“Farm-to-table” has become a buzzword, but what does it really take to bring specific produce from seed to market? Different Hudson Valley crops require different levels of planting, irrigating, weeding, harvesting, and tending to prevent crop-ruining issues like fungus or flooding.
The #How’sItGrowing series explores what farm-to-table really means for crowd-fave fruits and veggies, and shares how they’re looking this year. This summer, Suzanne Kelly opens up on everything that goes into garlic. Kelly is the founder of Green Owl Farm on a one-acre plot near Rhinebeck.
How long have you been growing garlic?
Let’s see — I planted my first crop in 2013.
What do you love about it?
I love garlic. Fresh garlic, like so many things you grow yourself, is good and better. It’s juicier and has a longer shelf life. I also love that it’s one of the first things that comes up in the late winter and early spring.
What is the outlook for this year’s crop?
I’m not sure yet. Most of my land isn’t really affected by heavy rains, but [this year’s] plot is more clay than other ones. The thing with garlic is it’s susceptible to fungus, so you don’t want your garlic to be sitting in water.
I’ll be harvesting in early July because of greater heat. My first crop I was harvesting in late July. We [recently] went from zone 5B to zone 6. It has definitely shifted the growing season earlier [in the past four years].
When did you plant?
I used to plant it in mid-October. Now I plant it late October into the first week of November. I plant it over two weeks. It takes me 20-40 hours of labor. My back was built for this work. I’ve had shoulder issues, but my back has been good.
We keep our own seed, keeping the largest bulbs, which is always painful because you wish you could sell your biggest and best.
How do you tend your crop over the winter?
We fertilize before we plant. We’re a no-till farm, so we broadfork everything and lay down compost and organic fertilizer. In November we mulch it with three inches of clean straw. The reason I mulch is to keep the moisture in. You get some warm days in the winter when it could sprout. I just feel like that will stress the plant, so I keep it covered up to keep it from emerging. It also keeps down the weeds once the growing season starts. If we’re not getting enough water each week I will irrigate. Maybe the first week of April I’ll fertilize it with some blood meal. You want something really high-nitrogen, fast-acting. I usually fertilize twice in the spring.
When will you harvest? What is involved?
It’s a lot of work. You want to pick the scapes first. It’s usually about a month before the garlic is ready. They used to come on the second week of June — now it’s the first week of June. The scapes are of course a marketable item, so we let them grow. I mostly sell them as a dried item. You want to get the scapes off because if you don’t, the garlic will not grow big because more energy will go into the flower.
In [late March through April] you have to be checking for allium leafminer [an invasive fly pest]. It can really ruin the garlic, penetrating all the way in so you can’t sell it. I have not had this problem yet, but a lot of folks will cover theirs.
I [harvest] totally by hand. Years ago when I was using a tractor I would use a pitchfork. Now that I have this permanent bed system, the soil’s nice and loose, and I just pull them. Hand pull, hand pull, hand pull, put them in a pile, take them in a wheelbarrow to the high tunnel.
And with garlic, people think, oh, it lasts for months and months — but to enable that, there’s the element of curing. How do you do that?
We do it two ways. The majority of our garlic we trim to have an inch and a half at the end of the stalk. Cornell did a bunch of studies and showed that it cured better without having as much plant matter attached to it. We built racks of chicken wire so each individual bulb sits in a hole, stalks up. If we have good dry weather, our garlic will dry in two [to three] weeks. We clean and trim the garlic after that. [During] the post-harvest, disease is just as much of a threat as in the ground. You’re introducing potential pathogens as they’re drying. You want to put them somewhere where there’s a lot of airflow.
A quarter of them we leave with the whole garlic stalk on because we make them into arrangements — little wreaths or garlic ropes, and sometimes I put dried flowers in them depending on what I have time for. That’s another marketable item.
What don’t people appreciate about what it takes to grow garlic? What’s challenging about it?
There’s tricky things with everything. Certain patches I’ve had diseases in — weird funguses.
Having said that, garlic is really fun to grow, and I recommend people do it. It comes up early. Unlike carrots, though, you only get to grow garlic once during the year. There’s a lot of pressure to get it right, or you have to wait until the next year. If you don’t like weeding your garden, or aren’t prepared to make sure it gets full sun, lots of nitrogen, and the scapes cut off, you [might want to find another crop].
Why is this a valuable item of produce to buy locally?
My understanding is that 80% of [garlic] in the grocery store is from China — that’s what they told us when I was going through the workshops with Cornell. [Chinese exporters] do cut all the roots off, and I have heard that they irradiate them so you can’t regrow them, which I think is for customs reasons. I think buying any produce locally is better. It’s going to come to your plate more quickly from when it was pulled from the ground. It also tastes better.
