Garlic Day 2010 at Charman Farms

This beautiful bundle of Tibetan garlic is my favourite souvenir from last Sunday’s Garlic Day at Charman Farms.  The cloves are huge, and the garlic is STRONG, pungent & spicy.  But the best thing about this year’s Tibetan crop is it’s nutty finish.  The longer it sits in your mouth, the nuttier it gets.  And when you’re a garlic nut, that’s a very good thing.

I volunteered to join the Charman Farms’ brigade for the day — headed up by the grower, Dan Charman (pictured below), our ragtag crew included Dan’s wife Susan, island friends, off-island relatives (from as far as India), and unsuspecting weekend house guests who thought they were just going for a farm tour and ended up cleaning garlic for 4 hours…but it’s all hands on deck at harvest time, and it’s such a fun day spent in the forest at the top of the hill that the time passes before you know it.

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I learned all sorts of things about all sorts of people standing around this table for a few hours with this happy group.  And with all the chatting we still managed to keep the dozen or so varieties of garlic in some sort of order.  (Honest Dan!)

See that big pile of garlic skins in the background?  I became fixated on making garlic paper from the moment I saw it.  So much paper!  Of course, I’ve never made paper, and I have only a vague idea of the work involved, but doesn’t it sound like a great idea?  In my dreams, I imagine it to be like Egyptian papyrus.

Fortunately, I have learned — with age — to allow these hare-brained schemes to “ferment” in my head before speaking them aloud to anyone, thereby committing myself to taking home — in this case — bags of garlic paper to sit in our basement alongside all the other great ideas gathering dust and pests until I finally decide to compost them myself.

So I dreamed of making garlic paper for the time I was there, until it came time to go home, at which point I was far too tired to contemplate scooping up anything other than myself.  And since I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, I didn’t have to lame out and admit that maybe it wasn’t such a realistic idea after all.

With age comes wisdom, that’s all I have to say.

I also hung around the tasting table answering any questions that the crowd had.  This resulted in me tasting a lot of raw garlic very early in the day, which, in turn, resulted in a bit of stomach upset.  But did I complain?  Did I quit?  Are you kidding me?  I was a member of the garlic brigade for the day.  Quitting is not an option when the hordes of gourmet garlic fans descend.

So I quickly munched down a couple of pieces of bread and downed some water with a bit of lemon squeezed in, and got back to work.  Actually, first Susan fed me a couple of her mother’s famous brownies, and then I got back to work — a layer of chocolate and butter fortifying my delicate constitution against the perils of raw garlic.

For those interested, this year’s crop included the following varieties of garlic:

• Spanish Roja
• Thai
• Korean
• Yugoslavian
• White Russian
• Red Russian
• Tibetan
• Rose D’Valour
• Red Austrian…and a few more I didn’t manage to get pictures of.

Thanks to Dan and Susan for a wonderful day.  They sent me home packing more artisanal garlic that one person should be lucky enough to have in a lifetime, never mind one year.

Needless to say, you’ll be seeing some garlic recipes around here very soon.