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Occasional Newsletter and
Current State of the 2008 Crop.
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Scroll down towards the bottom to see this year in passing. Things changed a lot this year. This Newsletter will grow as things change.  Click Here to Read the 2007 Newsletter. Click Here to Read the 2006 Newsletter.
Click Here to Read the 2005 Newsletter.
Click Here to Read the 2004 Newsletter.
Click Here to Read the 2003 Newsletter. Click Here to Read the 2002 Newsletter.
Click Here to Read the 2001 Newsletter. Click Here to Read the 2000 Newsletter.
Click Here to Read the 1999 Newsletter.
- Updated August 1, 2007 click here to see the 6:28 video on youtube:
Updated March 3, 2008 - I finally restored the shopping cart and we are now beginning to accept orders for delivery in late summer/early fall. We also have some leftover planting stock that is still good enough to use for spring planting assortments. If anyone is interested, just click on the link directly above and go to the assortments page and place your order. Be sure to tell us it's for spring planting in the comments field of the order form and we will send your order immediately. Things are still up in the air with Yahoo! and I am actively looking at some other hosting arrangements in case Yahoo! gets intolerably worse. Microsoft is reportedly telling its employees already how to deal with the acquisition of Yahoo! and how to phase it into their present organization, so it's clear to me that they intend to buy out Yahoo! and what they are doing is haggling over price. The question is whether it can remain online and intact reliably enough to continue using them as a host and how things will be in the apparently inevitable transition into Microsoft. Updated February 12, 2008 - Friends, the biggest concern I have to deal with right now is whether or not Yahoo will remain stable enough to continue successfully hosting our website. With upcoming layoffs and their current problems, I may decide to relocate the hosting of my website. They have been good hosts the last two and a half years and appear to continue to stay up and online intact and traffic continues to flow. They just no longer measure that traffic well and if it weren't for our own hit counting software we would have no idea how much website traffic we have been getting. As it is, our count is very accurate and website traffic continues to build. We had 275,000 visitors last year with unique IP addresses, up from about 200,000 the year before. It doesn't matter how good your website is if its host can't keep it online all the time. We have not yet had this problem with Yahoo but must anticipate the possibility in light of their present problems. Therefore, it is imperative that we immediately seek a suitable back up site to be located on a different host. In the meantime, it is getting time to restore the ordering capability to the website and begin accepting orders for 2008 delivery. I will start by restoring things to normal and then adding on new growers as they decide to come join me. This process will take a few weeks, so please bear with me while I slowly wend my way forward. I'm an apprentice geezer now, 69 in March, and I move a little slower on purpose. Updated February 1, 2008 -
Last year was a real crop disaster and this year will not be much better. We will have only a very small amount of garlic of our own growing this year. It became necessary to move our garlic planting area out of the family garden to an area in an adjacent field.
Cancelling last years orders involved lots of emails, phone calls, etc. and I didn't get the new garden fertilized until late and then I had to build an electric fence around it to keep the cattle out. Before I could plant, I had to run a water line about 800 feet out to it. Then the cold weather set in and we had freezing temps as low as 13 F. and almost constant high winds.
I had made some arrangements for some help in exchange for a significant share of the income when the garlic sold but he didn't show up.
For several years now I have been trying to juggle webmaster duties with growing. That's two full time jobs and I simply no longer have enough time to serve both these masters and I am being forced to choose between them. I have decided to remain webmaster and leave the growing of the garlic up to other people, those who have more time than I and I will help them sell their garlic.
This year you will be able to buy from me at my price or you may buy direct from the growers at their prices. It will take me a while to try to figure out the best way to go about doing this.
Updated October 18, 2007 - We also had to throw out more garlic than usual because it was found to have a pathogen or pest problem. If we can tell it has a problem, we don't ship it and then we contact the grower and try to help them learn about the problem and how to prevent it next year. This year the rare just got rarer. I hope there was enough good planting stock to insure a good harvest next year. I can only say that I have some excellent planting stock and I have every reason to expect an excellent crop next year, LandLady permitting. I hope the other growers kept their best for planting and that they remained firm.
I have had to cancel around a hundred orders people have placed with us and here is a copy of the email letter I sent to the folks, trying to explain what happened this year:
Please excuse my delay in response. I have been overwhelmed of late with phone calls, emails, people trying to order, etc. I am greatly saddened to have to tell you that I have had to cancel all outstanding sales and unfilled orders, including yours, due to severe garlic shortages caused by widespread weather-related crop losses and subsequent storage problems among some of the survivors. Much of the garlic we were going to use to fill orders went bad in storage from problems stemming from wet growing and harvesting conditions while mite contamination from their growing fields ruined others. What was at first beautiful garlic went bad before our eyes and we would prefer to burn it rather than try to send it to anyone. All of this unfolded unexpectedly and in a fairly short time. We always try to fill the earliest orders with the best garlic but our choices were limited this year due to crop failures among garlic growers all across the country. Many varieties we usually get were not available to us this year but the failures didn't become evident until after harvest time and after curing, while the garlic was cleaned and trimmed. We had no time to warn our customers as the bad news came in from grower after grower just as we were preparing to begin shipping garlic. I knew we had a crop loss but I didn't know about the others. Not all growers were affected but many were. It was then that we were able to piece together what happened and it was a warm spell in late winter followed by a late freeze around Easter - and then the flooding began, sealing their fate. The first two or three waves of garlics arriving from our older growers whose crops did well were good and they were used to pack and ship early orders but as later shipments from newfound growers started to come in, I suspected some of them coming from three different new growers of problems and set them aside for observation for a couple of weeks and sure enough those cultivars started turning soft indicating they were not useable for our purposes. We tried to find some more good garlic to replace the garlic that went bad and have been unable to do so and have now about given up on finding any more good garlic from growers this year and decided to cancel all outstanding orders and remove all fresh garlic from our online catalog. If we do find some good garlic we will contact those with the oldest outstanding orders and give them an opportunity to buy it. I'm not holding my breath, though. I've been on the Internet 10 years now and this year has the worst crop losses I have seen. I apologize to you for your disappointment at not getting the garlic you wanted. I understand disappointment as I have lost my crops two years in a row now. I look forward to next year fully confident of a bumper crop (just like I did the last two years). Mother Nature rules. I may apologize but she doesn't.
I will keep all these unfilled orders on file for next year where they will be put in front
of the line as a group where they will have first choice of what is
available then and when the crop is ready I will call or send an email to
each one asking them if they want to renew their order.
