Rutkowski Farm

So the Saratoga County Fair was last week.  Again, we entered our blueberries and garlic.  We took the blue ribbon for both. And this year we actually had competition in the blueberry category.  Yay!  Proof in pictures.

Last week I took off from my desk job to work on the garlic harvest.  It’s hot and slow work, but as with all farm tasks there’s a profound sense of accomplishment when it’s complete.  There are also some great surprises along the way.  The spider in the gallery below was the coolest one!

This year, we got some help from college student Stephanie (pictured below) with pulling the garlic.  As with every year I learned a few things this year.  I already knew this, but I need to change my some of my harvest dates for the garlic depending on the variety.  Doing this will make the process easier and will result in better keeping garlic.  The harvest this year was complicated a bit by the rain we got just about every day last week.  For the most part, the rain was contained to short events, so I was able to work around it.

I have my list of projects for next year’s harvest, not the least of which is a new hanging method.  My wrist is killing me from all that staple gun work.

To the left is a hazy picture (thank you cell phone) of garlic chips that were dehydrated for about 18 hours at 120°F.  I’ve made several batches over the winter, but this particular batch is a bit of a breakthrough for me.  This go around I tried to see if I could cut down the processing time in a significant way.  Past batches have taken me hours and hours to process because I spent a LOT of time shelling the garlic prior to drying.

In the past, I more or less followed the path set out by Herrick Kimball.  His book on making garlic powder is great and there are purportedly only a few left directly from him.  But I’m never content with set processes and usually feel the need to tinker around the edges.  One big problem I had with his process was that my dehydrator does not have deep enough trayspace to accommodate whole heads like he uses for his initial drying step.  I tried various things including soaking the cloves in hot water for 2 minutes to loosen the sheath.  That was messy and probably only marginally faster.  Another issue I had was the slicing blade on my food processor.  Simply put, I found it didn’t make a clean slice.  Some of the garlic got pulped and a lot got stuck in funny places inside the food processor.  I used a knife instead.  This slowed things down significantly.

Last night that all changed.  I decided to make a small batch with some of my remaining (halfway decent) garlic.  Yeah..I’m finding it pretty incredible that I still have garlic that’s ok at this point of the year, but it gives me something to experiment with.  So what did I do?

1. I bought one of these at A Different Drummer’s Kitchen in Albany.   This was a case where I knew exactly what I wanted, but had my doubts as to whether someone made it.  In this case a strawberry slicer makes a fine garlic slicer.  This sped things up significantly.  I did find that it worked better with smaller cloves which solves another problem for me.  I never quite know what to do with all of the smaller stock that comes out of the field.  I’d always prefer to sell the bigger stuff which means I tend to end up with a bunch of small stuff at the end of the season.
2. I didn’t bother to remove the shell of the garlic.  It all went in the dehydrator with the garlic.   I’ve been reading The Contrary Farmer by Gene Logsdon.  This guy is my new hero.  A lot of his wisdom comes down to keeping things small, simple and smart.  In my case, I asked myself why I was removing the shell.  There’s a perfectly good (and much faster) process called winnowing that has been used for centuries for this exact task.  So once it was all dry, I took 2 large bowls and poured it from one to the other in front of a window fan I set up on my porch.  And yep. It worked and probably took me 1/100th of the time it would have taken to pull the shell off of each clove.

Now there is one step I will do the next time around and that’s cutting off the bottoms of the cloves.  I skipped it as a time saving measure, but I think that it should be added back in.

In any case, I think it was a success!

Completely unrelated hazy pic. The garlic field from 4-20

Today I planted a 300 foot row of onions  (all the gory details are here).  You may ask…what is he thinking. Yeah, I don’t know.  Last year was, to a degree, a failure (with a fair amount of success mixed in).  I didn’t really know what it would mean to have a little one running around, and despite all of the public pronouncements about scaling back, I probably planted as much as I did other years.  The primary difference this past year was that we didn’t engage our friends for help and also lost Kathleen as a dedicated farmhand altogether.  She’s a great mom, and I have no doubt that we will involve our little guy in the fun as soon as this summer.  Still, there will probably be only one person working at a time.

The best way to approach all of this may be to build resolutions, so here goes.

• Spend more time with family.
• Work smarter, not harder
• Get ahead of the weeds.
• Trick Engage friends for help.
• Be generous with those friends.
• Constantly re-evaluate what is working, what isn’t.
• Put up a hoop house.