A pitchfork’s pointy tines jabbed into the soft fabric of a faded black tarp. Once. Twice. After the third heave, Los Olivos Homegrown farmer Poul Palmer leaned on the handle for leverage, loosening crumbles of clay soil from an herbal giant.
Allium sativum: garlic.
Not that white-stuff-you-find-in-a-supermarket kind, but that crazy-stuff-you’ve-never-heard-of garlic. Rare. This one’s called Inchelium red. It’s a mild softneck—as opposed to hardneck—variety discovered on the Colville Indian Reservation in Northern Washington.
In late May, Palmer’s soil-weathered hands deftly grabbed a green stalk of leaves and wiggled it. Uprooting the bulb out of the ground, he gave it a quick shake and squeezed it. The bulb was too soft.
“Baaahhh,” he sighed and tossed it into the pile that won’t make the table at his farm stand. “All the rules are broken this year. Unbelievable. I think it’s the lack of winter.”
Two fairly even piles sat at his feet. One’s full of garlic that matured into cloves ready to dry and sell, and the other’s stacked with garlic that didn’t grow quite right—on the inside, the bulbs essentially look like a cross between a leek and an onion. He thinks the weather this year stressed the plants out. It didn’t really get cold, which garlic needs. At least 20 of the varieties he normally grows didn’t make it. In 14 years of garlicky glory, this is his worst year ever.
“I should pick three varieties and just grow those really well, but no, not me,” he said, annoyed with himself. “I want to save the garlic world, that’s where my head’s at.”
At the moment Palmer’s trying to save that spicy, sweet, aromatic world of sativum by growing between 175 and 200 different strains of organic, lovingly tended garlic on a small plot of land almost directly across Highway 154 from Mattei’s Tavern. According to him, there are about 700 different varieties in the world, maybe more.
And no two garlics are the same.
Take Texas rose. It’s a small bulb with lots of cloves that have a bright reddish/purple skin. Palmer harvested the rose in early May, and the bulbs were still drying out.
“It’s a hot son of a bitch,” Palmer said with a laugh. “This stuff will kick your ass. It’s gnarly, not for beginners.”
Palmer’s definitely not an amateur; he’ll take his garlic however it comes. He started peeling back flaky red layers, singled out a clove, cracked it open, and popped a little pearly white chunk between his lips. Its spice kicks on the back of the tongue and stays warm all the way down your esophagus.
“As it dries, it’s going to get more and more intense,” he said before waxing on about the nuances of flavor and intensity his favorite crop can have.
There’s Cuban smuggler, which a lot of Palmer’s customers love, but he thinks has sub-par flavor. He grabbed a Cuban from his wooden drying racks, broke a clove off, and tore it in half. Its flavor tickles the front of the tongue with prickles of heat before fading slightly. A variety from Cordova, Spain, has a different sort of stinging heat and hits the back of the throat like Texas rose does.
There’s also ajo morado, which “came from the side of a volcano in Mexico.” His farmed rows also contain garlic from Laos, Nepal, Syria, Korea, and several more countries. Some bear names like Persian star—its namesake comes in part from the shape the cloves make—or Thai fire—yes it’s super hot, and yes it’s from Thailand.
Palmer’s aptly nicknamed the “Garlic Guy” in Los Olivos, and when his stand downtown opens, he gets customers who travel from all over Southern California to taste wine in Santa Barbara County and buy his brand of gourmet garlic. But as much as his passion is about garlic’s unique, brash flavors, it’s also about the small-scale growing of produce; keeping rare, old varieties alive; and telling the story behind what he grows.
Heirloomville
Palmer’s stint as the Los Olivos Homegrown garlic farmer started with a bulb that sprouted on his countertop. What followed caused the nearly lifelong Santa Ynez Valley mason to change course. Since then, it’s been one 14-year-long experiment to find the strains that grow best, taste best, and sell out best.
If you run into Palmer at the Figueroa Mountain Brewery taproom downtown—always in a T-shirt, farm-worn jeans, and glasses—he’ll pull out his cell phone and show you pictures of his garlic; he’ll tell you what he loves about it and why the one common commercial variety essentially sucks. Most importantly—and this you really need to listen to—he’ll tell you why the flavor of non-hybrid, old seed-saved strains will “rock your world.” And he’ll do it all in a slow, gruff drawl with a smile on his face.