Good luck to you. All order placed from today forward can probably expect fulfillment but maybe not because we still have unfilled orders in the house and they will take up a lot of what is on hand, but probably not all of it. All orders that we cannot fill will be contacted later on and told so. Big crop losses all across the country made a lot of cultivars we usually get just unavailable this year so it looks like we're selling out earlier than usual this year. We have had the busiest season ever and we have been overwhelmed by the volume of orders and also the large numbers of orders we cannot ship due to shortages. During a time of increased public interest and demand, weather-related crop losses have increased the desire but but the decreased amount of garlic available has left this demand unsatisfied and it is sure to increase next year, hopfully accompanied by a bumper crop. Updated August 22, 2007 - Due to adverse weather this year causing crop failures in many areas, some of the cultivars we usually carry, we will not have this year and some orders will have be substituted, adjusted or cancelled as we contact affected customers. Some of the affected hardneck cultivars include Metechi,Siberian, Bogatyr, Carpathian, Zemo, Georgia Fire, among others. Among the Artichoke garlics, Red Toch, Cal Early and Chet's will not be available. Stay tuned for others. Most of the garlics we usually have will be unaffected and will have abundant supplies of top quality gourmet garlics, as usual. More information will be posted here as I learn more from the growers. Updated August 1, 2007 - If you have read the Overview page, you know that most of these gourmet garlics have been in this country only since 1989 and most people don't know about them yet. As people learn about them, many find them very exciting and want to eat or grow them - that's understandable. I'm doing everything I can to promote interest in them and encourage people to grow their own wherever possible. Starting next year I am going to add a garlic growers farmers market to this website so that gardeners/growers can sell their crops direct to the general public through their webpage on my website and I will process the credit card transactions for the growers so they won't have to bother with it. Most small volume growers don't accept credit cards because they're in business only a couple of months a year and credit cards are a year around thing. This will allow small volume gardener/growers to get a fair price for their produce and open up new markets as well. We will have the drawing power of this website to bring buyers and sellers together. I propose to create a seperate company with a secure website that would process all credit card transactions and keep accurate accounting for each grower's sales. Each grower would have a seperate basic webpage of their own to tell about themselves and their garlic and prices, etc. and they would stay up year round so that customers would have all year long to view their offerings and many might want to order things early. The garlic growers market would integrate with this website as an extension of it. This would allow smaller volume growers to supplement their incomes with sales of garlic to people they would not otherwise have any way of reaching. The same with customers, this would allow them to buy what they want from growers they would not otherwise be able to find. If this is of interest to you, please read the "We're looking for a few good growers" page: Click here to go directly there. or, E-Mail Bob . Updated August 1, 2007 - The outlook for what garlics we will have available this year is very good. In the good news/bad news department, while we lost most our crop this year due to grasshoppers and rain, rain, rain, we have found a new source of Ajo Rojo garlics and will be able to offer some with a one pound limit. The crop failure won't affect our sales much since we get so much garlic to sell from other growers anyway. So now we will have both Burgundy and Ajo Rojo to offer as Creole garlics this year. I believe by next year we will have recovered most of the rest of our Creoles and have a full offering of them again.
The growers I have talked to so far say their crops will be very good and most had favorable growing conditions. We will have almost all the same cultivars we had last year, plus a couple of new ones.
Rain, Rain, Rain. Rain is usually more than welcome but we have had 17" in the last six weeks, during the biggest part of our harvesting season and I'm having to mud the garlic out, as we say down here when you have to harvest even though it's muddy.
Late rains don't usually help much, especially when you have to pull the bulbs up out of the mud. When the garlic has no leaves because the grasshoppers ate almost all the foliage, the bulbs can get ugly because without the leaves, the bulb wrappers just evaporate and you are left with bare bulbs.
Once again we will depend on our other organic and sustainable growers across the country for our garlic so we will have most of our usual offering to sell.
The only difference is that we will have only Burgundy (and, now, Ajo Rojo - added 7-29-07) for Creoles this year. I have a really good feeling next year is going to be a great crop.
Update on the grasshopper wars for 2007 - we won, but it was a costly victory. We wiped them out but not until they had eaten the foliage of most of our Creoles and Artichokes.
It took 75 pounds of Diatomaceous Earth and we got them before they reproduced so future grasshopper hordes will be a little smaller. We also brought in some chickens to get the latecomers and to clear them out of the whole area around the garden so as to prevent or minimize future invasions.
They have run unchecked in the past, leading up to having larger numbers of them in the area but from now on, those populations will be prevented by wiping out the grasshoppers in the immediate area before they multiply.
Because of our losses to the winged warriers this year, the only Creole we will have available is Burgundy, unless I can find some from another grower. I have had to remove the Creole assortment from the online catalog and hope I can fill the orders I have already received.
Wow - what a spring! Our ranch is covered in wildflowers of many kinds and more and more just keep coming.
It's a sea of Bluebonnets, Indian Blankets, Brown-eyed Susans, Indian Paintbrushes, clusters of white Rock Daisy, pink Primroses and Phlox, Larkspur and many whose names I don't even know.
They must number in the hundreds of Billions and the colors are dazzling and the aroma nearly intoxicating. El Nino is making up for the drought of the La Nina years, big time.
The ill-tempered La Nina brought us very hot and dry weather (We had 100 degree temps last year on April 15 while this year we had a hard frost on that date.) while her more considerate sibling brings us cool damp weather.
Our crop year runs from Sept. 1 through August 31 and last year we had a total of 8" for the year and this year so far we have had 17". The land is refreshed and the cattle tanks (I grew up calling them ponds, but in Texas they are called tanks - where I grew up tanks were large metal things.) are full and the creek is running over the dam. The last time we had something like this happen was in 2001 as El Nino came in to give us relief from La Nina and our drought was relieved yet again by the classy gentleman. These weather cycles don't affect every place the same; in some areas La Nina brings moisture and El Nino brings drought. Our garlic is already twice the size it got last year so we expect a good crop if we can defeat the millions of grasshoppers that have invaded our gardens, a booby trap left behind by La Nina. It's too late to use nola bait that usually keeps their numbers in check so we are going directly to using Diatomaceous Earth on them. It's organically approved but we hate to use it because it kills everything indiscriminately but if we don't, they'll eat both our family vegetable garden to the ground as well as our garlic garden. We were going to have guineas and turkeys in the garden this year but none of the chicks survived so we'll have to try again for next year. Last year we were going to try using Muscovy ducks to keep the grasshoppers down in the garden but the racoons killed all of them. I shot 13 raccoons and wounded a few more who excaped, but there were still enough of them to kill all eight of the ducks and the six roosters, too. It looks like raccoons are not going to be an endangered species, any time soon. Before I moved out here I always thought raccoons were kinda cute and didn't see why people hunted them. I learned from experience that coons will ruin an entire corn crop by taking one bite out of every ear of corn but not eating a single one completely and then ruin the peach crop by taking one bite out of every peach on every tree but not eating all of any peach. I'm willing to share but they are not and I won't abide anything that is that wasteful so now I shoot them on sight, which is difficult since they are nocturnal and hard to see. It's a never ending war of attrition. I don't like to have to kill anything and my lovely daughter, Tania, who is even much more of an animal rights advocate than I am understands why I have to kill them but still doesn't like it and accepts that life out here in the middle of nowhere is very different from the big city where she lives. I still hated killing them so we got a Maremma, an Italian livestock guardian dog, as a puppy last year to chase them off and it seems to be working, unfortunately, we have not yet been able to train her not to harrass and terrorize our two new Muscovie ducks and the rare Bourbon Red turkey we have picked up late last year to replace those birds that were killed early last year. We have to chain her when we work in the garden or she will trample things and when she's chasing the birds, they all trample everything around. Sometimes I would like to kick her butt but I never do because young girls just wanna have fun and I understand that.
