Five ways to buy direct from the growers in our online Farmers Market:
- If you know the name of the garlic you want to buy, click here to look it up in an alphabetical listing and click on the name of the one you want.
- If you don't know the name of the garlic you want to buy, click here to look it up in a list sorted by mild, medium and hot/strong and click on the name of one that sounds good to you
- If you want a sampler assortment of several different varieties, click here to buy a sampler assortment of several varieties. Click on the name of one that sounds good to you.
- Click here to go to our farmers market and click on the picture of a garlic you feel good about and click on their picture to go to their website and buy from them.
- If all else fails, call Ben and Claire at (352) 817-0111.
This Special section guides you to information that you're looking for about garlic. It is intended to educate you about the 10 cleary different varieties of garlic and an eleventh group of garlics that are unclassified and don't fit into any of the established varieties and are unique with generally predictable characteristics but they are truly in a class by themselves . The more people know about natural things, the happier and more comfortable they can be.
Herbalists have known for millennia that scented baths can help people feel more relaxed and end enjoy an enhanced sense of well-being. There's nothing like a long, warm soak in a bathtub of garlic water to help a person feel relaxed and at peace with the world and gain an enhanced sense of well-being - it just makes one feel good. No health claims here.
Herbalists have known for millennia that scented baths can help people feel more relaxed and end enjoy an enhanced sense of well-being. There's nothing like a long, warm soak in a bathtub of garlic water to help a person feel relaxed and at peace with the world and gain an enhanced sense of well-being - it just makes one feel good. No health claims here.
The Garlic Family Tree and Where Garlic Came from
Garlic 101 - Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Garlic but Didn't Know Who to Ask
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Garlic isn't just garlic, there are many different kinds of garlic and they're almost all different in size, color, shape, taste, number of cloves per bulb, pungency and storability. Most Americans aren't aware of the many kinds since they seldom see more than one kind in the local supermarket. There are hundreds if not thousands of cultivated sub-varieties of garlic in the world, although most of them may be selections of only a handful of basic types that have been grown widely and developed their own characteristics over the centuries as local growing conditions changed.
Botanists classify all true garlics as members of the lily family and under the species Allium Sativum. There are two subspecies; Ophioscorodon , or hard-necked garlics (Ophios for short) and Sativum , or soft-necked garlics. The hard-necked garlics were the original garlics and the soft-necked ones were developed or cultivated over the centuries by growers from the original hard-necks through a process of selection. The latest research (2003) shows that ten distinct varietal groups of garlic have evolved; five very different hardneck varieties called Porcelain, Purple Stripe, Marbled Purple Stripe, Glazed Purple Stripe, and Rocambole; three varieties of Weakly bolting hardnecks that often produce softnecks - Creole,Asiatic and Turban, plus two distinct softneck varietal groups; Artichoke and Silverskin. Our website has evolved to show this new structure Botanists originally thought that there were only five groups of garlics. Then a 1995 study attempted to classify garlic into 17 isozyme types, but that didn't work out satisfactorily, either. Eventually Dr. Gayle Volk of the USDA in Colorado and Dr. Joachim Keller of the Institute of Plant Biology in Gaterslaben, Germany, independently did DNA analyses of garlics and classified it correctly in 2003. The separate studies verified there were ten separate, distinct varieties of garlic. It's nice to finally get some real structure we can build around. Apparently all of the hundreds of sub-varieties (separate cultivars) of garlic grown all over the world came from these ten basic groups or sub-varieties of hardnecks that evolved in the Caucasus Mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Their individual characteristics have been altered over time by careful (or accidental) selection and changing growing conditions, such as soil type, fertility, rainfall, temperature, altitude, length and severity of winter, etc. as they spread across Asia and Europe and the Asiatics and Turbans developed in the East, while the Creoles developed in Spain and southern France and Artichokes and Silverskins developed Italy and elsewhere in Europe by selective replanting over generations. This picture of the structure of the garlic family is probably final but still work continues to define it more accurately using a larger number of cultivars and this may lead to the refining of the identification of clusters of sub-varieties but the basic picture is pretty much complete. The 10 Basic Varieties of Garlic: Five varieties of Hard-Neck garlic Porcelains like Music or German Extra Hardy; Rocamboles, like Killarney Red and Spanish Roja; Standard Purple Stripe such as Chesnok Red or Persian Star; Glazed Purple Stripe like Purple Glazer and Vekak; Marbled Purple Stripe such as Metechi, Bogatyr or Siberia Three Varieties of Weakly-Bolting Hardneck garlics Asiatic, such as Asian Tempest or Sonoran, the Creoles like Ajo Rojo or Rose de Lautrec and Turban garlics like Maiskij or Tzan. Two varieties of soft-neck garlic Artichokes like Inchelium Red and Early Red Italian and Silverskins like Silverwhite or Nootka Rose. |
How Did All These Garlics Get Here?
