2020 Garlic Harvest is nearly ready

Dear Friends of Garlic:

Below is the 2020 garlic order form for Higher Ground Farm.

You should know up front that this has been a semi-crummy year for growing garlic – a number of farming factors are involved, but, suffice it to say, the garlic is not up to my personal standards. 

This year’s garlic is delicious, but is disappointing appearance-wise:  smaller bulbs and cloves, cracked skins, (which won’t affect your flavor enjoyment but isn’t as aesthetically pleasing) and a smaller harvest overall in comparison to previous years.  So, please order early as supplies are VERY limited.

Additionally, Pat and I are offering for sale some of our farm-fresh products to you, at local farmers’ markets and other gatherings as long as supplies last.   So far, the products include organically-raised veggies (currently: potatoes, onions, leeks, kale, turnips, cabbage, herbs, and more) at $1.50 per pound; my famous (well, “locally famous”) “Gardener’s Hand Soap”$3.00 a bar with several fragrances to choose from; natural first aid items - dandelion salve, pine sap in hemp oil or in a salve; (due to customer demand) Pat’s famous Goat Cheese varieties (plain, Ranch, or Garlic)$3.00 per four ounce container (required disclaimer “not for human comsumption”); and a small selection of vintage (cast iron!) manual food choppers/meat grinders, just in case you want to convert that small chunk of road-kill venison into delicious sausage.

Thanks for your understanding of the vagaries and challenges facing today’s small farmers (not diminutive farmers you understand, but farmers of small farms… well you get it).

Jim and Pat McGinty

12925 East Oregon Road

Elk, WA  99009

509-292-0326

j.p.mcgintyelk2@gmail.com

2020 Higher Ground Farm Garlic Pre-Order

Questions? – 509-292-0326 or j.p.mcgintyelk2@gmail.com

 

Name:________________________________________Phone__________________

 

Email:_________________________________________Date___________________

_

Garlic @ $7.50 per pound (purchase priority is based on the date we receive this order form):

_____ lb(s) Bogatyr – taste the heat when raw; mellows when cooked

_____ lb(s) Georgian Fire – extremely hot even when cooked

_____ lb(s) German Red – robust garlic flavor, excellent in pesto

_____ lb(s) Musik – sweet garlic flavor; medium heat, excellent baked or roasted

_____ lb(s) Polish Red – excellent garlic flavor; medium heat

_____ lb(s) Spanish Roja – classic garlic with some heat, great flavor

 

I am pre-ordering this Garlic with the understanding that weather and/or soil conditions can alter the harvest and, therefore, the availability of the garlic I order.  I will be called or emailed should substitutions be necessary.   

Weeding between the lines

By Jim McGinty

 

The heat of Summer is upon us, and our gardens (and the weeds!) are finally flourishing.  Here at Rancho McGinty, the Roy’s Calais dent corn (corn to be ground into cornmeal) stalks are seven feet tall, and I swear I can hear the corn leaves squealing as they grow.  The poisonous but impressive squash plants are monstrous, and constantly on the outlook for food:  I never pass the squash plants within their viney reach.

Once again, the panels of black weed block fabric with pre-cut planting holes were a production superpower: the onions, leeks, and cabbage were huge, and weed free!

In the berry garden, the Quinault strawberries are producing a quart of juicy goodness every other day (fresh strawberry milkshakes!), while the Doyle thornless blackberries are just coming on – seriously, they make the best blackberry jam I’ve ever tasted.  Did I mention that they are also thornless?

Our garlic crop this year was only so-so:  smaller bulbs, fewer skins (which means cracks between the cloves), and overall fewer bulbs.  A combination of possible causes:  heavy, continuous rain in late Spring and early Summer, hot and dry weather when the rain window closed, underground grass root competition, and other farmer factors.  The good news is that the garlic tastes delicious, and I will have enough cloves to replant in late September for the 2021 harvest.

In the fruit tree orchard, a late Spring frost destroyed most of the beautiful apple, pear, and cherry blossoms – happily the Italian plum trees are loaded with fruit (plums generally have a later blossom period), so our breakfast toast will still have spreadable jam!  Reminder:  remember to prune your plum trees right after harvest, for best production next Summer.

Our cool weather root crops (potatoes, turnips, beets, and carrots) produced bushel baskets of tastiness:  I had never eaten turnips, and so I was expecting maybe musty, dirt-flavored ickyness, but I shredded a couple of turnips (replacing shredded potatoes) into a frittata with scrambled eggs and cheddar cheese, and it was very good!  Easy to grow, and tasty to boot – good to know for early Spring planting calendars.

Finally, remember to harvest veggies as they mature, to encourage additional production:  tomatoes, peppers, squash, ornamental eggplant (I mean tubes of purple Styrofoam ®), cucumbers all need to be monitored daily for ripe perfection.

Now is the time to plan for maximum harvest:  guessing the dreaded “First Frost” date, when most warm weather plants die overnight, is both important and impossible in our challenging environment.  Last year (2019) we experienced a series of totally-unexpected killer frosts in late September and early October (even the professional weather fraudcasters were taken aback).  Will you decide to prune out all the baby squash and blossoms now, in order to focus the plant’s energies on producing ripe livestock food?  Will you leave the plants to their own devices, and hope for a late first frost?  Will you have “frost blankets” or pre-cut sheets of floating row cover (Ree-May ®, or Agribon ®, locally-available at Northwest Seed and Pet in Spokane) to throw over the almost-ready-for-harvest veggies and fruit, at the hint of an overnight sneak frost?  Here at Rancho McGinty, we employ options # 1 and # 3: early pruning, and heavy-weight floating row cover (frost protection down to plus 26 degrees Fahrenheit).

GARDENING CALENDAR:

Once again, I know of no nose-to-nose garden club meetings, classes, or tours this month, though there are a LOT of local on-line gardening resources:  our neighborhood garden club has instructive (and amusing) videos and comments on our club’s blogsite (www.elk-camdengardenkeepers.blogspot.com), and on our Facebook page.  Meanwhile, the Pend Oreille County Master Gardeners in Newport continue to offer free on-line gardening classes on their website (www.extension.wsu.edu/pendoreille/event).

That’s it for this month – keep watering those food-bearing plants, bushes, and trees, and remember to water and turn your developing compost bins and piles – at the end of the gardening season, all that dirt will need replenishing for a better than ever 2021 garden.