The Secret Ingredient: Garlic
"You're always like, there's no way it's going to grow, and then it grows"
We always have something amazing to eat and carry home huge shopping bags of tomatoes or kale when we visit Vic and her family just outside of Hudson. They moved from Brooklyn a few years ago to a large property with fields and forests, where they live in an extremely cool shipping container home. Her idea for the space is a project called Fieldmakers — an educational farm stay with a focus on homestead practices. For now, they’ve got a big vegetable garden, some chickens, and knowledge of the best spots for ramps and morels foraging in the spring.
Vic: The thing I get most excited about growing is garlic. It's an offseason crop. You're burnt out at the end of the summer, you’re harvesting and there’s constant mowing and composting, so it's exciting to think about planting something that will do work over the winter. You're always like, There's no way it's going to grow, and then it grows.
There's so many uses for garlic. I pull it early, and it's a green garlic bulb — almost like an oversized scallion that tastes like garlic. And then the scapes are a shoot, it's basically like the plant almost bolting. Once the scape has two curlicues on top, that's when you cut it. You have to cut it because the plant takes energy to create that scape and once you cut it off, all the energy goes back into creating the garlic bulb. So after you cut it, you wait two weeks, and then the plant starts to die. It gets brown on the leaves and that's when you know to harvest the garlic.
I would have never known how to grow it if my mom didn't do it first. My parents have always loved garlic — like when they get pizza they get it with garlic and then they make more garlic and put it on top. So then they started growing it and I was fascinated. When we moved up here that was the first thing I wanted to do.
Kate: You parents grew a lot of food when you were growing up, right? Do you know how they came to that, was it something they grew up with too?
V: No, neither of them grew up farming, but my mom lived up near Ithaca on a farm with her first husband. She was just a big hippie and learned everything through Mother Earth and worked at a food co-op. She got a divorce and moved back to New Jersey and she and my dad found this old farm and my mom wanted to do it again. So they just kind of figured it out, all self taught.
We had a lot of sheep and ducks and chickens and my chore was giving them grain and making sure they had water. So I remember the livestock more than I do the actual gardening. But I ate beet greens and other things that maybe other kids didn't eat growing up. I remember, like, our house was full of plants, but I would go over to friends’ houses with bigger plants and say, Their plants are so much nicer than ours, and my mom was like, They’re fake. You always want what you don’t have, but I felt like I lived in a totally different country from everyone else. It felt really far away from the suburbs.
I became a vegetarian when I was 16. I loved animals, I couldn’t imagine eating them, and I think that’s why I was drawn to livestock. I didn’t get into helping my mom with the garden until college. I wasn’t really interested in how things grew when I was a teenager. Then I left for school and realized how unique the situation was that I grew up in. I started coming home and asking my mom to show me stuff, and she would teach me on a touch-and-go basis. Then when I was living in the city, I really missed the land and I’d go back all the time. I think the reason I lasted in Brooklyn for so long was because I had the farm an hour away.
I started Llama Mama Good Farm with my mom when I was like 30. What happened was my mom's friend got diagnosed with lung cancer. My mom stepped in and was like, I want you to live, I want to start helping you but she didn’t know what to do. So we started looking into all these healing diets that could, you know, quote, unquote, reverse cancer or whatever. But at that point, I think my mom's friend had six months to live, and she ended up living like a year and a half. And my mom would go over there every other day and juice for her. Juicing is just the fastest way to get the most nutrients into your body in a day. You need whole bunches of kale in order to get one green juice, it takes a lot. So we decided to grow anti-cancer foods, like all these dark leafy greens.
When we started Llama Mama Good Farm, it was all donation-based baskets to people suffering from autoimmune diseases. We had another person who had lupus and another person that had Hashimoto’s and everybody said the same thing: I feel my best when I'm eating really good, nutrient-rich organic food. So we would just provide it to them for free. We would do same day picking so we would literally pick kale, like, 20 minutes before they arrived. That’s when it has the most nutrients in it that it ever will.
Then we actually had trouble finding people to donate to, but a lot of people wanted to buy produce in the area. So we started offering baskets for sale, and we would do these gigantic baskets for $40, filled to the brim. We did that for eight years. My mom would teach me her knowledge about how to grow food and I would teach her some things too, because I was researching it. There were all these local farmers and younger farmers that I started following in New Jersey, and on the internet. I would look at YouTube videos and stuff. And there were these small scale seed catalogs that always had grow tips. I just wanted to be experimental. I was like, Let's grow ginger, or Let’s try fennel or carrots.
K: So when you were living in Brooklyn and doing all that, did you start dreaming about having your own land?