Merridee and I and our one year old puppy, a Maremma (a large white Italian livestock guardian dog) named Sophie, take a lot more walks around the place - we don't mind a little mud here and there. Soon I will try to post some pictures of our spring on the website ( They're up now, click link near top of page above and enjoy. - Bob - June1, 07 ) so others can enjoy the view as well - too bad I can't put the aroma on the website. No matter what is troubling us, things are always better after a long walk and a picnic in the wildflowers. One of many special places of beauty around the creek which meanders for a couple of miles through our place is a remote little shady pool of clear water where we dammed up a runoff area to form a 15 x 20 foot pool that's about four feet deep at it's deepest. It's a fabulous place to cool off on even the hottest of days because it is always shaded so the water stays cool. We only have to share it with the crawdads - crayfish to city dwellers. Oh, yeah, the garlic. What I have growing is generally looking very good. If the grasshoppers don't eat it all we will have a good crop. I didn't get to plant as much as I usually do and not nearly as much as I wanted to as I just didn't have time to plant when it was dry enough to last fall. I have a fair amount of Burgundy and lesser amounts of Ajo Rojo, Creole Red and Rose du Lautrec and some artichoke garlics like Red Toch, Polish White and Inchelium Red. I will have to depend more on the other growers this year to provide most of the varieties we usually sell and maybe a new cultivar or two, who knows what we will find? I may be growing less personally in coming years and am considering the idea of hosting a garlic growers farmers market on the website so growers can sell direct to the public and the public can buy direct from the grower and save some money. Right now, everything is up in the air and no decisions have been made, but I would like to hear some input if anyone out there has an opinion on it. Creoles will continue to be scarce and my big hope is to plant a good size crop this coming fall so we can have a large crop of bigger bulbed Creoles next year. This year Creoles will not be sold for table use, but only sent to gardeners to grow. Last year's 100 degree day on April 15, really set back our attempts to recover the Creoles and get them firmly re-established. The fact that they have survived the adversity they have is a tribute to their hardiness. The only Creoles we will be selling by the pound are Burgundy and there is a limit of one pound per customer on Creoles and also Creole assortments. There's just not enough of them and I'm trying to get them established in warm winter areas so none will be sent to cold winter areas where they don't usually grow well, anyway. Updated April 24, 2007 -
As of April 14, 2007 there's a new option on the shopping cart order form now - From our perspective, we would rather take the time to charge the card now as opposed to in the fall when this place becomes extremely hectic and the five minutes it takes to manually re-enter all the data and get an approval and write a short personal note of thanks to each customer creates a real bottleneck in the already almost panic-stricken tumilt of our rush season. By the time mid-September comes, we have hundreds of orders to fill and ship as fast as possible amid phone calls, emails, drop-ins, etc and it can get frantic at times. Anything that helps impose order on this pandemonium is very much appreciated and not having to take an extra five minutes with each transaction is a great relief and helps us get caught up faster and improves customer relations. The customers who prepay their orders get first choice from the new crop and some varieties are so rare that we sell out of them fast. On the day after a wet, cold, snowy Easter, Stephen Orr, a writer based in New York and affiliated with 'House and Garden' was visiting family in the area and came to visit and we talked about garlic and toured the garden. I enjoyed our visit and hope he will drop by again when comes to visit family. It was a wet, cold and windy day so we didn't take as much time in the garden as I wanted to. I forgot to take my garden map so I could only identify general varieties but not specific cultivars that early in the growing season. By the time I finish my hand weeding of each bed in the next few days, I will know exactly where each and every cultivar is and how well they are doing. It's a couple of weeks later now and I have finished my hand weeding of all the beds and I can now say which ones are where. The ones that are doing the best are the Artichokes (Red Toch, Chet's Italian Red, Inchelium Red, Polish White) and Creoles (Burgundy, Ajo Rojo, Creole Red and Rose du Lautrec). The Metechi is looking excellent and so is the Siberian. I think we'll have a good crop even if we didn't plant as much as we would have liked to. Our offering this year will be as varied as usual but less of it will come from my garden and more from other growers, except for Creoles and a few other things as I planted much less this year than usual, mostly because I have been so busy doing other things. This website alone could easily be a full-time job. I have sort of become the "Dear Abby" of garlic and there are a lot of people asking me all kinds of questions about garlic and I enjoy getting answers for them. I get invitations to speak to groups and sometimes I foolishly accept. I'm going to have to hire some more packing and shipping help as well as some planting and harvesting help and manage my time better so I can grow a larger and better crop. Who knows? Maybe I'll even have some time to write a book or two. Updated March 17, 2007 - The list of undeserved honors goes on, at least I think it's an honor when people write good things about you. A couple of weeks ago Julie Weiner from the Associated Press interviewed me for an article she was writing about garlic and the next day, J. M. Hirsch, AP Food Editor called and told me he was sending that article, which mentioned our discussion and quoted me, to every newspaper in the country. Some will run the article right away, some won't run it until later and some won't run it at all. As expected, our website traffic picked up considerably and we expect it to stay up for a few weeks or so. Welcome new friends to gourmet garlic headquarters. I hope you enjoy your stay and learn something worth knowing to take with you. It's been a colder than usual winter with temps down to 10 F and many lows in the teens and twenties. We've had 9.34 inches of rain since 9-1-06, when our crop year began. We alternate between being too dry and too cold and it slowed down the planting considerably. As usual my full attention each fall goes to packing and shipping orders as hundreds must go out in a short time and my helper, sister-in-law, Jeanie Dreinhofer, get overwhelmed. This greatly infringes on my time when I need to be planting, but if we don't get the garlic sent out on time to our very anxious customers, then that creates customer satisfaction problems and up until now I have had to pack and ship instead of plant. This coming fall, I will hire a couple of extra helpers for her, even if we have to go into debt to do it and spend my time in the garden getting ready to plant and planting. Our total crop this year will be much less than usual due to lack of time on my part and quality planting stock (Where do you get a lot of Creole garlics?) We replanted mostly the best of what we grew last year but they were a little on the smaller side due to an early heat wave in mid-April of last year. It will take two or three years to recover from that. We will grow a few other garlics mostly as experiments and depend on the other growers to provide us with enough garlic to have a good selection again this year. When it was too cold to plant garlic, I cut and split firewood for the fireplace, mostly oak, but some mesquite. I prefer oak in the fireplace as it burns longer with a nice yellow flame and smells better. Mesquite is best used for cooking, owing to the unique flavor it imparts to grilled food. When we grill outdoors, I build a fire of mesquite wood and let it burn down to coals and use the coals to cook the meat - we never use commercial charcoal nor do we use any petroleum-based starters - we build a small fire with sticks and keep adding larger pieces until we have enough for a good bed of coals. I've got a new digital camera so I hope to get a lot more pictures this year to add to the website. My old 35mm SLR was no longer the answer because the pictures had to be digitized and much clarity was lost in the process. Now I can shoot clear shots and send them directly into the disk and from there to the website. Life is good. We just got a couple of inches of much needed rain and it has stimulated the wildflowers and we are going to have another beautiful spring with bluebonnets and Indian blankets everywhere in late March/early April. I'll try to get some photos for the website. Updated February 5, 2007 - Wow! What a season this has been and it isn't over yet as we still have a few varieties left of good, firm long-storing garlic.
Right now I can make assortments using the following kinds of garlic:
Softnecks - This is the last entry into the 2006 newsletter, I'll start a new one for 2007 very soon. I've learned a few lessons this year, but I'm not sure of what they were. Oh, yeah, I'll be hiring additional help in the fall to ship garlic and I'll use my fall to prepare ground and plant garlic during the days and use the evenings to answer email and make calls. I have learned some more about controlling nematodes and fungus organically and will be using my new techniques and discussing them in the Garlic Diseases section of this website, where I try to help gardeners recognize and deal organically with pathogen and pest problems. To recap 2006, our garlic crops, and everyone else's garlic in this part of Texas, were severely stunted when our temperature hit 100 on April 15, 2006 and it was kinda small to begin with since Nature's normal cycle was running over a month later than usual (Fairly typical La Nina weather pattern.) We're hoping the new El Nino pattern settling in will give us a better crop in 2007. Thanks to other good organic growers across the country, we had a lot of good garlic to sell and still have some excellent garlic left.
