Excerpted with permission from It’s a Long Road to a Tomato

Of the approximately one hundred varieties of vegetables and herbs we grow on our farm, garlic reigns as the sovereign queen. I would give up the ninety-nine others, albeit reluctantly, before I would give up my garlic. Garlic is our biggest crop and the one that has brought us major press coverage, both in New York City and nationally. Finally and, perhaps most endearingly, garlic is the crop that brings in the most cash.
Most growers of garlic, be they weekend dabblers or for-profit players like myself, soon learn that they have entered into a relationship with a plant that will not be easily cast off. Garlic’s attributes are such that, once smitten by the garlic bug, many growers develop a lifelong attachment. Often, our passion for Allium sativum goes well beyond its wondrous culinary, medicinal and curative properties. For me, it is the plant itself that is most remarkable: its stately appearance in the field, its fascinating life cycle and growth habit, its hardiness, its ancient lineage, the way it comports itself in this world.

Garlic is believed to have originated in the foothills of mountainous south-central Asia (northern Iran, Afghanistan, northern Turkey, China). It probably was one of the first wild plants to be cultivated by humans, going back perhaps ten thousand years. We can imagine precious bulbs of garlic being carried along silk trade routes by nomads and hunter-gatherers long before silk was being traded. Today, garlic has found its way to all corners of the globe and its many cultigens have adapted brilliantly to diverse climates and soils.

Traditionally, the center of garlic production in the United States has been Gilroy, California. The vast bulk of garlic grown for processing and supermarket sales comes from this area. Gilroy’s garlic is predominantly of the softneck type. Softneck garlic is relatively easy to grow on a large scale and stores well. But the bulbs of softneck garlic have numerous small cloves that overlap one another and are often irksome to peel, and the flavor, while adequate, is rarely exceptional.

The Northeast, with its cold winters, is better suited to growing hardneck garlic, a different subspecies that is closer to the original wild garlic from south-central Asia and not as domesticated as the softneck varieties. Hardneck garlic (sometimes called topset garlic) has larger cloves that radiate out from a hard central stem. They peel easily and their flavor, while it ranges widely from one hardneck variety to another, is often outstanding. Hardneck garlic is more demanding to grow, tends to yield less per acre, and often has a shorter shelf life, but among real garlic lovers it is the only stuff to eat.

On our farm we grow Rocambole, a variety of hardneck garlic that arrived in my hands seventeen years ago through good fortune and the generosity of a neighbor. Andy Burigo, an old Italian American who lives down the road from us, befriended my wife, Flavia (also of Italian ancestry), while she was out on one of her landscape-painting excursions. After Mr. Burigo learned that I was running an organic farm, he presented my wife with a brown paper bag containing about thirty bulbs of garlic and suggested to her that I try growing them. He told her the original planting stock came from Calabria, Italy, and that it had entered the United States many years earlier in the pocket of a friend, unbeknownst to customs officials. Ever since then he had given it pride of place in his extensive and well-tended garden.

That fall I separated the bulbs Andy Burigo had given me into a couple of hundred cloves and planted them in fertile soil. They lay in the ground all winter with a blanket of straw mulch covering them. At the end of March they emerged as the first crop of the season—slender, blue-green shoots that grew quickly. Over the next few months I provided water and pulled the weeds that competed with them. At the end of July, after their leaves had started turning brown, I dug up a couple of plants, brushed the soil off them and beheld a marvelous sight. The bulbs had a vibrant aura about them. Their buff-colored skins were streaked with a reddish-purple blush. They were firm and well-formed. And they were big.

Though this was not the first garlic I had ever planted and harvested, that day marked the beginning of my perennial romance with the “stinking rose.” I gave the bulbs to my wife. She used them in a meal that night and told me it was the best garlic she had ever eaten. Though not generally regarded by others, or myself, as a man with a discerning palate, I was inclined to agree.

A couple of days later I sold a few dozen bulbs at my farmers’ market stand. The following week almost every customer who had purchased one came back smiling, asking for more. It occurred to me then that I might be on to a good thing. I didn’t sell any more garlic that year and was reluctant even to give the occasional bulb to my wife. Instead, I squirreled away the hundred-odd bulbs that were left. That fall I divided them into about eight hundred cloves and planted them with great care.

The following year we sold a few hundred at market, again to rave reviews, and saved the rest for planting. I continued like that for a while, parceling out my trove in a quite parsimonious fashion, but within a few years I had built up a planting stock of twenty thousand cloves and an eager pool of customers. I was ready to do serious business.

With each subsequent year, aided by good press (on TV, radio, and in print media), the demand for our garlic has increased. And each year, to keep pace with this demand, I have allotted more acreage and labor to the cultivation of this exceptional plant.

Now we are planting approximately fifty thousand cloves—each and every one by hand. It may be that we have reached a natural ceiling in garlic production, if not in terms of how much we can sell at market, then in terms of the resources we have available to grow the stuff. These days I often feel overwhelmed by the vast sea of garlic growing in my fields and the substantial effort required to plant it, mulch it, weed it, water it, harvest it, cure it, grade it, and sell it. But I still dearly love my garlic and regard it more than ever as the plant that defines the essence of our farm.

Growing fifty thousand garlic plants on a small, diversified, organic farm is no small task. It must be approached in a highly organized, almost military fashion. At each stage, timing is critical. First we select the planting stock—some eight or nine thousand of our best bulbs from the summer harvest. We prefer large bulbs, but not the very biggest—these have a high proportion of split cloves that grow two or three small plants instead of one large one.