He’s definitely right: That generic white stuff Vons sells doesn’t really, to be über cliché, hold a candle to what he grows. Palmer’s garlic is tongue-tinglingly fabulous. His recommendation for the young stuff—freshly plucked from the earth—is to cook it up with something that showcases its flavor. Shrimp, for instance. A little (OK, a lot of) butter; salt; half a bulb of Cusco’s plump cloves, roughly chopped; a heaping two-hands worth of shrimp; a dash of oregano; and a splash or more of pinot gris. All you need is a crunchy, soft loaf of French bread to sop up the juice with.
So good.
But as far as the origins of garlic go, it all started with one.
“ … 10,000 years ago, there was only one family of garlic: the purple stripe family, and now we have 11,” he said. “All garlic has the strain of purple-stripe hardneck garlic in it.”
Hardneck means the neck, where the stalk of leaves meets the bulb, is hard. Squeeze it and it doesn’t give. Softneck’s the opposite. The original family of herb adapted to climate and terrain, proliferating and changing into the many we have now. He’s quick to point out, not all those varieties grow well in the Santa Ynez Valley. But sometimes, a non-hardy strain can morph into something new that does push on in the clay soil and dry heat.
“I had a French softneck turn into a hardneck,” he said. “It was struggling … and now it grows good.”
The softneck was known as chamisal wild, and he calls the new strain Palmer wild giant. Chamisal grew short with “wimpy bulbs” in Los Olivos soil, but the giant’s stalks grow 3 feet tall and put out a big bulb. It’s not the only strain that’s morphed on Palmer’s watch.
The antique tractors he keeps well-oiled, well-tuned, and running for work corner the farm’s productive rows. Wooden stakes delineate between sativum varieties; onions and peppers sidle up next to them; and Palmer coaxes heirloom tomatoes and lettuce to life in miniature hot houses. This year, the Sharpie-inked stakes number far more than last.
After a visit to the most recent Heirloom Expo in Santa Rosa, Palmer came home with 75 additional heirloom strains borrowed from a collection 265 varieties thick. An acquaintance of his from Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company, founder Jere Gettle, basically inherited the strains from an old garlic farmer.
“So I told him I would help him save them,” Palmer said. The 75 he hauled back to his garlic paradise were the strains best suited to its climate and soil. This idea he has to save the garlic is more of a quest to save the heirlooms that bring variety, beauty, and flavor to this world.
“Once we lose all our heirlooms and don’t have many more [seeds] to fall back on, we’re screwed; game over. You know, we’re really fast killing off this world. It’s really sad,” he said. “Heirlooms in the world are what put out true seed.”
Taste is top
As far as vegetables are concerned, heirloom is a word most people associate with tasty tomatoes. You know the ones: They’re brightly colored in oranges, greens, purples, pinks, yellows, often striped, and they come in in shapes we’re not used to seeing at Albertsons.
According to the San Diego Master Gardener Association, 7,500 heirloom tomato varieties are listed in the Seed Saver’s Exchange Yearbook. “They have become known as heirlooms because the seeds have been saved and passed down from generation to generation,” Master Gardener Karen Cooper Greenwald writes on the website. “The most accepted definition of an heirloom tomato is that it must be ‘open pollinated,’ and have been grown for at least 50 years, or introduced before 1940.”
Open pollination is basically when “pollination occurs by insect, bird, wind, humans, or other natural mechanisms,” according to seedsavers.org. “Open pollinated plants are more genetically diverse. This can cause a greater amount of variation within plant populations, which allows plants to slowly adapt to local growing conditions and climate from year-to-year.”
Heirloom seeds are often saved each year and used for the next year’s planting. The same rules apply to any heirloom vegetable—including garlic, although the definition changes slightly depending on who’s doing the talking. Jacob Grant of Roots Organic Farm, also in the Santa Ynez Valley, said: “the actual definition of heirloom is grown by one family for three generations of farmers … often you have to stay diligent if you want things to stay the same.”
But one thing is synonymously the same with the foodie world: “The word heirloom does imply better tasting,” Grant, who grows between 15 and 25 heirloom tomato varieties and a handful of other heirloom vegetables, said.
Because heirlooms are open-pollinated, they can and will change: say if two different kinds of tomatoes are planted near one another, or if something blows in on the wind. And an heirloom’s characteristics can change if it’s taken from one climate and thrust into another one.
On 40 acres of land off Mora Avenue, Grant faced west, toward the rolling hills and a lone oak tree. Strawberries, tomatoes, and peppers lined out to the north. Horses whinnied on the property next door, and the spray of distant sprinklers mixed with the dust kicked up by the wind. Directly in front of him, an Italian variety of heirloom broccoli mingled with an assortment of weeds. It looks like commercial broccoli, but the crowns are comparatively tiny, and it grows on a stalk that resembles flat-leaf kale. It’s a tricky sale at the farmers’ markets he goes to.