Thanks to all our customers and growers who helped us avert disaster in this year year of crop failure. Wow! What a season this has been and it isn't over yet. We still have some very good to excellent garlics for eating, planting or other use. We have some hardneck Purple Stripes and Porcelains as well as some softneck Silverskins and the heirloom Artichoke garlic, Lorz Italian for warm winter gardeners. Organic Guru, Howard Garrett, the Doctor of Dirt, dropped by to see me (Nice ego boost.) and get a tour of the garden in mid October and I attended the Texas Country Reporter Festival in Waxahachie in late October - they did a story about the garlic and I on one of their TV shows and Bob Phillips invited me to their annual festival as his guest. (Another nice ego boost.) This past season was a fairly typical La Nina year, hot and dry in our part of the world. We had around 13 inches of rain in the 12 months from September, 2005 through August, 2006 and we hit 100 degrees F in an early heat spell in April, stunting our entire crop. That was just a precursor to our 100 - 103 degree rainless summer. Several other growers we deal with lost their crops, too, while others had great crops and life went on. I knew it was a La Nina year when I planted and I knew there was little chance the crop would thrive, but I worked it as hard as I would have if I had thought it would succeed, just in case the LandLady's delinquent daughter forgot about us - she didn't, but you gotta try anyway. Now that El Nino is moving into the neighborhood, things will be better. We usually have cooler, wetter winters and springs when the kid is in town and our garlic excels during his visits - he likes garlic; his rude and ill-tempered sister doesn't. This years story about our Creole garlics bears retelling. Over the years we have become one of the few sources of the rare and expensive Creole garlics because they grow better in the warm winter areas than they do in the colder North. We have slowly increased our holdings in these rare garlics which were developed in Spain and southern France over the centuries, rather than Italy or elsewhere; they were different altogether and they came in with the Spanish Conquistadores in the 1500s, hence the name Creole, which relates to the Carribbean. As explained in earlier parts of this newsletter, we hit 100 degrees on April 15, badly stunting our crop of rare Creoles and a few Artichokes. Our bulbs wound up being about 1/3 to 1/4 their usual size but almost all survived. We had accepted about a hundred orders of Creoles in anticipation of our usual large crop and offered our customers an opportunity to cancel. Almost all said to go ahead and send those hardy little survivors, we want them anyway. They got a pretty good bargain because there were 2-3 times more bulbs in a pound this way and if you plant them early and leave them in the ground and extra week or two, they'll size back up in a couple of years and they'll have a lot more then. Everyone won. I still have some pretty good planting stock and will expect to have a much better crop in this El Nino year. It is my intention to cultivate an interest in people all across the Gulf coast, especially Louisiana and get them to grow these wonderful garlics not only for personal use but for profit as part of an economic rebirth in a area that sorely needs it. Why grow something that sells for $2/lb when with only a little extra effort you can grow something that sells for five to ten times that and have people lining up to buy it? I think that once some of those New Orleans chefs find out about these Creole garlics, they will create an even greater demand for them and people will have yet another reason to come to Louisiana and plan on spending some extra money on something they really like. I also think that in the future the Creole garlics, currently almost unheard of in Louisiana, will become a very big part of Creole cooking and cuisine and part of the uniqueness of it all. Are you listening, Chef Emeril and all the other New Orleans chefs? Your future is calling. Creoles are among the rarest and most expensive of garlics and with the name of Creole, where but Louisiana would you expect them? The name might make you think they're grown there but they are not, it's just their name. If I do my job, they'll eventually be growing in profusion there and providing more economic opportunity for many as well as some great eating that you won't forget anytime soon. I'm expecting much better weather this year and will try to plant as much garlic as circumstances allow in hopes of getting the rare bumper crop that farmers live for. So it is time for me to get off the computer and get on with my planting while there is still plenty of time to plant. Also, I'm hoping to have time soon to add some more pictures to the website, especially this newsletter and also the "Year in the garlic garden page".
Wow! Our office is in turmoil as usual in the fall. We're swamped with orders, emails and phone calls. After months of quiet, suddenly it's like the horse races when they open the starting gate - suddenly loud, fast and frantic.
We're packing and shipping as fast as we can. Every year we accept orders all year long for shipment in mid-September, in time for fall planting. Suddenly in mid-September a flurry of activity erupts and the furor continues for a month or so until we get caught up on shipping and we are almost caught up now. We are now shipping orders within a few days of arrival and will soon be back to same day or next day shipping.
Even though our own crop was severely stunted by an early, intense summer where we hit 100 degrees (F) on APRIL 15, we are having a successful sales year as most of our growers had excellent years so we have had plenty of very good garlic to offer.
We are sold out of some of the rarer varieties but still have lots of different kinds of the most popular gourmet garlics.
Landlady Nature's delinquent daughter, La Nina, has once again shown that she will be the one to decide whether or not we can have a crop and this year she said no. Fortunately, she is on her way out of the area as the Landlady's son, El Nino is on the way and he always lets us have a crop so we will be back next year with more Creoles and a few Artichokes of our own and a lot of garlics from our other growers.
I'll write more later, right now I have garlic to pack and send to anxious gardeners all over the country.
It was 105 today. It's a hot summer, dry, too; but then , it is August in west-central Texas and it's supposed to be hot and dry. The withered skeletons of grasses and native plants crunch beneath my feet as I walk off the beaten part to the garden and blow away to fertilize some other spot downwind. I make a mental note to stay on the path... Ecology starts at home, too.
It is the fate of those who would test the LandLady's patience way out here to endure periodic droughts as desertification creeps slowly Eastward and the prairie that precedes the desert begins across the road from our Western fence.
The Mukewater Creek runs through our place and turns South at our Western edge and the East bank of the creek is lush with many kinds of green things while the Western bank is mostly thin and rocky.
The only question is how long will this drought last? Will it be short or drawn out for years like the one from 1998 - 2001? Will global warming/ desertification slowly turn our beautifully green ranch permanently brown? Will only spiny and poisonous things live here then and a century from now will the inrushing sea from the melted ice caps force them to move further inland?
By then I will have long since become one with God and will have other priorities.
Drought not only forces changes in behavior but in thinking as well.
As far as you can see to the seemingly endless East a long line of wooden power poles comes up to our house and goes no further. It is the all-important link to the modern world, without which our air conditioning and computer won't work. Life as we know it would bake and become hardened and sun-bleached like the cow bones that dot this old Chisum Trail ranch.
The little community of Trickham, at our SW corner used to be a rip-roaring cattle town and was the last stop for supplies on the Western (Chisum) trail to Dodge City in the 1870s & 80s. The Eastern cattle trail (Chisholm) went up to Dodge City through Fort Worth. Trickham was the intersection of the N-S road to Mexico and the E-W road that went to El Paso.
They didn't have air conditioning, etc. Of course, they didn't have increasing monthly utility bills, either. We're just not as hardy as they were; the power line is our umbilical cord to life, cut it and we die - and bake.
I have talked to the growers and the word I am getting is that it's an excellent crop and there will be plenty of excellent garlic shipping out around mid-September.
Every year we collect orders all year long and find ourselves several hundred orders behind come mid-September. The garlics usually arrive in early September and as soon as we get them they are put into bins in the cooler and we start shipping orders furiously and pandemonium reigns for the next three weeks.
We're usually caught up by early October and it stays fairly hectic until around Thanksgiving.
The drought won't hurt our garlic offering much, only the Creoles will be affected and they'll be smaller than usual. They are so rare that we are going to ship them anyway. Small Creoles are much better than no Creoles. They will size back up after a couple of years of early planting and later than usual harvesting.
If you can find bigger and better Creoles elsewhere, please do and then tell me where, I would like to buy some of them, too.
Welcome to La Nina's world, at least as seen from out in the middle of nowhere in West central Texas. The Landlady's (Mother Nature's) delinquent daughter is back again and wreaking her usual havoc of drought and high temps.
