Why Purple Garlic?

Heirloom garlic

       For me, garlic is art. It reminds me that simple things don't have to be boring, they can be special. Garlic shows me of the natural beauty that can come from growing through new situations, and it reminds me to observe the beauty of each present moment.

       I always thought garlic was white. My family usually bought pre-minced garlic, but sometimes they bought large white bulbs from the grocery store. Even though the color was plain, I was always intrigued by the layers and the forms of these white bulbs.

White garlic from our farm

        But then I started working on an heirloom garlic farm. Here, garlic isn’t just white. Sometimes it’s purple, pink, or yellow. It has names like “sunset” and “burgundy”. I didn’t know that garlic, a food I ate almost every day, could come in different colors. How could I have missed such a beautiful occurrence, right before my eyes? How could I have eaten garlic from a jar, grown around the world and soaked in preservatives when I could grow something so magical in my own backyard? 

Different varieties of garlic in different colors and patterns

      

        When I tell people about my job, a natural question is, “What’s your favorite vegetable?” My immediate answer is always garlic. Not because of the taste (although I love the flavor), but because of how it’s grown, because of the varieties, and the stories.

       To grow garlic, you bury a clove. One clove grows into a new bulb of garlic. Unlike most plants, you plant it in the fall, usually late November. Garlic needs the cold winter weather to form its unique shape. It only gets strong enough to form cloves (next year’s seeds) by surviving the winter.

Garlic cloves for planting

       The summer is really the season for garlic. Usually in late July, it is time to harvest garlic. Harvesting garlic was the moment I really fell in love with farming. It was the moment when I wondered how anybody could even think of doing anything else with their lives.

       When you harvest garlic, you first dig underneath it with either a pitchfork or undercut it with a tractor, to loosen the roots from the dirt beneath them. Then, you reach your hands into the rich soil, digging purely guided by the feeling of the plant and the soil, until you can firmly grab the garlic. For some varieties, you can grab it higher up along the stem before gently pulling it out. For others, you have to dig until you’re holding the entire bulb in your hand so that it doesn’t rip off the neck.

Fresh garlic lined up to wash

       When you pull the garlic out of the ground, you have to be extremely careful. This isn’t a rock you’re digging up. This is a fresh bulb, which has lived under the earth for months. You gently pull the stem up, releasing pressure when there’s too much pullback from the roots, a sign that you need to dig around it more so you don’t break the neck.

       When you handle this fresh garlic, it isn’t something you just toss in a harvest bin. Fresh garlic bruises extremely easily, which causes it to rot when it’s cured, so you have to treat the bulb like an egg, placing it gently where you want it to go.

       While you can eat garlic fresh from the ground (called green garlic), it’s usually cured, which means dried out, for about six weeks so that it hardens and can be stored much longer. This, too, is a process incorporating community, art and tradition.

Garlic drying in the greenhouse

        Sometimes soft-neck garlic varieties (they have flexible stems instead of the harder ones of other varieties) are dried out by braiding them. These braids can be woven with dried flowers to add color, and bulbs of garlic can be cut off when you're ready to eat them.

Garlic braid

       For me, the growing and harvesting of garlic is the magic that makes garlic more than just a vegetable. It embodies everything beautiful about farming: growing a new plant from a tiny seed, surviving a long winter to blossom the next summer, digging this new bulb out of rich soil. Garlic holds a story, a life of its own that culminates in a beautiful bulb with a powerful flavor.