A few of the kinds of garlic now in America came in with Polish, German and Italian immigrants over the centuries, but most of them came in all at once in 1989. The USDA had been asking the Soviets for permission to go to the Caucasus region to collect garlics but permission had always been refused because there were many missile bases in the area and this was where their spaceport was and is.
Finally, as the Soviet Union was disintegrating in 1989, they suddenly invited the Americans in to collect the garlics. They were under continuous armed guard and were allowed to travel only from village to village along the old Silk Road buying garlic from local markets and naming the cultivars after the town or village where they were purchased.
When they got back to the US, they realized they had no gardens ready in which to plant the garlic (The USDA plans things years in advance.) so they contracted out the growing to a few private growers on a share-the-garlic basis. After their crops were harvested and the USDA got their share, these growers began to trade with each other and to sell some to friends and other garlic growers and that is how they came to be available now when they were not available 30 years ago. There was no time for adequate phytosanitary precautions to be made so we don't really know what kinds of "hitchhikers" might have been brought in with them.
The above explanation also shows why these garlics are rare and expensive. Slowly more growers are beginning to grow these cultivars and as more of it is grown and the supply begins to catch up with the very great demand. Garlic lovers take one look at these delightful things and they feel an overwhelming urge to try them. In a few years, these gourmet garlics will be more widely grown and the price will eventually come down somewhat, but at present, most growers are selling out of premium garlic at premium prices in a short time so people who know what varieties and cultivars they want need to order their favorites early in the year in order to have sothe best chance of getting the ones they want as most growers may be sold out if they delay ordering until October or even September on particularly popular varieties/cultivars.
OK, so you ordered early and got the varieties you wanted, what do you do with them? Read on...
Finally, as the Soviet Union was disintegrating in 1989, they suddenly invited the Americans in to collect the garlics. They were under continuous armed guard and were allowed to travel only from village to village along the old Silk Road buying garlic from local markets and naming the cultivars after the town or village where they were purchased.
When they got back to the US, they realized they had no gardens ready in which to plant the garlic (The USDA plans things years in advance.) so they contracted out the growing to a few private growers on a share-the-garlic basis. After their crops were harvested and the USDA got their share, these growers began to trade with each other and to sell some to friends and other garlic growers and that is how they came to be available now when they were not available 30 years ago. There was no time for adequate phytosanitary precautions to be made so we don't really know what kinds of "hitchhikers" might have been brought in with them.
The above explanation also shows why these garlics are rare and expensive. Slowly more growers are beginning to grow these cultivars and as more of it is grown and the supply begins to catch up with the very great demand. Garlic lovers take one look at these delightful things and they feel an overwhelming urge to try them. In a few years, these gourmet garlics will be more widely grown and the price will eventually come down somewhat, but at present, most growers are selling out of premium garlic at premium prices in a short time so people who know what varieties and cultivars they want need to order their favorites early in the year in order to have sothe best chance of getting the ones they want as most growers may be sold out if they delay ordering until October or even September on particularly popular varieties/cultivars.
OK, so you ordered early and got the varieties you wanted, what do you do with them? Read on...
This page last updated November 24, 2019.