The recent rains have held off the drough for a while but the high temps have settled in earlier than usual, with semi-predictable results in that it has forced some of our garlics to mature before they were big enough and a few varieties will not be big enough to sell this year.
So far, the Creoles and the Artichokes , including Thermadrone seem to be the worst hit. The artichokes we can get from other growers but the Creoles are harder to find so those varieties will be scarcer than usual this year. If I can get some from another grower, I will have some to sell, otherwise, Creoles will be available in assortments only, not in bulk by the pound.
That 100 degree day in mid April and a lot of days in the upper 90s and low 100s since then has stunted the garlic and helped the grasshoppers and there are a lot of them but they had been staying mostly in the natural areas of the garden, pretty much as hoped for until the heat wave killed the weeds and then the 'hoppers noticed the garlic.
My little water hose can't compete against the high heat and the weeds have been drying down anyway after flowering and a lot more of the grasshoppers started looking at the garlic since it was the greenest things left in the garden. Grasshoppers really like garlic.
Those who have been following our misadventures growing gourmet garlics on an old cattle ranch out here on the edge of nowhere for the past few years will see this as yet another topsy-turvy year in our roller coaster farming career.
No two years have been the same and one reason for growing so many kinds is that in any given year some will thrive and some will falter and that next year it will be different ones than this year, but something will always be doing well.
We're not going to worry about what might have been but will gratefully accept whatever the Landlady offers because we love being guests in her home, even if she abuses us from time to time, after all, it's all in the family.
Our growers usually have good years since La Nina affects different parts of the country differently so those with agreeable weather will have plentty of good garlic and so our general offerring of garlics shouldn't change much.
For reasons I'm not sure I understand, Asiatic garlics don't thrive down here, at least not for me, at least not yet. They seem to want colder winters and cooler springs than we can give them. I have given up trying to grow Rocamboles, and nearly ready to quit trying Asiatics as well, not having any real success in growing them either.
My hope has been to be able to acclimatize them to warm winter growing conditions by selection, but so far the results are dismal. Too bad, really, because they are so early harvesting that they would already be large bulbed when the heat forced them to mature and they would be out of the garden before the grasshoppers arrive. Oh well, keep trying I guess.
The few standard hardneck varieties we are growing this year now have scapes, but the weakly bolting Creoles are just now sending up scapes and most seem to be maturing without them - not unexpected in a La Nina year.
La Nina years make growing garlic an exercise in uncertainty because it's difficult to predict how that will affect our garlic. The temperature hit 100 degrees F on April 15 and that's too early in the year for 100 degree temps and the leaf tips got a little burned, except on the later harvesting kinds.
We're pouring on the water and hoping for the best in view of the hotter than normal spring temps.
This garden has a big Live Oak tree in the SE corner for morning shade and a clump of Hackberry trees in the NW corner giving afternoon shade. I have mowed the areas, brought out lawn chairs and brought in several pieces of driftwood and decorative rocks from around the ranch for some natural art to enjoy during breaks from the hot sun.
They lend a rock garden sort of atmosphere that seems cooling in itself.
As I was sitting under the Oak tree this morning after hand weeding one 250' bed, I could see the deep bluish-green Purple Glazers and German Stiffnecks with their already curled scapes contrasting with the lighter mid-green French Germinador and the paler yellow-green Artichokes.
As I look closer, I can see the lighter colored Artichoke garlics have a tan overtone as their lower leaves die down that makes them very noticeable among the darker greens. The closest Artichoke to harvest is Red Toch, which we will be pulling very soon.
The Silverskins are still all green but each cultivar is a different shade of green and at least a month away from harvest. Before last year, I had never noticed the differences between the Silverskins, not only in their color but the differences in the sizes and shapes of their foliage as well.
This garden is more than just long raised beds of garlic as two areas were left fallow this year to let the wild things flourish as they will. There's been weeds everywhere in those two islands of nature in the middle of an otherwise semi-manicured garden. With the coming of spring, those weeds morphed into wildflowers of so many kinds that I don't even know the names of half of them.
There's black-eye Susans, tall sunflowers, scads of long skinny weeds with delicate little light purple flowers that cast a purple mist over much of the natural areas. The Indian blankets are spotty in the garden but plentiful all over the prairie. Bluebonnets are sparse this year but they'll be back, after all, they own the land , too.
One of the reasons to leave the natural areas is to try to lure the grasshoppers away from the garlic in the hope that their natural food will be their first choice and if we water the natural areas that might make them preferrable to garlic, at least long enough for us to get our garlic out of the ground.
If that doesn't work, I'll try pureeing cedar leaves in water, diluting and straining and then spraying it on the garlic leaves in hopes that it will repel the grasshoppers since they never seem to bother the native cedar trees and the cattle all rub in the cedar bushes as it contains natural compounds that are toxic to many small organisms. Anything that is compatible with the organic way is worth trying.
The long beds are in three areas with the natural areas between them. Because of the different colors, shapes, sizes and structures of all the different kinds of garlic, it looks like three green rainbows with wildflowers between them. It's not what you would see at one of the large California Growers where they grow all the some kind in endless unchanging rows since they only grow one kind.
You can only see this at a small market garden where a little of many dofferent kinds of garlic are grown with beds close enough together for the differences to become obvious.
The picture on the right shows a Glazed Purple Stripe garlic ( Purple Glazer ) with a loop in its scape. Right now the garlic is is going through many changes as it shifts from building leaves and roots to building cloves and bulbils. Botanists say this change is brought on by having more hours of daylight than nightime hours. The garden shows constant change as garlic is a living thing just trying to survive. The early harvesting Artichokes are now shedding their lowest leaves and so there are an increasing number of dead leaves in those beds while later harvesting ones remain green and continue to grow. There are still many shades shades of green and many stages of development going on all at once. It's like a silent concert of colors but the breeze and the birds to give it voice and depth. Life is good. The Purple stripes and silverskins are the greenest and most robust with the Porcelains next. The Creoles look like they're starting to get closer to harvest as they are beginning to send up scapes, the Artichokes will harvest first. I will very soon begin to harvest some of the earliest maturing Red Tochs. One might think that a garlic garden would be as repetitious as a field of oats but it is not so. There are many things of beauty, sizes, colors, and shapes in a garlic garden and there's always life and it's as abundant underground as it is above ground.
Centuries ago the Anasazi and other Indians of the Great American Southwest painted pictographs and chipped petroglyphs everywhere they lived and the hump-backed flute player, Kokopelli appeared on walls and rocks over a wide area. Centuries after their passing, perhaps millions of people have seen the images and wondering what their true meaning was. There were stories about Kokopelli being the God of Fertility, making the three sisters of corn, squash and beans grow and impregnating the village women, thereby assuring survival of the clans. All the women were said to be enamored of Kokopelli and yet he had such a strange body, one wonders how this reputation could be achieved since one usually thinks of a love God being tall and handsome. Almost two years ago I discovered that Kokopelli could be found in the stars and must have been a constellation in the astronomy of the ancient ones and whose rising in the Eastern sky foretold the coming of spring and he was said to bring the rebirth of spring with him when he rose. Every year when Kokopelli was fully visible in the night sky, they knew it was spring and safe to plant their precious seed, without which they would perish. Perhaps his image was everywhere so that local medicine chiefs would know exactly when to plant and also conduct important fertility rituals. Kokopelli is comprised of the big dipper and Bootes and can be seen rising in the Eastern night sky now. More illustrations will be posted soon. After my success identifying some of the pictographs at Paint Rock, Texas as astronomical in nature, I went looking at other ancient images and have found a very widely known image that turns out to be another astronomical constellation. I will soon be opening up a webpage announcing this interesting story about Kokopelli and continuing to look for more - it wouldn't surprise me if the Navajo Thunderbird turns out to be What we call Cygnus the Swan (the Jumanos at Paint Rock saw it as a turkey) . Remember, you saw it here first. Archeoastronomy is a new science founded in 1970 by Carl Sagan and I'm having fun with it.
