MARKET REPORT - MAY 25TH, 2016

Scape Walking into town"I got the blues so bad one time it put my face in a permanent frownYou know, I'm feelin' so much better I could cakewalk into town"  Taj Mahal It's 1990.  I'm planting garlic at my farm on Saltspring.  Lots.  In the spring a gal farther up the island will plant hundreds of row feet of basil.  In the late summer, the pesto-fest happens, and my old Champion juicer is grinding olive oil, garlic, pine nuts and fragrant basil together, which will get frozen in dozens of yogurt containers for a year-long supply of homemade pesto. I love garlic, and really like growing it and I have for 15 of the last 25 years.  In 2002 I'm planting garlic again, at Edenvale, with Stefan, our farm in Abbotsford.  Now, 25 years later I'm still at it, this time in Ruskin, an hour east of Vancouver, and my little patch has grown to 1/3 of an acre this year as I replant the entire crop every year to expand my production.  And I still love growing garlic - except for one part, and even though there is a little joy in getting one-on-one with every one of thousands of plants, scape-walking is really unpleasant.There are 2 types of garlic - soft neck grows in warmer climates like southern China and Mexico and it doesn't have a central hard stalk or produce a scape. We do grow some softneck here that have adapted to our climate – and those varieties do produce a scape.  Hard neck garlic is grown in Chile and across Northern and Eastern Europe, Russia, Canada and the northern U.S.  It produces a scape, the stringy, curly future flower stalk that every garlic grower tries to sell you right about now.  The plant sends up the scape, (a message from its little garlic brain) to produce seeds - and they emerge, grow a foot long and curl in a matter of just 3 days.  You can nearly watch them grow it's so fast. The scape over time unravels into a long upright woody stalk, a couple of feet high, and eventually produces a big flower-head on top. That has a row of mini-cloves on the outer edge, surrounding a central seed head that will ultimately produce tiny seeds.  The little ‘cloveulettes’, about the size of a pea, spill out of the flower, some of which will turn into mini-garlic plants, and the seeds would eventually fall, producing a crop of tiny garlic.  But we castrate the scapes as soon as they curl, so the plant, having lost two different forms of reproduction now has to rely on its final fallback position and that is to produce a bulb in the ground, where each clove will grow into a plant. (If we didn’t harvest it first.)  What perseverance!   If, as garlic producers, we didn't cut the scape, there would still be a bulb in the ground, but much smaller, which we don't want, and every day each scape is left to grow is a day that the bulb is forming with much less vigour.So that's the background to scape-walking.  Every plant decides when to send up its scape - sometimes two weeks later than its buddies around it, and every variety has its own schedule as well.  The sunnier end of the row also sees earlier scapes.  So you may be snapping off scapes for up to 3 weeks.  And I mostly hate it, as does every garlic grower I know.  First, there's the stance - to cut scapes you have to lean over at a 45 degree angle for hours and hours, and I don't need to tell you how uncomfortable that is, and you can guess how sore your back gets. I have about 15 rows of garlic - 4 plants wide and 150 feet long.  About 12,000 plants this year.  After a week or two of a throbbing lower back, I really don't want to be reaching out across a 3 foot bed, so I only look at one side of the bed – the one closest to me on my daily scape walk, de-scaping on the other side of the row as I stroll the next aisle.  And every day, on my scape-walk I walk those rows in the opposite direction as the day before, because scapes hide behind leaves, and you can walk past one quite easily, while the next day, walking north instead of south, they are totally obvious.  You start to wonder if you are getting them all that day, because as you are walking row 10, you look over at row 9, which you just finished, and sight a big ol' well-hidden scape that you've missed maybe 5 times this week.  The walking isn't that bad, (and walking both sides of every one of 15 rows multiplied by 150 feet adds up to over 1/2 a mile.)  And you are communing with all your plants, pulling out the stray weed, checking for leaks in the drip tape etc., so there are other purposes.The first scape harvest is harder on your back, but easier in some ways, because about 50% of scapes of the same variety will all come on at once.  And if you are selling them, you can put together a reasonably good sized harvest with that first cut.  But after that, it becomes quite un-rewarding - 10 days later you may only find 5 or 10 in a row after you've walked it daily.  But that would be 5 or 10 plants that are going to produce a much smaller bulb.It's really difficult trying to focus on finding that stray curly scape.  With all that staring, and the bright sun, dark earth, green foliage and a mostly green scape I get sea-sick.  My eyes get sore.  I get a headache.  I take a breather and stare into the distance to give my eyes a rest, but I get really dizzy at the same time.  I can't think of an analogy to anything you might do that requires so much concentration so you can relate to this.  Trust me, it's just nauseating, and I kind of dread it every day.  I start to daydream as I stroll at a slug-like pace, lose my focus, start walking faster, give myself crap and wonder how many I've missed.  And at the end of my scape-walking this year, it's going to add up to 8 miles of slow walking and staring and focusing, and pain and sore eyes, headache and an upset stomach.  But when that’s over, I have a break before I harvest, then trim off the roots and most of the stalk, hang all those plants to cure in about 1,000 bundles, then spend 30-40 hours in October in front of the TV breaking up all the bulbs into cloves and separating them by size, and then spend days and days on my knees planting cloves several inches into the mud on cold, rainy days in November with frozen fingers.  But I still really love growing garlic!And if anyone dare complain about the price of BC garlic, send them my way.About 5 years ago I visited Roberto Quintana outside Mexicali who produces about 30 acres of garlic.  Like me, he also does it by himself.  He has a machine that breaks the seed garlic into cloves (a nifty trick I think).  The cloves are loaded in a hopper, and he has another tractor-pulled garlic planter that literally shoots the garlic into beds.  Some will go in right side up, some not, and garlic likes to be planted butt down and point up, so he loses some sizing.  He has a huge pivot irrigation system that just winds around the field 24/7, soaking bed after bed as it goes by, and because his ‘dirt’ is nearly all Sonoran Desert sand, he has very few weeds.  At about this time in the year, or a bit earlier, he runs his harvester across the field, which pulls the garlic out, and tops it as it goes into the hopper.  Back at his shed the garlic is run over a sizer which separates jumbo, X Jumbo and Colossal.  Anything smaller gets tossed or goes to a processor.  He keeps 20% of his larger garlic for planting next year, palletizes the rest, and trucks it to L.A.  Oh, he has some help packing, but the rest is a one-man job, and if anyone complains about how cheap Mexican or Chinese garlic is – well, now you know.further reading: Why is BC garlic so darn good!