Sundries Farm Garlic

Robbie was able to come home for three weeks in June and it was a marvelous time. We haven’t had three weeks together during the fire season ever, not ever, and we’ve been in fire for 15 years now. We needed that time for ourselves, of course, but we also really needed three weeks to get our garlic crop harvested and curing (full disclosure — we also floated and fished a ton while Robbie was home so there was a lot of hard work but also some relaxation and camping and beautiful fishing and visiting with friends).

Growing heirloom, organic garlic requires a lot of passion and a lot of hard work. Everything about this crop is done by hand and each garlic bulb is touched by us about 8 times before it is ready to go to market! Did you know growing garlic is this labor intensive? It must be planted by hand, clove by clove, with proper spacing and orientation. It must be weeded by hand. It must be picked by hand. It must be hung (hanged?) to cure. Once cured, it must be cleaned by hand, trimmed by hand (roots and leaves removed) or braided (if it’s a softneck variety). In the case of Sundries Farm, we will be selling or garlic though our online farm store and shipping it out, order by order, which will be the last time we touch it before it heads out to you.

This year we have been working closely with the Department of Agriculture here in Idaho to officially certify our garlic as “white rot free” which will enable us to sell seed garlic for top dollar to every county in the state of Idaho as well as the entire USA making this niche crop of ours even more niche! If all goes according to plan we will also be the only Idaho garlic farm offering certified Nootka Rose variety. WOO HOO! It’s very exiting and we are grateful that the wonderful people at Idaho’s Department of Agriculture have been willing to work with us. We had a couple ladies out to the farm last week to pull cloves for inspection and testing and it was clear to me that they care deeply about small, regenerative, diversified farming. They are passionate gals who really know their stuff and Robbie and I look forward to working with them and being in relationship with them for years to come.

We are hoping to launch our farm website in the next couple of weeks — Robbie has been website building in hotel rooms, on tarmac while waiting for fire calls, in the Airstream in McCall…working working working — and we plan to be shipping orders out by September. I would say it’s a miracle we have been able to manage all of this during the fire season when we have so much going on, however, I know how hard we have worked to succeed at farming this crop and I know that in life, you do not get what you wish for, YOU GET WHAT YOU WORK FOR. So pats on the backs for us. We’re building a dream and so we go in grace, with grit.

More details are coming with regards to purchasing garlic from us for anyone who is interested. We’re overjoyed that we will be able to share the fruits of our labor with you this year, and hopefully, for many years to come.

Love,

The King and Queen of Sundries Farm

Post Scriptus

I can’t believe I forgot to tell you about our tractor! After shopping for a tractor for a few years and being outbid at auctions we found this little John Deere beauty in a nearby town and a miracle happened. The seller’s phone number was wrong in his Craig’s List sale listing and we tried and tried to phone him (so did a bunch of other people) and finally, in desperation, we emailed him. He emailed us back immediately and we galloped over to look at the tractor. Once there, he told us he listed his phone number incorrectly and he had 18 other emails inquiring about the tractor and some other fellow was continuously driving by to ogle the tractor and had already offered him a lowball cash offer…which was rejected because we were coming to look at the darn thing!!!

There was going to be a tractor riot. I’m not kidding.

Suffice to say, we bought it for a very fair price. It came with nine implements. It’s a 70s model, so it’s still built heavy enough to handle some bigger implements like a hay mower for instance. It was a great find and we are thankful we had the means to swoop in and make it ours. Since it was nearby, we drove it home to the farm that day. That’s right. We were the jerks on the highway driving a tractor. IT WAS GLORIOUS.

Robbie has been teaching me to operate it which is fun and empowering. He’s a heavy machinery operating genius thanks to his time as a fish biologist in Arizona. It’s so much fun to watch him work on it. A friend of ours calls the tractor the “machine of opportunity” and it’s so true. We’re just so grateful to have this tool at our fingertips now. It’s changed our farming lives.