For the full story about the Paint Rock pictographs, click here. Updated May 9, 2006 - Time for another status report on the current state of the garlic crop. Mother Nature continues to run about a month behind her normal schedule as she has from late last summer around here. Peak foliage time is still a couple of weeks away as I haven't seen any sign of scapes yet. The crops are mostly very good except for one cultivar that's not thriving as well as hoped for and that's the hard to find French artichoke, Thermadrone. Sorry, folks, no Thermadrone this year unless I can find some available from another grower. The few Asiatics I planted are not thriving either, but that has become expected of them as they just haven't been thriving for us the last few years. Updated April 2, 2006 - I thought some people would like to see what one of our gardens looks like all during a season from plowing through harvest and hanging in the barn, so I added a new page to the website with a picture story showing a season in the garden. Click on the link above to go there. Spring is always welcome around our place whether we have any wildflowers or not and this year, we have no bluebonnets so we will have to rely on our pictures from past springs. Our fall and winter were very dry with about normal temperatures but windier than normal. Working outside is always good but Spring is a special treat for the senses. You become more acutely aware of the breeze in your face and the sounds around you and soon, the clean new scent of the awakening flowers sending out their aromatic invitations to the increasing numbers of insects. The hyacynths and daffodils are but a memory now and the bluebonnets seeds sleep on, having deciding not to get up this year. The henbit is creeping slowly into the garden and the shepard's purse leaves bring a nice green color to the low rolling hills of our prairie. The welcome rains of March dispelled the sense of foreboding that acccompanies a droughty start to a growing season. What little weather we had up until March was pretty dry. It's another La Nina, and that usually means hot and dry weather for us and it looks like this growing season is no different as we have had only three inches of rain since September up until March when we got three more - half of our rain this season has come in the last month and even that is only half our usual rainfall. Even Mother Nature got off to a slow start this growing season (we consider the growing year to be from September 1 through August 31 and the actual growing season to be September through June) as the volunteer elephant garlic did not come up until mid-to-late October, over a month later than usual. I always look to that as the time when Mother Earth thinks it's time to start planting. Then I try to start planting immediately. I had to spend much more time in the office and the shipping department due to the rush created by the Mother Earth News recommending us and I just couldn't start planting on time. I gotta start getting some volunteer help in here for planting and harvesting. Anyone want to volunteer? George Buckley, my usual helper, was called away for a month and I had to prepare the beds and plant by myself for a while, but after a few weeks brother-in-law, Fred, helped out and eventually George made it back and helped out some more. I did not get to plant as much as I wanted to this season as some of the planting stock I had obtained turn out to have nematodes (microscopically small worms) and I didn't want to plant contaminated stock in my garden. It's not all bad because it enabled me to learn to identify nematode-contaminated garlic. I noticed some cultivars were prematurely losing their firmness and the cloves had peculiar symptoms and so I dissected some of the bulbs and examined them under the microscope and found the tiny worms. Some were blue and some were red and they looked downright patriotic in those milky white garlic cloves but I just wouldn't let myself plant them but burned them instead. I learn something every year. These nematodes, ditylinchus dipsacci and pratylinchus penetrans, are probably not a hazard to human health, but they do dramatically shorten the storage life of garlic and if I wouldn't plant it in my garden, I won't sell it to anyone else. Another new thing I learned this year is a little trick to extend the storage life of garlic. A debate has raged among growers for decades as to what is the best way to store garlic and agreement is hard to come by owing to the varied experiences of people in diverse settings. This year, our garlic that was left whole with the roots and leaves intact and still on and stored in a large wooden shed that was once a smokehouse under some large oak trees stored much better than cut garlic ready for shipment in our walk-in cooler. From now on, all cured garlic will be stored intact in the old smokehouse until the time to ship and then only enough for the coming week will be trimmed and put in the cooler. I want to do everything I can to extend the shelf life of the garlic I send to my customers; they appreciate garlic that is still good months later instead of spoiling or sprouting right away like supermarket garlic - it's what they pay for. In spite of the slow start and late planting of fewer cultivars than we would have preferred, we're off to a good start and the crop looks pretty good. If it doesn't get too hot too soon and the grasshopper invasion is late, we'll make about as big a crop as we did last year. More later... These are the Kinds of Garlic We Typically Have in Stock (Not guaranteed!). We Will Probably Have These and More in 2006!
Ajo Rojo - A creole with a lot of flavor and a little zing. We expect to have several more new commitments and will have 20 or 30 varieties available by mid-September. We will add them to the Boutique page and also add information about them in the Varieties Page as they come in. We will also add them to the shopping cart program to make it easier to order them. I will try to keep the website updated often so that new varieties are posted immediately. Updated November 28, 2005 - Welcome to the viewers of Texas Country Reporter Television Show which ran an episode this week featuring my wife's favorite Garlicmeister, me. I felt very flattered that they would want to come out to our place and introduce me and my garlic to people all over Texas through their very popular program. They showed me playing my Indian flute and harvesting garlic and hanging it in the barn. They also showed me taste testing a Creole garlic and discussing it's flavor. I'm always happy to bring my message about the goodness of garlic to more people, however I can. Speaking of flute, winter solstice is coming in three weeks and I need to practice in order to be able to play well at Paint Rock for the "I saw the light" ceremony at local noon as the spear of light strikes the center of a pictograph painted hundreds of years ago, just like it does every winter solstice. Paint Rock has hundreds of ancient Indian pictographs , many of which appear to be astronomical in nature. Dr. Bill Yeates and I have been able to identify the astronomical meanings of many of the pictographs showing Paint Rock was an ancient observatory. These were no ordinary Indians...or, were they? Click Here to see pictures of and read more about the fascinating ancient archeoastronomic pictographs at Paint Rock, Texas. Updated November 25, 2005 -
We still have ample amounts of garlic for assortments, but only for assortments, as we can no longer ship pounds of garlic all of the same variety since increased demand and record sales have depleted most of our inventory .
If you want to buy garlic, had better hurry as we are rapidly selling out.
Wow! Being recommended in the Oct.-Nov. issue of Mother Earth News has really kept us busy - on top of our usual fall madness caused by orders coming in all year long for shipment in September, resulting in a frantic turmoil as we ship out hundreds of saved up orders as fast as we can.
It is our policy to send all earlier orders before later arriving ones.
