This morning, I was meditating on the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Back in August, I wrote a newsletter about garlic and how it appeared possible that for the first time in 30 years or more, Terra Firma might not be able to grow it — thanks to a shortage of “seed garlic”. Over the next few months, I went through those 5 different stages. By October 21st, the date we normally plant our garlic crop each year, I had reached the “Acceptance” stage and come to terms with the idea that 2025 would be the year we harvested no garlic.
One week later, I got a text from one of a dozen contacts I had reached out to during my quest to find a source of planting stock. “I’ve got the goods. I will meet you in Gilroy next Monday, come in an unmarked vehicle and bring cash. I will text you the exact location 5 minutes before the pickup time. Make sure you are not followed”.
Well, not quite. It was more like the garlic version of a post-holiday sale. Garlic bulbs vary in shape and size, and when they are “cracked” into individual cloves before planting, it’s difficult to correctly estimate how many pounds of cloves will be needed for the acreage planned. So most years when large garlic growers finish planting their crop, they have some left over. My source this year was a broker who buys that leftover seed garlic from the big growers and sells it to smaller growers like us. It ended up being just about the right amount.
Seed garlic is perishable. Once the heads are broken into individual cloves, they start to dry out and shrivel or get moldy. But garlic cloves that are being planted have to be both intact and still moist inside in order to sprout and grow. If you plant a clove that is peeled, for example, it will quickly disintegrate in the soil. We started planting the garlic early Tuesday morning, and hope to finish by tomorrow. The quality is great, which is both surprising and encouraging given that I had already given up on growing any garlic this winter.
The weather also gave us a break, possibly for the first time this year. Unlike seed or transplants, which are planted just an inch or so deep, garlic cloves get planted two or three inches below the soil surface. That means the soil has to be dry when we plant it. If it had rained an inch or more last week, which is not unusual for late October, it would have been too wet. That is one of the main reasons we normally put the garlic in the ground sooner.
Quite honestly, we’ve had a very rough year at the farm this year. The Summer from Hell that we experienced took both a physical toll on us as well as a financial one. Even now we are still experiencing the after-affects from it. If you’re wondering why you haven’t seen any carrots in your boxes lately, for example, you can blame the heat in July that annihilated the tiny seedlings that normally would have matured by late October. Leeks, an important Fall and Winter crops for us, barely survived the heat and are seriously stunted as a result.
So it was nice to catch a break this time, and I figured I would share the newswith you today, as some folks might be dealing with a different kind of grief this morning. We’ve also sent you the first of our Fall Mandarin crop this week.
Thanks,