappealing to pests like grasshoppers or deer. As long as fertility is high and weed pressure low this crop can make for a relatively simple garden success. The challenge with garlic is the long season, almost 9 months to full maturity, and the timing. It must be planted at the end of the season, often when farmers are at their most tired. Then it needs to be harvested at the peak of weeding in July. Throughout the many months it grows it can be easy to lose track of the crop, exactly what happened to us this season.
Once the garlic reaches its full maturity and is cured the heads will last anywhere from a couple months to almost a year. The storability of the crop is ideal because it has potential to offer the farm income outside the growing season (i.e. a Winter CSA). Even better, it stores without refrigeration, which is always limited in space. These attributes allow us, in a good year, to ship seed garlic nationwide and expand our market beyond Fort Collins.
Garlic offers many sales avenues. Our “2nds” provide customers with high quality culinary garlic for use in kitchens. As quality increases we offer seed garlic selected rigorously for planting. We look at traits like color on the outside skin, bulb development, and drought tolerance to propagate through growers up and down the front range.
Perhaps the biggest reason I am expanding garlic production this year is because I believe it to have potential to become a regional specialty crop produced at scale. We have spent the last 4 years whittling down from 16 to 10 varieties searching for genetics ideal in our growing climate. Since garlic sprouts in March it needs to be drought tolerant while waiting for irrigation water in May. After continuously selecting out plants unable to cope with our turbulent springs, we have refined varieties able to thrive without supplemental water for 2 months.
Sitting in the barn, breaking up this year’s heads into bulbs to plant, I consider the reasons to continue this journey of food production. Garlic carries every reason within its cloves. Resilience, flavor, regional relationship, and diversity keep this farm moving forward. Garlic is both our last and first crop (last to be planted in 2022, first to rise in 2023). An ode to the past growing season and renewed hope towards the next. All the knowledge gained from past seasons gets placed into the ground as we plant towards our future harvests.
If you are interested in helping us plant garlic this year leave a comment below or email us. We are actively seeking volunteers to help from 9a-12p and 3p-6p on Wednesday the 2nd. Share this email with those who might be interested as well. Come join us as we plant 2022’s last crop!
I can help Wednesday afternoon, wouldn't be able to get there until 4 pm but could help until 6 pm!
I will help you weed next season. I am Boulder’s Dandelion King after all.