Right now it takes us a week or more to ship out an incoming order, but we hope to be completely caught up by the end of next week and can again ship incoming orders within 24 hours - that's always our goal. Updated September 15, 2005 - We're shipping garlic out now as fast as we can and expect to get caught up shipping all the early orders in the next few days - see list of cultivars below and we have a few others as well. We're starting a few days earlier than usual this year. Except to our Gulf Coast friends who have been affected by Katrina. We will hold orders from the area until we know what our friends there want to do. To those of our customers living in the storm damage disaster area who have lost their garlic this year, we will make available for you some Creole and perhaps other garlics at little or no cost to help you get re-started. Updated July 23, 2005 - Great News! We can lower Creole prices after all - from $24/lb to $20/lb. Price is always influenced by availability. Our surviving garlic crop has sized up well during the curing process, including many of those we thought weren't going to be big enough (some still aren't) and we have the best crop we have had in years. We may still not have as much of it as we would prefer, but the size and quality of most of what we have is from very good to excellent. Many will only be available in assortments, but at least they're available. Creoles aren't as big as other garlics but cost as much to grow so their price will probably always be a little higher. Updated July 10, 2005 -A computer glitch has delayed our printing of our annual fall snail mail catalog but it will be on the way soon. Well, the 2005 harvest is complete, the garlic is in the barn curing and will soon be trimmed and graded. Faithful readers from years past will be wondering what manner of catastrophe befell us this year at the hands of our landlady, Ma Nature. Only a small one and a price we gladly pay - the western third of our garden was flooded from December through April so we lost a little of our crop. Still, our rebuilding program is making great strides as we now have a good supply of excellent planting stock for about 40 cultivars of garlic for our next years crop. Thanks to the folks at Channel 8 in Dallas who dropped by to film a segment for their local news program. They filmed me pulling garlic from the ground and the barn full of garlic hanging from the rafters in hundreds of bunches . It looked kinda like a tobacco drying barn - pretty scenic, really. In general it was a very good harvest, but with a bite taken out of the western part. The rest of the garden did quite well and grew a lot of extra-large garlic, mostly to be used as our planting stock this fall - we're looking for a nice large harvest next year and we'll be starting out with some pretty good planting stock. We have some excellent Burgundy which we can sell by the pound (Limit of two pounds per customer), but the other Creoles are in such short supply they will be sold only in assortments so as to give as many people as possible a chance to try them. Creoles continue to be hard to come by. We have hopes of being able to drop the prices on Creoles but it may not be - it all depends on how well they size up during the curing process. You can find out more about Creoles on our Varieties and Overview pages.We also have some excellent Siberian, a mild Marbled Purple Stripe garlic - great for warm winter gardens. Our standard prices for 2005 will remain at $16./pound for most bulk garlics, with special assortments costing from $18. to $20. In most cases, add $2 per pound for premium sizes. Shipping will be $8 for the first pound plus $2 extra for each additional pound. Updated June 5, 2005 -We have had more rain and yet another cool front come through to relieve us from the four days of 101 to 103 F temps we got last week. The heat seared some of the leaves of some of the plants, limiting their ability to grow somewhat, but all in all, we still have a very good crop. More later - I'm in the middle of harvesting right now. Updated May 23, 2005 - Our crop is still growing and hasn't been wiped out by any kind of disaster yet and it looks like we may make a nice crop this year. We have had a cool winter and spring with a gradual warmup. However, it has now become hot with temps in the mid-to-upper 90s this week, so that should force the garlic to mature, but if it gets to 100, that could damage the garlic's leaves and force early bolting. Our early harvesting varieties, normally already harvested by now, are slow to come to maturity; however, the mid and late season varieties are pretty much on schedule. We will begin harvesting in a few days, when the temp drops a few degrees. Updated April 20, 2005 - If the crop continues to do well, we should have fair amounts of Creole garlics that do so well in the South, including Ajo Rojo, Burgundy, Creole Red, Cuban Purple and Spanish Benitee. We will have lesser amounts of Spanish Morado, Labera Purple and Pescadero Red - mostly available in assortments only. However, if we lose a large part of our crop Creoles will continue to be rare and expensive. We also expect to have a lot of Siberian and a little Metechi, both are Marbled Purple Stripes that excel in warm winter climates.
Good news for lovers of French cuisine, we hope to have some Germinador and Rose du Lautrec (all the rage in the south of France) in limited quantities next year and maybe some Rose du Var and Thermadrone as well, hopefully.
The garden is drying out well from the long wet spell and our garlic crop continues to look great. The foliage is mostly large and lush, although there are a few burned leaf tips due to bright sun, El Nino winds and wet soil.
Leaves are about two feet long and the necks are thickening and the bulbs are beginning to form in the earlier harvesting ones.
You can tell the different varieties apart just by looking at their foliage. Among the softnecks, the yellowish green splayed-out leaves of artichokes are easily distinguished from the darker, more vertical silverskins that reach straight for the sky.
The Creoles are a medium green with more vertical leaves while the porcelain types are lush, ground-hugging and deep blue-green.
The marbled purple stripe varieties are the largest and most robust looking ones of the bunch.
My interpretations of two of the Paint Rock pictographs were submitted as a paper to the Southwest Federation of Archeological Societies, a peer review group, and were accepted with enthusiasm. The identification of these two pictographs as astronomical in nature,
in addition to several other astronomically-related pictographs confirms Paint Rock is the most extensive archeoastronomy site in the country.
Both new interpretations indicate things that have not yet been found at other pictograph/petroglyph sites and make Paint Rock unique. Updated March 16, 2005 - As of today, our garlic crop looks wonderful. It has had plenty of rain and some parts of the West end are standing in water, but it has not affected very much of the crop. Even though we couldn't plant as early as we would have liked (Nov.-Dec., instead of Oct.-Nov), almost everything is big and lush this looks to be one of the best crops ever for us. El Nino usually gives us a good garlic crop while La Nina doesn't usually do as well - this is an El Nino growing season. Our crop this year is almost all Creole varieties, such as Burgundy, Ajo Rojo, Creole Red, Spanish Benitee, Spanish Morado and Cuban Purple. We have 38 kinds this year, mostly in development for future years. We have several kinds each of Marbled Purple Stripes, Artichokes, Asiatics, Porcelains and some very nice rare French garlics. Added February 19, 2005 - I would like to thank the American Botanical Council for their kind words about us in the current issue (Number 65) of their journal, HerbalGram. Recognition of any kind by such esteemed herbalists feels good, even if my contributions were such a small part of their greater gardens. They do an indispensible job that is becoming increasingly important in a world where many natural treatments and philosophies are being lost. They deserve all the support they can get. Our crop is up nicely and we have had more than enough rain to keep it happy. We're growing in the northern half of Ma Daisy's old garden for the first time in seven years and it looks good. This year we are growing mostly the very rare Creole varieties while re-establishing our Artichoke, Silverskin and Marbled Purple Stripes varieties as well. We expect to have some nice Burgundy as well as Ajo Rojo and a little Creole Red and maybe a couple of others. It's way too early to make any predictions, but the crop looks very good at this point in time. We are just now beginning our annual update to the website and you can already see some results from it. We will have lots of things to add this year and will be adding some new pictures soon as well as more technical information about garlic. We will also be adding a section all about Paint Rock, the Indian pictograph site a little to the west from our place. It is a very special place that people should know about. The 2003 and 2004 newsletters had some discussion about it. Added December 21, 2004 - Sorry, friends, we're all sold out of fresh garlic for the season. Our next shipments will will be in Summer/Fall of 2005. Place your orders early in the year for September shipping to get the best chance of getting exactly the rare garlics you want; after all, they are rare and people do not always get ones they want because they're so hard to find. Added November 5, 2004 - We have plenty of large excellent German Extra Hardy and Music - both longer storing garlics. We also have some nice Chesnok Red and Persian Star, the two best of all roasting garlics. Click on names to buy. We also still have a nice selection of garlics for Assortments. Order now while there's still time to plant and a good selection. Added September 16, 2004 - The article in last year's Sept/Oct edition of Organic Gardening magazine recommending Creoles (and us) for warm winter regions of the country has caused an immediate increase in demand for these rare treasures. Creoles are the hardest to find of all garlics these days, and the increase in demand comes at a time when there simply aren't many available. The good news is that we expect to have a much greater supply of them next year and the year after. Added June 5, 2004 -What a magnificent spring we're having out here on the ranch. It looks like a sea of pinks, reds, yellows, golds, whites and blues covering the prairie like a wall-to-wall carpet of colored snow. The perfumed air is heavy with the sounds of birds and insects as the Landlady dons her finest apparel to show us that not only is she strong and powerful, but that she is also a thing of beauty and a patron of the natural arts. She has turned our little piece of central Texas into candy for the eyes, ears, nose and soul. When the Landlady feels good, everyone feels good. We don't usually encourage visitors because I enjoy them so much I wind up getting nothing else done and fall even further behind. However, we are considering welcoming volunteers at planting time in the fall and at harvesting time in the spring if they want to help out with the crop. For those who don't like to camp out, there are available a couple of nice fully equipped vacation condo-type homes with wood burning fireplaces and a modern bunkhouse-style luxury hostel with two large dormitory-type bunk bedrooms in nearby communities. E-mail me if you would like to attend. Added May 19, 2004 -
Creoles are probably the rarest of all garlics these days as very few people grow them and their
crops are all small. They are in very great demand but in very limited
supply, due largely to the article mentioning us in Organic Gardening Mag last fall.
