Please join us at the events listed below.  Shoot us an email on our contact us page if you’d like to pre-order any garlic. It’s fresh and juicy! We can ship anywhere.

• Sixth annual Minnesota Garlic Festival Saturday, August13 at the McLeod County Fairgrounds in Hutchinson. If you haven’t been, you should come. See link on side for more information. The chef demos look great.
• Minnesota Renaissance Festival on August 20 and 21 in Shakopee.  Look for the “garlic garlic garlic” banner.
• Red Wing Farmers’ Market in later August and September. See link on side for more information.
  

  Working with garlic is a delight.

  There are 28 varieties this year to try, each with its own flavor and delightful juiciness. And who said all garlic is the same. Ha.

May brings more growth. These photos are from the Hager garden at Windbeam Farm. Friends share their land with me in return for a year’s worth of garlic eating. Not a bad trade, huh? Paul made a window of opportunity. Check out their website on the side. Great place for weddings and gatherings.

May also brought morels and spring garlic. Both grilled to perfection by Tyler.

Spring Garlic is garlic that came up from last year…perhaps didn’t get harvested and wintered over.

It’s a nice treat this time of year.

Then comes the season of scapes—the flower shoot of the hardneck garlic. We had an abundance this year. Sold them at the Red Wing Farmer’s’ Market and gave to friends. Scapes hold us over until the real thing is ready to eat. There are many philosophies on when to break the scapes off. I tend to harvest them when I see them. If kept on, they tend to make for a smaller bulb of garlic. You want the energy of the plant to go to the bulb underground and not the flower of the scape. And make sure you eat them and not just compost them.

The scape tends to straighten itself out and the bulbil will open. All varieties are unique in the shape of their scape, their curl, and the size of their bulbil.

We have had plenty of rain in Minnesota this summer. The garlic and the weeds have grown tall and beautiful. Harvesting has been a challenge in dodging the rain. Ideally, one doesn’t want rain for the two weeks or so prior to harvest. No luck with that this summer. But the garlic is beautiful.

The Inchelium Red got up to four inches!

Garlic has got to “cure” for 2-3 weeks in order for it to dry and develop the garlic taste we have all grown to love. This is also weather dependent as the more humid it is, the longer it takes to dry. Make sure you don’t have the garlic hanging in sunshine. You want air flow and no light. That is often easier said than done. Our garage gets taken over. This is the barn on The Farm of my brother and sis-in-law.  The hanging garlic is kept out of direct light yet has air flow.

Each twine is holding about a dozen garlic. Keeping track of the varieties is a task in and of itself. Each twine has a label with the name of the garlic and color coded to show whether they are for sale/give away or if they shall be replanted.

What a treat it is to grow garlic on two beautiful farms. This is my favorite place on The Farm.

I’ll sort my garlic while taking in the view and the breeze and the solitude.

I shall try to update you with a season of garlic through photos. I am working on improving my blogging skills as I feel it is important to share knowledge. And who doesn’t want to learn how to grow garlic in Minnesota? Make sure you check out the Minnesota Garlic Festival coming up in a few weeks. See link on side bar. Always a good time. And we’ll have plenty of garlic along with us!

In March, it doesn’t look like there’s much going on, but, look a little closer and you’ll see a little something down under. That’s when it starts getting exciting!

And then over the next weeks what happens:

The garlic is getting so big that I can’t use my hand to show how tall it is.

In April the best thing to hit the garden happened. And what could be more beautiful than your grandbaby sitting in the garlic patch!

More coming soon…

Good grief…the woman leaves us in the crunch of garlic last year. I have no excuse, other than life itself.

This plot has fifty-one test varieties of porcelain, marbled purple stripe, purple stripe, and glazed purple stripe. It is the first year that I have grown these, given to me by Cannon Falls Joel. I feel there is pressure to make sure that they all survive and are taken care of like a real scientist would. Thank goodness they all came up this spring otherwise I’d have to admit to Joel that I have failed the job already. It is a happy feeling one gets…like a mother seeing all the wee ones growing so strong, each garlic having it’s own look and characteristic.

These little beauties have grown so much. They are much stronger than they were in the last posting. Walking through the garden it is easy to see how different each variety is, even at this height.  I am hoping that we get some rain as this is when it’s needed.

It’s hard to tell, but they are there…just small enough to not show in this photo. Nancy, my sister-in-law, has worked very hard saving her old barn on their farm. It’s a gem. I feel very fortunate to garden here.

A trip out to the Farm on April 9th made me very happy. The little beauties were up through the straw and looking for sun! Randy and I had to rake some of the straw off of it as it was matted down and wet and some of the finer varities had trouble poking up through it. Taking the straw off is always a gamble as there still could be a frost that could injure it.

The Go-Girls in Red Wing had a fundraiser on March 7, 2009. I brought in garlic powder to sell…mostly to see how it would go over and I must say I was pleasantly surprised.

Joel Girardin and his wife Colleen met me at Norton’s Restaurant in Red Wing early  March to celebrate his birthday.  Joel is known at the “Grandfather of Minnesota Garlic.” He has been growing garlic for around 15 years and at one time grew close to 200 varieties. How he kept track of all of them is beyond me. He is an adviser to Seed Saver Exchange in Decorah, Iowa, and has received their Oak Medallion award.  He and Colleen live right here in Goodhue County outside of Cannon Falls. They are two of the most giving people I know.

There’s nothing like talking garlic, eating good food and laughing hard. This is what you do off-season as a garlic grower.