How to Plant Garlic

Garlic planting time is upon us in the cold climate areas. We've been shipping out lots with more to follow. There is definitely still time to plant if you're not under snow. You can find our available varieties and order your seed at www.greatnortherngarlic.com. If you're wondering how to plant, it's easy. Noah made our first instructional video. Check it out:

You can also find information at out our Garlic Planting 101.

Newsletter!

We were quite excited. After a lot of building, and writing, and testing, we sent off our first newsletter the other day letting everyone know that it's time to order garlic for planting. (High five Mailchimp!) We'll be sending out our first shipments to Alaska tomorrow.

But there's more than a time to order reminder in the Great Northern Garlic newsletter. We recapped our year in garlic. It was quite a busy one, but we kept it pretty short. :) There's a quick recap of our first garlic festival attendance, a feature on a couple of our beautiful varieties of garlic, and a super cute photo of our son (we couldn't resist!). We'd love to post the newsletter here but there's no way to embed it. If you'd like to take a peek just click the link and it will open right up: http://eepurl.com/vH9AL

Beautiful Nootka Rose ready for fall planting

www.greatnortherngarlic.com

Our First Garlic Festival!

We've cleaned and packed the garlic. We've picked the extra vegetables at the farm. We've made our deliveries to the Pastime Bar & Grill who is featuring our organic garlic and heirloom tomatoes on their garlic themed menu. We've packed the truck. We're ready!  Here's where we'll be this weekend...

Garlic Planting 101

So you're ready to plant some garlic? Garlic is planted in the fall and harvested the following year. It may seem like a terribly long time to have to wait. But, when it pops up first thing in the spring it just might feel like that is the best part!

Garlic isn't hard to grow. Here is a basic rundown of what you need to do:

• Plant a few weeks before your location gets its first frost. (Basically about the time the rest of the garden is finishing and you are doing fall cleanup.) 
• Prepare a bed, nice and deep, work in some good compost if you have it.
• If it isn't done already, separate your bulbs into cloves, keeping the paper skins in tact.
• Plant cloves 6-8 inches apart.
• Cloves are planted with the root end down, pointy end up.
• Push cloves into the soil to  a depth about 3 times the clove's length.
• Give your garlic plot a good watering. 
• Cover planted garlic with 3-6 inches of organic mulch. (Straw, alfalfa, grass clippings or old hay all work great.)
• You are all finished until next year, now just wait for your garlic to grow!

Simple, isn't it? Your garlic will likely be the first green thing up in the garden the next year. Ours starts emerging just days after the snow recedes.

One thing to keep in mind when planting is that you will need to be able to weed the bed in the spring. We plant our garlic four abreast in beds two feet wide, this way we can weed from either side of the bed without straining our backs.

Thanks Most Interesting Man in the World!

The Great Northern Garlic Website is Open for 2013 Seed Orders!

We've been working hard around here! There is always weeding to do. Crop maintenance. Planting. We've been harvesting peas and lettuce. We planted over 300 tomato plants, over 60 pumpkin seeds, and loads of potatoes! Lucky for us we've had a few thousand cute little helpers to control some of the pests.

And we have to take time for fun. There's been bike riding down the mountain, swimming at the lake, and hanging out with the geese at the pond.

How the time flies! It's hard to believe that it is almost time to start harvesting garlic! We were lucky to have a few days of hard rain, which gave us the opportunity to work on the website. We've been wanting to do that for some time now. After rewriting the descriptions for each of our 15 garlic varieties....

we opened up the website for garlic seed orders!

Our crop estimates are in and we've been wanting to make ordering available for a while now, to make it convenient for you, so we are quite pleased! We have some wonderful varieties that you will love in the garden... and in the kitchen. Hop on over to www.GreatNorthernGarlic.com and check them out!

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Origins 2

 This is Part 2 Of Our Origin Story, to read Part 1 go here.

 So we loaded the log cabin into a U-Haul truck a piece at a time along with our other few meager possessions. Loaded our few goats we had acquired and learned to milk into the back of the '65 and we were off. I think we signed something that said we wouldn't take the U-Haul off road......sorry U-Haul it was only 24 miles or so.
  I believe it was the 20th of September 1995 when we "landed" in (our) New World. By the 20th of November we would sleep in the cabin for the first time. Six inches of snow on the ground and a tarp for a door. It was invigorating to say the least.

  A day or two before, Noah was kicked in the chest by Clyde, one half of our pair of Belgian draft horses (Bonnie being the other half of the pair).

