Garlic has a split personality. In the supermarket and on your kitchen counter, it gets taken for granted. It’s always there, dull in appearance and steadfast in nature. You’re not going to pick it up and devour it as you might a peach or tomato, but neither will it develop a soft spot on the bottom and slowly turn into a puddle if left for too long.
If a recipe is a movie, garlic is a character actor: it always plays the same part. It’s no good at playing the starring role, as it can easily drown out all the other actors in a recipe, and it can give you the culinary equivalent of a hangover. But accidentally leaving it out of a certain dishes can actually diminish the other flavors. There are dozens of popular foods that would simply not be the same without it.
On our farm, Garlic plays a similar role. Twice a year, it becomes a top priority for us: During the harvest in early June, and once again when we plant it in October. Unlike just about every other crop we grow, garlic gets planted just once a year, all at the same time. There is no way to “stage” garlic or plant successions like we do other crops. Nothing you can do to garlic can fool it into sprouting earlier, or making heads later. We grow a lot of it though, so both planting and harvest are a big deal.
Once harvest is done, though, the garlic gets stacked in bins in the barn where it stores perfectly until December most years. We pull out a bin or two once a week, clean it up and send it out a few heads at a time in your CSA boxes. We have other customers for it as well, most notably Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley. They add a case to their orders of tomatoes, squash and cukes every week or two. The garlic leaves the farm a little at a time, and the pile of bins slowly and steadily shrinks through the fall.
Unlike most crops we grow, garlic is not grown from seeds but rather from the same cloves you eat. As you may know from experience in your kitchen, sometime in December or maybe January, each clove sprouts a green shoot. Those shoots grow up while the clove develops roots and grows into a plant that makes one head . Put another way, each head of garlic you receive in your boxes was at one time a single plant. While we could plant the same garlic in the fall that we harvested in the spring, it’s really not a good idea. If even 1% of the garlic was infected with a soil-borne disease, by planting the 10-12 cloves from that head we will effectively be spreading that disease tenfold.
Garlic also needs cold weather while it’s growing to produce strong offspring. The garlic that we buy for “seed” comes from higher elevation areas where the ground freezes — which has the side benefit of killing many of the common soil-borne diseases. If we planted some of our own garlic cloves alongside these mountain-grown garlic cloves, you would see the latter sprouting strongly and uniformly where the TFF garlic would come up weak, spindly, and inconsistently. It’s simply not cold enough, for long enough, to grow good “garlic seed” here.
From time to time, our garlic seed supplier informs us that “seed is not available this year”. Sometimes it is due to weather in whatever area the garlic is grown — usually bearing no relation to the weather we see here. Other times they don’t even tell us the reason, as if the 10,000 lbs. of garlic seed we purchase each year together with several other local farms is nothing more than a rounding error in their sales — which is almost certainly the case. Unfortunately, 2024 appears to be one of those years. This morning I received the short, polite, and devastating email ending with “Maybe next year”. No explanation.
Now ensues an all-too-familiar scramble to find a suitable replacement — probably how a film director feels when they find out that Steve Buscemi or Zooey Deschanel is not available to play that “quirky yet recognizable” character in their movie. Unlike the director, though, we can’t “reschedule shooting”. We’ve got just one short window each year to get the garlic in the ground.
I would love to say that the other times our garlic supplier backed out on us (two that I remember), we were able to track down some really high quality garlic seed that produced a tremendous crop the next year. Sadly, the opposite was true. One year, the substitute garlic was already moldy and breaking down when we planted it. There was no garlic harvest the next year.
As I mentioned in my newsletter a few weeks back, climate change poses an existential threat to the viability and consistency of seed production — without which, farmers cannot feed humanity. I have no idea whether our garlic seed fell victim to a weather disaster, or simply to a change in market demand that caused the supplier to re-direct it to another customer. But my guess is that either way, it is likely related to global warming. The more frequent the occurence of extreme weather events, the higher the likeliehood of supply disruptions and shortages of seed. If you are a seed supplier, this is pure upside: you don’t have to pay farmers growing seed unless they harvest a crop, but you can raise prices for all the seed you sell. You buy less seed, and sell it for a higher price — it’s win/win. Everyone else loses.
For the next few weeks, our local community of CSA farmers will be searching for someplace to buy 10,000 lbs. of high quality garlic seed. While that may not be much in the grand scheme of garlic, it’s a big deal for us. “Terra Firma Farm, the Film” would just not be the same without the unique role that garlic plays. I’ll keep you posted.