“It’s a cultural thing; I think that people don’t understand how to cook with it,” Grant said, adding that it’s delicious, and everything that shoots off the stalk is edible—both the leaves and the crowns.
Grant isn’t a rigid heirloom farmer and also grows hybrid varieties on his sun-gorged parcel. For him, it’s all about flavor, what tastes best coupled with what grows well in the Santa Ynez Valley.
“Flavor isn’t only genetic. Flavor is also cultural, which is how you grow what you grow,” he said, describing himself as a lazy farmer. He lets his organically produced fruits and veggies manifest naturally the way they need to—insects, weeds, stresses, and all. “I just feel like the plants, they’ll take care of it.”
With most of the produce he sells, if he wants it to remain true to the genetics that give it the best flavor, he doesn’t save the seeds but purchases them from a seed company.
However, sometimes the produce he wants to grow isn’t easy to find in seed form anymore. Ten years ago, Grant got a handful of strangely colored beans from a guy in Pennsylvania. Those seeds were blue shackamaxon, a bean traditionally grown by the Lenape tribe that once inhabited the area near present-day Philadelphia, according to athinkingstomach.com.
“It’s, like, very blue,” Grant said.
The pods are a reddish color, and as the beans mature, they go from blue-blue to blackish-blue. Because, he can’t really find them for purchase anymore, he has to grow his shackamaxon patch far from the other beans he farms, in an attempt to keep them true to origin. He sells some and saves the rest for the future.
Educated buyers
Since 2002, Roots Organic has sold produce almost exclusively at farmers’ markets in Southern Santa Barbara County. Grant has some restaurants he caters to but is adamant that farmers’ markets are the way to go. He calls it truck farming.
“You grow a certain amount, and you get retail for it,” he said.
Roots cuts out the middleman and the supermarket, going straight to the customers, and that premium he gets enables him to farm his way. He’s always harvesting things and always planting things, farming 20 acres at any given time, tilling under the remains on other acreage and letting it seep nutrients into the soil. He likens it to the way someone would garden.
“This idea of growing 5 acres or so in a field the same way you would in a backyard,” he said. Rows of teeny green and purple shoots of lettuce pop out of the soil across from strawberries and peppers, next to barren soil that eventually gives way to corn. That variety is what he has to—and wants to—grow in order to be successful at the farmers’ markets. “A biologically diverse field, which most of the time works out in my favor, you know bugs eating bugs instead of bugs eating plants.”
The buyers who stop by his stand each week are the same consumers who enable guys like him and garlic guru Palmer to bring in the heirloom crazies that modern eaters aren’t used to seeing—or necessarily paying for—at Vons. Grant said one of his best sellers is an Italian heirloom zucchini called costata Romanesco. But it wasn’t always that way.
“Tomatoes are a sure sell,” he said. “The other stuff takes some work, and farmers’ markets are great because I’m selling to the same people every week, so I can educate them.”
Now, customers buy twice as much costata as they do the other three zucchinis Roots sells combined.
“It’s just one of those things that people tried it and realized it’s better than any other zucchini,” he said.
Similarly, Palmer’s built up a following at his garlic stand in downtown Los Olivos. He sets up a tent every summer in the vacant lot on the left as you drive past Carhartt Winery on Grand Avenue. His summers start with a music- and food-filled garlic festival in late May. This year, Palmer said the pickings were unfortunately slim. He didn’t have as much garlic as he normally does, but what he did have was carted away by customers from Carpinteria, Santa Barbara, and LA, at the sum of between $15 and $20 a pound. Those prices seem astronomical, considering commercial garlic usually sells at two for a dollar in most supermarkets, but the taste of Palmer’s garlic is quite possibly priceless.
So far this summer, Palmer’s only opened his stand a couple hours on either Saturday or Sunday, because the little garlic his ground has given him sells like gourmet food will in a town like Los Olivos.
Palmer and Grant count themselves among the lucky for getting into a gourmet, niche business right as food and farmers’ markets started to take off. And if there’s anything both farmers understand more than what they grow, it’s that variety breeds life.
“Once they’re [heirlooms] gone, they’re friggin’ gone; there’s no bringing it back,” Palmer said. “We’ve got to keep the diversity in the world.”
Interim Editor Camillia Lanham can be reached at clanham@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jun 11-18, 2015.
