Our Garlic seed crop coming up in April
This season we are growing garlic for our CSA for the first time in a number of years, but there wont be garlic in the shares until next season here’s why:
We’ve wanted to grow garlic for our CSA for a number of years but have run into several issues. The first was a soil born disease that seams to be endemic in all of our fields, and the second was the extremely high price of seed garlic. But now we may have a solution to both of these problems.
Last fall we were able to rent some new land that had been in sod for many years, reducing the possibility of the soil born disease that plagued us on our garlic each time we tried to grow it in the past. Next we bought 400 lbs of seed garlic and planted it.
We know 400lbs sounds like it should be plenty of garlic, but actually it’s just about the right amount to grow for a seed crop for next year – so that we can plant the 3 acres or so of garlic we need to feed our hungry CSA!
So the result of our efforts is that Next Season we’ll have garlic in our CSA shares (assuming everything goes well). For this season we’ll have Garlic Scapes, the flowering part of the garlic that we snap off so that the bulbs will size up, but probably not any garlic to distribute.
Garlic Scapes just Harvested
Garlic Scapes however, are a great spring treat. They can be used just like garlic, chop them up and put them in wherever you’d use garlic. The flavor is usually a little milder than the bulb so if you’re using a recipe that calls for garlic, use a little more when substituting with scapes.