 A few broken ribs and 20 below zero temperatures almost finished us off that first month. We learned about something called 'creosote'. A build up of creosote in our stove pipe caused the pipe to become clogged and thus fill the cabin with smoke. We had to just shut the stove down and endure the sub-zero temps....Noah was too sick to get out of bed, let alone fix the problem.
  Luck had it that a neighbors visiting son stopped by. He found us looking like death warmed over (warmed being a relative term of course). He took down the stove pipe and unclogged it and built us a fire.
  That near death experience averted, the rest of our first winter went smoothly. We had put in enough firewood, we had put in enough hay, the cabin was warm. We learned about the weather patterns on our mountain, the prevailing winds, how low the sun stayed on the horizon and how short the winter days were. All really essential information for designing an alternative energy powered lifestyle.
 To be continued........

2013 Garlic Scapes

Yesterday we cut our first garlic scapes!

Scapes are the flowering shoots that form at the top of hardneck garlic. The stem grows into a beautiful curl. Lucky for us, they're also delicious!

Garlic scapes have a wonderfully subtle garlic flavor when cooked. Some people also love them raw. If you like it hot and spicy you might like to toss them straight into a salad or chop them up into salsa. Scapes' flavor mellows when cooked. They're great in stir-fries and pureed into garlic scape pesto. You can brush them with olive oil and throw them on the grill. One of the favorites around here is to have them beer battered and fried.

We've been harvesting and enjoying scapes for quite a while now, but we are happy to be able to offer them for sale for the first time in 2013. Our garlic scape season at here at Great Northern Garlic lasts from mid-June to mid-July. Head on over to our website if you're interested in ordering some. We'll ship them to you fresh from the farm!

It's Green Garlic Time!

We've been pulling up lots of green garlic on the farm. Why? Even though we space our cloves carefully when we plant, there are still some that grow up in doubles and even triples for various reasons. We thin them to give the strongest plant the space to grow and become a nice big bulb of garlic.

What is green garlic? Basically, green garlic is garlic that isn't all the way developed. It looks a lot like a scallion at this stage. But, green garlic has a wonderful mild garlic flavor. Seems like you can put it in just about anything. We've cooked it up in stir fries, quiche, egg rolls, and even put it raw into coleslaw, salsa, and salad. All delicious. We've also made the classic potato leek soup with a garlic twist. It's easy:

Green Garlic, Leek, and Potato Soup

• Slice one bunch of green garlic & bunch of leeks
• In a large pot melt approximately 4 tablespoons of butter (enough to coat) 
• Add green garlic and leeks. Saute on a medium-low heat until wilted but not browned, around 10-20 minutes
• Peel and thinly slice 4-6 medium potatoes and add to pot
• Cover with chicken or vegetable broth and cook until potatoes are soft
• Lightly mash with a potato masher or puree in blender if desired
• Add salt and pepper to taste

That's it! Like it more garlicky? Add more green garlic. Want it to go further? Add more potatoes or broth. Vary the amounts according to what you like. It's soup, there's lots of room to play around. You could even saute the green garlic and leeks then put everything in the crock pot and let it simmer. What a great meal to come home to at the end of the day!

What's your favorite green garlic recipe? We have a lot more to eat. If you're in the area and want to pick up a bunch or so, just let us know!

Origins

Origin-

Noun

 The beginning of something's existence.

  How did we get where we are? Well that's a long story. One that seems normal and blah to us but to many, it seems extraordinary. A line from my favorite poem as a child seems to sum it all up.

  

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.                               -Robert Frost --1920

  

  Northern California, Thanksgiving day, 1992, an accident on a football field sets into motion a romance that had flickered but never burned. In less than two years we would be married in one of the most beautiful places imaginable. 

 We were young but had good jobs. We had a desire to own some land but not a postage stamp lot and a cookie cutter house.We wanted SOME LAND. But we lived in California, where land doesn't come cheap and our jobs weren't that good. Big Sur would of been first on the list but it's well...Big Sur and either for the uber rich or the free-loading friends of the uber rich. So Big Sur it was not.

  An offer to house-sit for a few months in the mountains of Washington State proved to be too enticing to pass up. Soon we quit our jobs, packed up our meager possessions, sold the classic VW, bought a 1965 4-wheel drive Chevy truck and we were off. We really didn't know what we were doing.

  Now, while most of our friends were just getting into the rhythm of early adulthood. Juggling the newly earned right to consume alcohol with the proposition of having to get up in the morning to go to work. We were discovering a new world.

 Country life.

 We weren't Californians anymore (although Californian doesn't just wash off in the shower or get buried in the grime under your fingernails). We had a lot to learn and the tuition at the school of hard knocks gets expensive from time to time. Snow, rednecks, small town cops, firewood, winter driving and livestock all come to mind when I think back on that time.

  Six months later we were looking for our own piece of property. And we found it. 40 acres, its own little valley, remote, no power, no phone lines, dirt roads. Just what we (thought we) wanted. So we did what any reasonable newlywed couple would do, we started building a log cabin in the garage of the house we were taking care of.

  To be continued... go here to read part 2.

Like we needed something else to do, we built a blog! I'll let Heather take the wheel now, I am off to plant barley.