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!

.

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!