Two Feet in the Dirt

One of the first farmers I worked for always said about garlic “plant on Halloween, harvest on the Fourth of July” and that has proven almost exactly true for us. Garlic is the rare crop that is planted the year prior and is in the ground all winter before being harvested the following summer. While it’s always exciting to finally get the garlic out of the ground, the garlic harvest also invariably falls at one of our busiest times of year. Apart from the increasing load of crops like beans, cucumbers, and zucchini that need to be harvested multiple times a week, we are also still in the process of planting later successions of these crops as well as seeding the bulk of our fall transplants, from kale and collards to chard, cabbage, and cauliflower. So it’s always a bit stressful to try to fit into an already busy week the multi-hour task of harvesting the garlic.

Apart from just getting it out of the ground, the garlic also needs to be sorted and hung up to dry. Sorting garlic is a pretty important “trick of the trade.” Besides selling garlic, we also use a percentage of it as our planting stock each fall. Sorting out the largest heads to use as seed ensures that we are always selecting for the biggest, healthiest cloves to be the basis of next year’s plants. Garlic also needs to be hung in the open air to dry for several weeks before it reaches the stage most of us are used to seeing in the grocery store. As a result, when we start selling garlic this week it will be in the form of “fresh garlic.” This tends to have somewhat less bite in it’s flavor and has not yet developed the papery outer skin. I actually prefer it to traditional garlic. We use fresh garlic interchangeably with regular garlic, but this website has some other ideas on how to use and store it.

See below for our full harvest list. The store will be open Thursday from noon until midnight!

Thank you so much for your support.

Farmers Katie & Mike

Harvest List:

• Garlic scapes
• Lettuce salad mix
• Arugula
• Red Russian kale
• Lacinato kale
• Curly green kale
• Spring Onions
• Kohlrabi
• Collard Greens
• Rainbow Chard
• Carrots
• Cabbage
• Beets
• Snap peas
• Zucchini/Summer squash
• Cucumbers
• Beans
• Basil
• Fresh Garlic
• Potatoes
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