In early October we look for a warm and comfortable spot and sit down to separate the chosen bulbs into their constituent cloves. This phase of garlic planting is known as “clove popping.” We grade the cloves into several categories (tiny, small, medium, large, questionable, and “bad stuff”) depending on their size and quality. The few cloves that are soft, moldy, damaged, or exhibit even the slightest sign of disease go straight into the “bad stuff” box and are later burned in a 55-gallon drum. I regard it as imperative that our planting stock be clean and well screened. The whole process usually takes two weeks and is quite taxing on the hands, especially the thumbs. Bu the time all the cloves are “popped” and ready to plant, my helpers are wondering if our workers’ compensation insurance covers thumb-replacement surgery. (It does not.)

Next, I use a tractor to cut furrows eighteen inches apart in well-rested ground. We then set about on our hands and knees, planting the cloves one at a time at a spacing of three to six inches. Each clove is pushed a few inches into the soil and must be oriented correctly, so that its first shoot in the spring will head toward the sun, not the earth’s molten core. The smallest cloves are planted more closely (they receive the three-inch spacing) and will be dug and sold as green garlic in early summer—the entire plant is sold, leaves and all, to the surprise and bemusement of my newer customers. The larger cloves receive five or six inches of spacing and will be allowed to grow to maturity.

After planting is completed (it usually takes two to three weeks), the cloves are mulched a few inches thick with a hundred-odd tons of well-aged bedding material from a nearby horse farm. Through the winter, they rest in the cold ground, nursing their store of energy, awaiting the transformation to come. For a farmer it is a good thing to know that the garlic is in the ground, that the next generation of this most special plant is waiting under the snow to be born.

The first green shoots break ground in late March or early April, and that’s when I know for sure that I’m back in the garlic business. By mid-April all the plants should be up. May and June are months of intensive weeding, much of which is done by hand. If the rains fail, water will have to be provided via irrigation.

The garlic carries on its aboveground growth rapidly until the summer solstice, when the longest day of the year is reached. As the days begin to shorten, the plant slows down its photosynthetic processes and begins to focus on its underground parts—the energy captured in the leaves is directed downward to form the new bulb.

Toward the end of June our garlic sends up a flower stalk, though it’s more correctly referred to as a false flower stalk, since garlic rarely, if ever, reproduces sexually (via the coming together of male and female parts), like most other plants do. Instead, its strategy for self-perpetuation relies on clonal division: each new bulb is a clone of an earlier bulb, going all the way back, you might even say, to an ancient mother bulb from some distant time and place.

The false flower stalk of our Rocambole garlic, if left on the plant, can grow two or three feet high. It goes through some wonderful loops and whorls and eventually straightens up and swells at the top to form a capsule that contains several miniature bulbs of garlic known as bulbils. Most growers believe that early removal of the false flower stalk—the scape or top, as it is often called—will lead to a larger bulb. We subscribe to this belief, too, but we usually leave some tops on anyway since they make such a sight in the field, and, later, can present a stunning arrangement in a vase.

The growth of the false flower stalk, the development of the capsule, and the formation of the bulbils are all part of what makes hardneck garlic such an extraordinary plant. Visually, the tops are striking. They are also excellent to eat.

We harvest our garlic when about half the leaves have turned brown, usually over a two-week period from the last week of July to the first week of August. This calls for major effort on the part of all hands present and generates a copious amount of human sweat. A tractor with cultivator tines loosens the soil on either side of the bulbs so that most of them can be pulled by hand, without additional digging. But the numbers are great, the sun is hot, and the total harvested plant weight, along with a little residual soil around the roots, is several tons.

With their leafy tops still attached, the bulbs are hung in clusters of ten or twelve in every available space in the barn and tractor or implement sheds. Strategically placed fans assist in the curing process. Access into these large enclaves of hanging plant matter is severely limited, and everywhere the air is redolent with the smell of fresh garlic. If the weather is not too humid, within a month the stems of the plants will be sufficiently dry and hard that the leafy tops can be cut off without risk of bacteria entering the bulbs. Once the leaves are removed (this is typically carried out over several weeks), the bulbs are graded according to size and quality. The largest bulbs are usually sold first. They are prized by our customers but do not store quite as well as the smaller and medium-sized bulbs.

If all goes according to plan, by December we are taking our last bulbs to market (with the exception, of course, of a personal stash) and our customers are stocking up for the winter. Meanwhile, dormant in the frozen ground, the next generation of garlic is waiting to fulfill its ancient destiny and, at the same time, keep its promise to help a small farm stay afloat. It’s not a bad deal, on both sides.

A few years back Andy Burigo, a gardener extraordinaire and father of our garlic, died at the age of eighty-six. In his later years he and his wife, Ida, visited our farm once a year or so to have coffee with Flavia and evaluate the condition of my crops. On their last visit, by which time I had transformed his original gift into some thirty-five thousand healthy plants glistening in the morning sun, Andy called my wife over to him, saying that he had something for her. With a sober look in his eyes, he reached out and pressed into her hand a half-dozen newly minted pennies. “See what your husband can do with these,” he said, and broke into his customary twinkle-eyed laughter.

At his well-attended funeral one Saturday morning, while I was selling garlic in New York City, Flavia reached into her handbag and took out a very large bulb I had given her the night before. Quietly she made her way through the crowd of mourners and placed the bulb on Andy’s coffin just before it was lowered into the ground.