It is full-on garlic planting time at Amara Farm! I was hoping to get the garlic in earlier, at the end of September, but other business kept getting in the way. Finally with the lovely weather that we’ve been having, we were able to work our fields and create the raised beds to plant.
We’re hoping to plant at least 4,000 cloves. It sounds like a lot but it’s actually short of what I was originally wanting to plant and this is happened for a number of reasons. When I first moved to the valley and showed up at the farmers market with garlic, all of the long-time farmers came over and exclaimed “What? You don’t have white rot?!”
Now I’ve been growing garlic for about 9 years, mostly in the Lower Mainland, and I had never come across this disease. If you’re at all familiar with club root, white rot is very similar in that once your soil is infected, the spores can live in the the soil for over 20 years.
Bulbs that get infected with the rot begin to mold and turn mushy. Having been here over a year, I am hearing more and more people tell me that they’ve lost their garlic, especially this year!
So…. Being the paranoid person I am, I decided long ago to never save any of my own garlic for seed and to buy my garlic from the Okanagan. I figured that since the disease doesn’t like extreme temperatures (it won’t grow if it’s too hot or too cold), garlic grown there would be disease-free.
Along comes climate change. This year, it rained in June in the Okanagan. And it rained heavily. Acres of garlic were destroyed! Just to give you an idea, my 4,000 garlic takes up less than an eighth of an acre. So, even though I had placed an order for 150 pounds of seed garlic from my regular supplier way back in May, I got zero!
And wouldn’t you know, that the garlic festival I hosted back in August enabled me to sell out of almost all of my garlic. I had maybe 40 pounds of garlic left at all. I quickly got over my need for off-island seed garlic and asked everyone and anyone if they had any left. Luckily, a grower in Dove Creek heard my sob story and I was able to procure 40 pounds from him. Combined with some other dribs and drabs that I’ve been able to get, we’re well on our way to at least having some kind of garlic crop this year.
In some ways, the whole issue has forced me to look at the sustainability of my practices of procuring seed garlic from far away. It would never have worked long-term anyways to constantly be shipping it in from elsewhere so I’m happy to be forced to re-think this. I did take some precautions with my own saved seed, though. Having done some research, I took the extra step of soaking the separated garlic cloves in a 10% solution of peroxide, in case there were any spores on the garlic.
I’ll report any successes or failures next summer. In the meantime, I urge everyone to plant garlic! Being secure in our garlic supply is absolutely doable in the Comox Valley and would be an excellent goal to strive towards.
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