Moscow Food Co-op Producer Profile

by Mary Jane Butters, from the November 2001 newsletter

We've been growing and selling our Paradise Farm organic German Red garlic at the Co-op for the last eight years. We sell hundreds of pounds of this delicious garlic variety to the international specialty foods website, www.thegarlicstore.com, as well, but we intend to continue supplying our neighbors with this great garlic.

And why do I say this German Red garlic is so special? The cloves are large (about 8 per bulb), store well, have a strong garlic flavor, and do not have any disease or mold. And, these cloves are easy to use since the skins peel easily. You won't find the skins clinging to your fingers, cutting board, and knives like the papery skins of other garlic varieties.

The reason our garlic keeps so well, and is so large and flavorful, is the pampering we provide each bulb. We use expensive organic fertilizers, minerals, and kelp in our garlic fields. In addition, we add mycorrhizal fungi to the soil. This is an expensive product (five gallons cost $250), but the fungus grows symbiotically with the garlic, attaches as a filament to the roots and extends the power of the roots to pull nutrients from the soil.

In addition, we have years of experience in raising garlic, so we know when to plant and harvest for the best results. When we harvest, each plant is individually handled and placed on padded mats in the back of our pickup, and then individually hung to dry in our barn. We don't toss, throw, smash, pile, or squish our garlic—so our garlic bulbs don't have bruises or cuts. We handle each bulb as though it were an egg.

Growing and harvesting our garlic is very labor intensive. The price reflects our costs. But we think our garlic is clearly superior.

In addition to the German Red garlic bulbs, every June we sell our garlic scapes to the Co-op Deli. The scapes are the curly seed tops the garlic plant produces. The Deli folks blend the scapes with pine nuts and olive oil to make a delicious garlic pesto which is sold in tubs, put on pizza, etc. Since the scapes are fresh for only a few weeks annually, the garlic pesto is also a seasonal food. The scapes make a pesto that is a pretty green color with a rich garlic flavor, but without a hot garlic bite. During the season, I eat it two or three times daily.

The garlic scape pesto was created by Rich Hannan, the director of the Western Region USDA Germ Plasma Bank at WSU. Rich is in charge of storing and saving seeds of all kinds of crop varieties to maintain biodiversity. When he was appointed the curator of garlic at this seed-storage facility in 1983, there were only 14 different cultivars (different unique varieties) of garlic in the seed bank. Now he has found and saved 275 garlic cultivars from around the world. Rich Hannan was also creative enough to think of a use for the garlic scapes. He has also entrusted us here at Paradise Farm with a total of 62 other varieties of garlic. We are now beginning field trials for those garlics. We'll keep good records, study the results, and perhaps we'll find another variety that is even better than the German Red.

I think the Palouse has a bright future as a garlic-growing region. The California town of Gilroy is now famous for growing garlic, but here we really have the ideal climate, rainfall, and soil for growing premium garlic.

Mary Jane Butters is a Moscow organic farmer who loves garlic, and who believes that the annual availability of Garlic Scape Pesto should be celebrated with a national eating holiday.

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