Rutkowski Farm

Our online store is open for 2010.  Just a couple of notes.  If you’re buying locally, you can use the cart as a rule of thumb, but because I can’t combine discounts (ie free shipping and a local discount) I have to ask you to contact us.  This will make it easier to arrange pickup/etc anyhow.

The other note for you out of towners is regarding shipping.  Basically the price of shipping is built into the cost of the garlic over 10 pounds.  Before that each pound of garlic brings down your shipping cost. It’s complicated, but it works.

Any questions…ask.

I sometimes forget that building an internet presence means maintaining an internet presence.  What I’m referring to is the fact that I need to update the store portion of the site.  The garlic harvest is, in fact, in and it’s time to start taking orders.  Part of that process is making sure I have enough set aside for the two garlic festivals that we’ll be attending as well as enough to sell online.

Last year, I didn’t really get a handle on it until very late in the year.

This year, I’ve had a couple of inquiries locally that referenced our page and asked if we were sold out.  Not yet!

So, as soon as I finish this post, I’m off

to update that.

In the meantime, I need to remind folks that we’ll be attending both the 15th Annual Southern Vermont Garlic & Herb Festival in Bennington, VT Sept 4th and 5th and the Hudson Valley Garlic Festival in Saugerties, NY on Sept 25th and 26th.

If you can make either of these events, they’re both a great time and you won’t leave either without eating a lot of garlic.  We hope to see you at either!

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!