Garlic arrives!

Happy day: our shipment of cheerfully plump, certified organic seed garlic arrived this morning! We usually reserve seed stock from the summer harvest for fall planting, but with the farm move last year, we weren’t able to put in the usual overwinter crop. What a shock! Once you’re used to it, it’s quite painful not to have a plentiful supply of super flavorful homegrown garlic always at hand!

This is the trusty variety of hardneck garlic (stiff stems) that we’ve always grown. It’s called Music, apparently “developed” right here in Canada by a grower named Al Music. So I’ve heard…

Garlic is a bit of a mystery, because it’s not grown from seed. In fact, until the last couple of decades, it was thought that garlic didn’t even produce viable seed. Instead, garlic is grown  from cloves, which is known as vegetative reproduction, like planting cuttings. Basically, garlic clones itself, it’s genetically identical from year to year. So far, it seems no-one has applied the latest in DNA fingerprinting to a selection of world garlic to see precisely what’s up, but the general belief is that we are eating garlic that may be unchanged after…thousands of years.

In any case, our garlic will be planted somewhere in the second half of October. We’re getting their garden beds ready now! Stay tuned…