Green Garlic

What’s Growing This Week:    Cabbage  Carrots Potatoes Baby Bok Choy Meyer Lemons Satsuma Mandarins Green Garlic  Asian Pears (M, L) Broccoli (M, L) Leeks (M, L) Butternut Squash (L) Apples (L)

Garlic has a mind of its own.  And that’s not the only thing that makes it very different from most other vegetables.  Like other bulbs and tubers — onions, sweet potatoes, potatoes — garlic does not produce seed.  Rather, the vegetable itself is reproductive.  A garlic clove — like a potato or a sweet potato — left for long enough, will sprout and root, providing a food source for its next generation until it is large enough to fend for itself.  However, garlic is very, very particular about when it does things.  A potato, for example, will sprout pretty much any time it is exposed to certain triggers (ethylene gas, for example, or warm temperatures).

Garlic varieties are adapted to particular geographic areas.  Here in Northern California, our garlic begin to sprout when it senses a combination of higher humidity and shortening days — i.e., winter.  Once it sprouts, it grows mostly roots until warmer temperatures and longer days arrive, at which point the leaves and stem begin to grow quickly.  Longer days and higher temperatures cause the stem to begin dividing into cloves, and once they are fully formed the leaves begin to die.  At this point the garlic is ready to harvest.  If you replanted the garlic immediately after harvesting it, it would either sit in the ground for 6 months before sprouting again, or it would shrivel in the summer heat.  It will not sprout again until the conditions are right for its survival.

Many cultures around the world eat lots of garlic, yet for most of history, it was a seasonal crop — harvested once a year.  In dry areas like southern Italy, the bulbs could be stored for longer by braiding them and hanging in a dry place.  Other cultures relied much more heavily on preservation techniques to make garlic available year-round.  Garlic powder, curry paste, kim chi, garlic pickles, etc.

Recently, garlic has been globalized in an effort to keep it available all year.  It is grown in the northern hemisphere in the summer, the southern hemisphere in the (our) winter, and in the subtropics in between.  Currently, China is the single largest garlic producer in the world, and is now the source of most of the garlic eaten in the U.S.  Garlic is a relatively labor intensive crop to grow, and low labor costs in China give growers there a big advantage.
And unlike many fresh produce items, garlic holds up reasonably well to the long ocean voyage.  As recently as three years ago, economists from the University of California pronounced the death of the garlic industry in California — where most American garlic is grown.  Unfortunately, they failed to anticipate that garlic lovers in the U.S. actually care about the quality of the garlic they eat.  While I’m sure that there is plenty of high-quality garlic grown in China, it seems that much of the stuff they send us is doesn’t make the grade.  Garlic that is stored too long gets dry and bitter.  And while Chinese cooks may not mind peeling apart dozens of tiny cloves for their dinner, it seems most American garlic lovers prefer big, juicy cloves.

Translation:  The California garlic industry is back, albeit on a smaller scale than before.  Garlic farmers have actually expanded so much in the last two years that there is currently a shortage of seed garlic (garlic for planting) and the supply of locally grown eating garlic has not kept up with demand — leading to higher prices in general, and specifically, a significant price differential between U.S. and Chinese grown garlic.

Here at Terra Firma, we are growing a little more garlic than we have in the past, but not that much.  We have our own way of addressing the “garlic gap” that occurs every winter — green garlic.  Green garlic is a tender garlic plant, leaves and stem, that has not yet begun to harden into cloves.  It is eaten like a leek or green onion.  Green garlic was historically considered a short-season treat — available for just a few weeks before the plants were harvested for bulbs.  However, we have found a way to extend the green garlic season by a month or more.

In late July, we take all of our “cull” garlic — ugly, split, and small heads from the harvest  — and put them into our cooler for 4-6 weeks.  This effectively tricks the garlic into believing that it has gone through winter.  When we pull them out in August, the warm days make them think that spring has arrived.  We plant the cloves and they sprout in September and get a big headstart over our main crop garlic, which gets planted in late October and often doesn’t emerge from the cold ground until late December or even January.  Garlic “tricked” this way will grow all winter and into the spring without producing cloves.

IN YOUR BOXES
While we have succeeded in finding a way to trick our garlic into sprouting earlier in the fall, there’s never any guarantee about when it will be ready to harvest as green garlic.  The last few years, the green garlic has sized up very slowly, really just a few weeks ahead of the main crop.  This year, however, some of the garlic is already big enough to pick.  We are harvesting a small amount for you this week.  Since we used the last of our head garlic in December, that makes this year’s “gap” one of the shortest we’ve ever had.

Green garlic does look quite a bit like Leeks, but there are a few easy ways to tell the difference.  First, of course, is the smell — if you can’t tell the difference yourself, I guarantee you someone in your household can.  Second is the leaf color — a yellowish light green compared to the dark, purplish green of the leeks.  Speaking of leaves, the garlic leaves are entirely edible — they can be used as a substitute for chives — and are much less tough that Leeks leaves, which most people don’t like much.

We are thrilled to once again be harvesting our neighbor Terry Schroeder’s Meyer Lemon orchard this year.  The lemons rebounded nicely after last year’s freeze and have set a heavy crop — two crops, in fact — so you can expect to see them several times this winter.  Don’t forget that there are two parts of the fruit to enjoy:  the juice, of course, but also the fragrant zest.

 We are giving our Spinach field the week off — even though it just had a two week vacation.  The forecast for the rest of this week is for sunny days and dry weather, which we hope will be conducive to the leaves growing enough for us to harvest more in another week or two.  We have several plantings in the ground, which should give us a reliable supply of salad and cooking spinach into March, weather permitting.

    Pablito

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MAILING ADDRESS:
Terra Firma Farms, Inc
P.O. Box 836
Winters, CA 95694
(530) 756-2800
www.terrafirmafarm.com
Goldenbell@aol.com

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