Our phone number is 1 - ( 325 ) 348-3049.
It's very important to order early as the earliest orders get the best choice of the new crop garlic - and many cultivars sell out early.
We would like to welcome the readers of Herb Companion magazine to our website. My thanks to Susan Belsinger for mentioning us in their May 2004 issue - it always feels good when a such a well respected publication recommends you.
Recognition is one of the main things that makes the long hours of toil worth the effort.
Herb Companion has long been a valuable source of herbal information to us and it makes me feel honored and humbled to be favorably mentioned.
We feel very fortunate to have been recommended by several other publications in the last few years, including, The NY Times, Forbes Magazine, Food and Wine magazine, Organic Gardening, Texas Gardening, The Dallas Morning News and San Francisco Chronicle,
among many newspapers across the country. We must be doing something right.
I played my Choctaw cedar flute again this year at the Paint Rock Pictograph site (Click here to read of our excellent experiences and discoveries at Paint Rock) during the winter solstice and again during the vernal equinox and discovered the meanings of some of the pictographs.
Some of them were ritualistic, such as the paintings that honored the Green Corn Moon and the Ripe Corn Moon, two of the biggest celebrations of the year among corn growing indians.
Some of them were of astronomical significance, such as those depicting the supernovae of 1054 and 1572 and one that was a beautiful map of the winter/spring sky. Another was already known to be a reliable marker for the winter solstice.
It's a real "Aha" moment when you finally figure out a pictograph. What was a mystery for centuries is suddenly clear.
Added November 17, 2003 - It has been a busy fall season, especially since Organic Gardening magazine ran an article about garlic mentioning us and recommending us as a mail order source of garlic. It always feels good when some national publication recognizes your work and mentions you favorably in an article. There was another Garlic is Life! Symposium in Tulsa and it was super. The scientific focus this year was on identifying the basic groups of garlic and the origin places of those particular groups of garlic.
The latest findings indicate seven groups or clusters of garlic types, with the Creoles being yet undefined.
An earlier study had shown 17 isozyme groups falling into five major categories. The symposium has been a gold mine to me in terms of being able to meet knowledgeable, multi-degreed people from whom I have learned much about all aspects of garlic. It is from these well-informed experts from afar that I get the information for the website. The material in my website comes from these experts' lectures and also from the conversations we have at lunch or dinner afterward. The body of knowledge about garlic is growing exponentially, just like the interest in it and there's a lot of misinformation circulating about it, too. I try to clear up some of the confusion by talking with experts and incorporating their comments into the website - that keeps it current. Added September 12, 2003 - We owe thanks again this year to our group of Great Garlic Growers for allowing us to purchase the cream of their crops at a premium price so that we will be selling only the best that we can find. Our growers take good care of us. For those who haven't been following along with us, Our growers are remotely located growers who don't have much of a local market, but who can grow some really great garlic. By patronizing these small scale growers we are promoting e-commerce in America. With the help of our growers, we can deliver these gourmet varieties to the people who come to our website looking for them. Everybody wins.
NEW! - Added May 1, 2003 - Check out our new line of pickled/marinated garlic. -
March 25, 2003 This year, I played my Choctaw cedar flute at the Winter Solstice and Vernal Equinox celebrations at the pictographs site at Paint Rock, Texas.
Paint Rock is a place which many native peoples over the centuries have treated as a holy place and painted many pictures and symbols on the cliff walls above the banks of the Concho River.
Observations have confirmed some of these rock paintings to accurately predict the solstices and equinoxes and some that appear to be astronomical/astrological sky charts as well.
Paint Rock is a special place where one can commune with nature and feel an uncommonly strong connectedness with Mother Earth and her family (sometimes we forget that we are a part of that family - not something separate from it).
It feels as if some part of the spirits of those who were here before are still here. It is an invitation to open the eyes and ears of your soul to hear the stories of those whose innumerable campfires dot the night sky and whose names can never be said again.
One comes away with a feeling of spiritual fulfillment and personal contentment.
There are some places that just seem to have some kind of spiritual electromagnetic attraction - this place is one.
Always check the Boutique Page for what is currently available. If you wish, you can E-Mail me or call me at (1-325-348-3049) to tell me what you want to order so that I can verify price and availability. We are now set up to accept credit cards (Visa, Mastercard and American Express and Discover) and we have installed a shopping cart to simplify buying and to automate the process. Even though our process appears to be automatic, it isn't. I still review each and every sale before the credit card is charged and sometimes even write a personal comment on the receipt that gets sent with the package. We are not going to sacrifice personal service to automation. Ordering is easier than ever now with the on-line shopping cart. It will not only accept credit cards on line, but also fill out an order form for you to print and send if you prefer to pay by check and also would prepare a checklist if you prefer to give your credit card information over the phone. If you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail or call me.
Click Here to Go To the Boutique
- Buy Small Assorted Sampler Packs of garlic & other things.
Click Here to Go To the Varieties Page
- Buy specific varieties of garlic by the pound.
A look back at the Topsy-Turvy 2001 crop year. What an interesting year this has been! One is enough of years like 2001. It was a year of ecstastic highs (They wrote a big article about us in Texas Gardener Magazine.) and tragic lows with some growers experiencing bumper crops while others while others watched their garlic wither or drown. It was an incredible spring followed by 9-11, it was a year when some beautiful garlic turned bad in storage. Due to the article in Forbes, we got more orders than ever before but much of the garlic from one particular grower wilted prematurely and many orders had to be cancelled. All in all; however, it was a spectacular year that I won't be forgetting any time soon. So far, the 21st century is rather turbulent, but interesting in a fatal attraction sort of way. A look back at 2000 and a first look at this years crop as of March 22 2001. Wow! What a wild and crazy year 2000 was for us, especially when you remember that we lost our crop in April to a tornado/freak hail storm. While 2000 brought us a lot more unanticipated free publicity in the way of being recommended in Forbes Magazine and stories that mentioned us in lots of newspapers across the country, it also brought more than its share of adversity. 2000 was undoubtedly the hottest and driest year of my life - it hit 116 degrees several times - we were in the midst of the worst drought in our local history. Funny, the drought ended when we went to the Garlic is Life Symposium and Festival in Tulsa, OK in Oct. It started raining on us there and rained on us all the way back from Tulsa. Mother Nature always seems to have special treats in store for this part of Texas. Wow! What a busy year 1999 was. First, we were favorably mentioned in a Food and Wine magazine article and then the New York Times mentioned us as did the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Contra Costa Times and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and several other publications, too. I feel very flattered. |
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Our site is always under construction. - This page last updated February 14, 2008
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Bob
Our website has been visited over a million times since June 6, 1997. - Thanks.