V: I got really into Brooklyn Grange, I got a tour of the garden up there and it was so amazing. But you know, it's not easy. You're literally creating gardens on roofs, it’s a very expensive way to go about growing. But I started a rooftop garden on our building, which was fun, and our neighbors liked it. But I would come upstate and want to stay on a farm and have an agritourism experience and it was really hard to find that. So that’s what I want Fieldmakers to be. I want it to be an agritourism spot where you can come and learn about growing food. Not because you're going to become a farmer and not even that you’re going to go home and pot a windowsill plant, just that you want to know what it entails and how it happens.
K: Yeah, when we’re looking for an Airbnb, we like to stay on farms so that we can see the animals, but I feel like it’s never about teaching you.
V: Yeah, it’s just a novelty, like Play with goats!
The goal was always for it to be a farm and forage concept. I didn't really know anything about foraging, I’d never done it. But when we moved up here I found some ramps in the forest and I really dove headfirst into foraging. There’s Columbia Cornell Extension up here and they offer all these workshops — they have a foraging one, they have a maple syrup-making one, and I would go to all of them. I downloaded a bunch of books and apps and just went into the woods. It was Covid, so what else am I going to do? I just started learning. Following local foraging people up here and seeing what they were posting about. And it's amazing, the woods are amazing. I can't believe it.
I would love for people to have the experience where they can come up and learn about seasonal foraging and seasonal farming and just how the whole ecosystem works. Bringing that into people’s lives, being immersed in nature, spending a day getting your hands dirty or taking a walk in the woods, finding some interesting mushrooms or something. We want to have bees and maple tapping. I’m like, there’s got to be other people who think that’s cool, right?
K: Can you tell me more about the farming you’re doing here?
V: We have some tricky soil. Soil in general needs a lot of amendment and a lot of time. The interesting thing about mushrooms and things that grow in the woods is that any kind of tillage that happens is natural, like an animal's hops or a tree falling or wind blowing spores around. But with manmade farming, when you till land you’re releasing carbon into the air. In order to amend soil, to get it really where it should be, it requires a lot of turning over and incorporating compost and nutrients and repeating and repeating. The interesting thing about no-till is that you don't really have to do any of that, you can just grow on top of land. You lay cardboard and all this compost down and then make compost too. And all of the green and brown waste from the garden and everything else creates more dirt for you to reestablish into your ground to grow more food. It’s kind of like raised beds, they’re totally enclosed within their own space. So they drain really well. You can grow anything in there and then at the end of the season, you amend it, you put down lime and compost, you incorporate it with bone meal or oyster shells and then you just cover it up and let it rest. And then in the spring you amend it again, because plants take everything out of the soil, so you have to keep reestablishing it with nutrients.
So this year we tilled and laid compost down in these big hills, kind of like raised beds on the ground and I planted the garlic in the compost. It’s kind of like a cheat no-till method. I think they'll come out better, because now I have more drainage because it's above ground. And I was able to plant them outside the garden because animals don't really want to eat it, so I did a lot more.
K: So what are you going to do with all this garlic?
Hopefully I can sell some and then I’ll seed save. It’s kind of expensive to buy seeds, I think like a dollar a bulb. What you do is when you harvest garlic, you save all the biggest cloves, and you put them in a pile for seed. And then you plant those so that the next year you have the biggest best chance. And you eat the smaller ones.
For the first time this year I made chili crisp. And I’m actually growing shallots this year too. So it's like shallots, garlic, pepper flakes, and the ginger that we grew here. I have none left because we devoured it. Besides that, I just roast garlic in olive oil and dip bread into it. It’s like the best thing ever. I guess you’ve got to really like garlic.
What I’m Cooking
Kale sauce over crispy potatoes and raw asparagus (v, gf)
A highly versatile and pretty healthy sauce that you can eat with pasta, or eggs, or on a pizza, or really anywhere you want a sauce. I put it together with potatoes, asparagus, and pickled onion because a mess of veggies with potatoes is one of my favorite templates for dinner. The asparagus at the farmer’s market right now is worth eating raw; taste it, and if you disagree, you can always roast it and then use it the same way.
Recipe for paid subscribers:
I found this interview entertaining and informative – it also touched my memory circuits and rewired things about my own life I haven’t thought about in years. I just loved the connection made between food, nature and health – that touches me deeply!
And in another dimension…garlic has also had a huge influence in my professional cooking career. One amazing memory comes from my time in Italy and learning something very, very important – Italians love the taste of garlic, but it must be subtle or treated in a way that is easy to digest! That changed the way I thought about garlic and how I use this amazing ingredient.
Finally…thanks for this entertaining newsletter.