We Take Our Garlic Seriously
Sara with the selection of garlic we grow, hanging before it is planted.
Ceres and Sara (our Garden Program Manager) take our love of garlic seriously. We grow 18-20 varieties of garlic and hundreds of pounds of it. Sara has been caring for some of these varieties for over 20 years! We have been saving the biggest and healthiest cloves for our seed garlic over the years.
Garlic is interesting. It has to be grown every year to continue, as it either sprouts and grows, or rots. When we knew we would be moving the Sebastopol Garden this past winter, we realized we would not be able to grow any garlic, since it is an overwintered crop. That’s when we realized we needed help to grow and care for the garlic.
We asked some friends who we knew were good gardeners to grow out some of our collection, including:
Our team at the Santa Rosa garden
The Silverwoods at Chokmalichi Farm
Laurel Anderson and Steve Ehrman
Deep Medicine Circle (DMC) and their 1-acre rooftop garden in Oakland
The farmers at Deep Medicine Circle rooftop farm in Oakland, with Ceres’ garlic.
We are grateful to you all in helping us with this endeavor! Thank you so much.
DMC’s Rooftop Medicine Farm grew out most of our collection with a commitment to give us back some. Not only do they have a large rooftop garden in Oakland, but they also have land along the San Mateo Coast. The food they grow will go to communities in the Bay Area, and they are deeply committed to creating justice in the food system. We are excited our garlic can be part of it.
Check out their work here: https://www.deepmedicinecircle.org/
“Deep Medicine Circle is a WOC-led, worker directed Nonprofit organization that is committed to heal the wounds of colonialism through food, medicine, restoration, story telling and learning. The DMC is advancing Farming as Medicine initiative to two sites, urban and rural, where farmers work under Indigenous leadership to tend the land with ecological care, liberating the food from the market economy to be delivered to communities most impacted by colonialism and regenerating the health of the soil and water.”
Now that our garlic has been harvested, we are getting it back so we can grow it this year in the new garden. We are so excited that we can continue the tradition of growing a beautiful diverse collection.
Sara holding two varieties of garlic.
Our varieties include Cuban Purple, Blue Ukranian, China Stripe, Transylvanian, Red Toch, Xian, Susanville, Thai Purple, Armenian, Early Portuguese, and more. Growing a diversity of varieties not only keeps all of these varieties alive, but creates resilience in our growing. If one is hit by disease, we have others that might be resistant. They have different flavors and levels of the medicinal part of garlic (allicin), and they all store for different lengths of time. You might not be able to notice the differences once they are on your plate, but they are important to care for.
Garlic is planted at the end of October or early November. If you want to know more about growing garlic, Sara wrote up this guide to growing garlic: https://www.communityseedexchange.org/growing-great-garlic
If you want to be part of caring for the amazing diversity of garlic, you can join the Community Seed Exchange in their stewardship program and get some interesting varieties from their garlic swap (which Sara organizes). https://www.communityseedexchange.org/single-post/a-word-about-chester-aaron