!! Now taking orders for fall 2019 SEED GARLIC shipments !!
— All orders will be processed and shipped starting at the end of August —
A Pelkey Farms Spotlight On:
German Extra Hardy
The German Extra Hardy is among the most winter-friendly garlics and will produce very large bulbs each with 4-5 cloves. It has a strong, raw flavor, and a high sugar content making it good for roasting. Outside skin is ivory-white, but the clove skin is dark red.
Chesnok Red
From Shvelisi, Republic of Georgia, this garlic is savory when cooked and is sweet, creamy and nutty flavored when roasted. One of Karen's favorites, Chesnok Red is a Purple Stripe hardneck garlic with 9 to 10 easy to peel cloves.
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WHAT IS "SEED GARLIC"? Unlike how it sounds, seed garlic is not, in fact, garlic seeds. It is garlic bulbs broken into cloves, and you use those cloves to then seed the soil in order to grow more garlic. The cloves from the seed garlic will sprout into new garlic plants, and grow new bulbs. In essence, having one garlic bulb broken into cloves will net you multiple garlic plants when used to seed the soil. Think of seeding as another word for planting.
Garlic is an extremely hardy grower, and it winters well. Garlic is generally harvested in late summer. Garlic seeding takes place a few weeks prior to the first frost of the season, and with the help of a heavy straw mulch, grows throughout the winter and into summer. Here you can see a new garlic shoot pushing its way through the straw in the spring. Like all the garlic at Pelkey Farms, this one was grown from the cloves of seed garlic.
Pelkey Farms offers over 40 varieties of seed garlic in our online store, sold and shipped during the early Autumn each year. Staples like Georgian Fire and Oregon Spice, to the Pelkey Farms exclusive, Haycock Red, we have seed garlic to cover every grower's garlic needs.
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Gar·lic
/ˈgärlik/
Noun
A strong-smelling pungent-tasting bulb, used as a flavoring in cooking and in herbal medicine.
The plant (Allium sativum) of the lily family that produces a bulb.
The word garlic comes from Old English garleac, meaning "spear leek." Dating back over 6,000 years, it is native to Central Asia, and has long been a staple in the Mediterranean region, as well as a frequent seasoning in Asia, Africa, and Europe.
Egyptians worshiped garlic and placed clay models of garlic bulbs in the tomb of Tutankhamen. Garlic was so highly-prized, it was even used as currency. Folklore holds that garlic repelled vampires, protected against the Evil Eye, and warded off jealous nymphs said to terrorize pregnant women and engaged maidens. And let us not forget to mention the alleged aphrodisiacal powers of garlic which have been extolled through the ages.
Surprisingly, garlic was frowned upon by foodie snobs in the United States until the first quarter of the twentieth century, being found almost exclusively in ethnic dishes in working-class neighborhoods. But, by 1940, America had embraced garlic, finally recognizing its value as not only a minor seasoning, but as a major ingredient in recipes.
Quaint diner slang of the 1920's referred to garlic as Bronx vanilla, halitosis, and Italian perfume. Today, Americans alone consume more than 250 million pounds of garlic annually.