Fran's garden stories: A trip to Jas and Gu's garlic farm

Halfway through our vacation, we took a two day trip north to visit our friends Jasmyn and Gu (and their five kids, their dog, two cats, three kittens, 7 chickens, 25 chicks, and a few houseguests and neighbours.) I have mentioned them before in the blog as Jasmyn has the greenest thumbs of anyone I know and I know a lot of green thumbs. They are living a three hour drive north from Allan, beyond Mont Laurier in a beautiful rural area. They too are living in a three room house converted from a barn and spend a lot of time outside for obvious reasons. There is a lake with an access point 5 minutes from their house, but the water was fairly cold so I was the only one running to swim for a change. Even I did not last long in the water.

Jas confided to me that she was not a true chicken farmer at heart, and that this year she and Gu decided to make a go growing garlic professionally. They expanded their already huge and diverse garden and this summer were learning techniques for growing and harvesting with the intention to turn most of their harvest into seed stock (clove stock?) for next year and then sell commercially. We arrived in the middle of the garlic harvest, and in between entertaining and catching up with various kids, I eagerly soaked up as much as I could about how to grow garlic that is easily 5 times the size of what I

just harvested the previous week 200 kilometers further south (which is quite a feat!). Unlike me, who asked my mother in law when to plant and which end goes up, Jas and Gu spent the winter reading up on garlic growing and consulting with a friend in the area who has been growing for some thirty years. I also have been growing exclusively for eating, not having enough space to grow surplus for planting, and it turns out that how you harvest and store for planting is different from how I do it for eating purposes.

My technique for raising garlic, if you can call it a technique, is to stick the cloves in the ground 6 inches apart with the part that sends up a green shoot facing up, late October/early November, and cover the area with hay. Once the plants have sent up a flower shoot (a "scape"), I wait until it has made a full circle and cut them off. I then wait about a month more, when the leaves are going yellow, and rip them out of the ground occasionally tearing the plant off the bulb. I root around with a handspade often damaging the bulb to get out the ones that got away, and some are left behind to pop up surprise garlic clusters the next spring. I tie them upside down
and hang them to dry for a few weeks in my bike shed

and then they are ready to eat or store in a cool place for later.

So here is what I have learned. According to Gu, pulling the plant up by the leaves can bruise the bulb and affect the next generation you grow from the cloves, so he does not use my brute strength method (I kid you not, after yanking 250 heads in a few hours, your shoulders hurt). First, he inspects the garlic for spots on the leaves, because this seems to signal a fungus in the plant which can destroy the bulb if left to mature fully.

The garlic is still edible, but will deteriorate if left in the ground, and is best not used for planting. Then he counts the number of leaves on the plant, and the proportion that has started to turn yellow. If it has 4 leaves he picks them, and if it has 5 leaves, he waits until more than half are turning yellow. More than 5 leaves indicates it is not ready. The plant loses leaves as it gets mature, so one with 4 has already lost some. He uses what I believe is called a Hula-ho (or stirrup ho, either one being pretty suggestive of something it is not!) to dig under and lift the garlic out without breaking or damaging it. This nifty

device is also great for weeding without needing to bend over. I want one!!

I am getting ahead of myself, however. They start off by putting bone meal under each clove they plant on raised beds with good drainage and no weeds. Jas's consultant friend warned her that planting small cloves resulted in small garlic heads, but she tried adding extra bone meal when the cloves were smaller and got amazing results.

She also has a few chickens wandering loose in the garden at any point in time which keeps the fertilizer replenished. I may have a hard time reproducing the chicken factor, but I am definitely looking into bone meal for this autumn planting. This year we tried fish emulsion, liquid sea weed fertilizer and epsom salts for extra magnesium, but no bones.

So rather than picking all at once like I do, they are selectively picking the ripest ones over a period of time, letting the smaller ones keep growing. We laid them out on shade cloth to dry and at the end of the day, we tied them in bundles of 7, wrapping the cord

up the stem to keep them upright when hung in groups of 4 under a tarp.

They planted something like 4800 garlic plants, and they were just beginning to harvest and tie them up the day we arrived. Having enough space to dry them properly was already posing a challenge, and Gu went off with Josh to check out the neighbour's barn as a drying space. Needless to say, the garlic is keeping everyone busy and extra hands were very welcome, even if it meant entertaining kids for a while.

Besides lots and lots of garlic, and some chickens, the garden has corn, lettuce, chard, beans, bok choy, onions, peppers, eggplant, wild and cultivated flowers, berries, and probably a lot more (I was busy in the garlic patch trying to learn how to get those crazy huge heads!). The area is full of raspberries right now, heading soon into an abundance of blueberries, and you just might stumble on a bear who has the same interest in berries as you do.

The previous week, Jas was picking raspberries up the road with the dog, Shrek, who insisted on trying to bark down the bear who showed up on the other side of the bush. Jas retreated back home to safety. Shrek turned up home unscathed a few hours later. Gardening can be dangerous at times.

They also are growing a wide variety of herbs for cooking as well as natural medicinal herbs. Jas gave me some dill plants, savoury and wild Canadian mint to share with Allan, as well as a weed called polygonum hydropiper (water pepper) which has a hot peppery taste and a lemony aftertaste. Interesting stuff. I will try cultivating it in a container and see what happens.

We headed back south the next day, and took a
beautiful drive down the whole length of the 327

highway from Mont Tremblant to Lachute near Allan's place. The road is scenic, curving through the mountains and small towns, passing a huge caribou and deer farm near Arundel (too far off to get good photos, but a forest of antlers was really quite a sight).

I had two side missions, one was to take photos of beautiful Canadian landscapes for my neighbour's artistic inspiration, and to find second hand tractors for sale for our friend Allan. Both resulted in multiple spontaneous u-turns and pulling up on the shoulder of the highway and taking an odd assortment of photos of old tractors, for sale signs, covered bridges, country fields, wild birds and rivers.

I decided to skip on posting the tractor pics, but it was an interesting aside.

I added a few sky pictures which I took a couple days later on Highway 50 heading from Montreal back up to Lachute. There were some even more spectacular shots of the sunrays bursting through the clouds which I missed because there was no where to pull over safely, and of the gorgeous rainbow which Allan told us we had just missed over the Shire which was probably at the same time. Still, not bad for some off the road photography.