The Complete Guide to Basaltic Farms Organic Seed Garlic

I’ve been growing certified organic seed garlic in McArthur, California for going on eight years now and I’ll tell you something most farm blogs won’t say. Year after year we do a little better but we’re also only one fatal mistake away from failure. That’s not pessimism it’s just the math of small organic farming in America right now. Farming is dying in this country and every farmer I know is some version of holding on while hoping next year is the year things finally click.

I love this work, so I keep doing it.

This guide is the one place I’ve tried to put everything I’ve learned about our farm, our garlic and how to do right by both and that means the growing, buying, storing, cooking and the whole year-round cycle. All of it in honest terms. No marketing language. No “premium this” or “world-class that.” Just what’s actually true about this crop and how we grow it in the volcanic soil of the Fall River Valley and what I’ve learned from getting plenty of it wrong along the way.

What Makes Basaltic Farms Different

There’s a lot of organic farms out there and most of them are doing honest work. I’m not here to knock any of them. But when we started Basaltic Farms I had to figure out how a small operation in northern California was going to stand out from the established names and the larger companies that had been doing this for years before us. Places like Keene Organics had a head start we couldn’t undo. So we had to find a different way to compete and that way turned out to be certification stacked on certification stacked on genuine practice.

We’re certified organic by three separate agencies. CCOF. USDA Organic. Real Organic Project. Each one has similar standards on paper but they audit different things and they push on different weak points in the operation. Holding all three means we’re not just meeting the floor of any single program, we’re meeting the floor of all three and the overlap is where the real discipline happens. If one certifier gets complacent about a practice, the other two usually don’t.

But triple certification is still just certification. It tells you we followed the rules. It doesn’t tell you how we farm when nobody’s looking. That’s where regenerative agriculture comes in and it’s honestly where I think organic farming is heading whether the certifiers catch up or not. Most organic operations are still farming conventionally with organic-approved inputs. Same tillage, same monocropping, same soil mining, just with compliant sprays. What we do is different. We build soil instead of depleting it. We cover crop aggressively. We compost everything we can. We treat the field like a living system instead of a production surface and over time the soil itself gets better every year instead of worse.

The basalt under our feet is part of that story too. The farm sits on eroded volcanic rock and the bluff that borders the field is literally a 200-foot cliff of it. That parent material feeds the soil in ways most farmland doesn’t, and when you combine that with the regenerative practices on top, the garlic gets something you can actually taste. I’m not going to promise miracles. I’m just going to tell you that every year the crop gets a little better and we think that’s because we’re working with the land instead of against it.

Understanding Garlic: The Taxonomy Most People Miss

Garlic is not one thing. This is probably the single most important thing I can tell you before we go any further and it’s the thing most customers get wrong. When somebody says “garlic” they usually mean whatever they saw last at the grocery store which is almost always a generic softneck variety grown in China or California. That’s one type of garlic out of dozens that grow in serious cultivation around the world and they are not interchangeable.

All cultivated garlic is Allium sativum and it splits into two broad categories. Hardneck garlic produces a rigid flowering stalk called a scape and a single ring of cloves around that stalk. Softneck garlic has no stalk, produces multiple layers of smaller cloves and can be braided because the neck stays pliable after curing. That’s the first split and it matters because hardneck and softneck want different climates, store for different lengths of time and taste completely different on the plate.

But that’s just the start. Each category breaks down further into subgroups and the subgroups are where the real character lives.

Hardneck splits into three main subgroups. Porcelain varieties like Music produce large bulbs with four to six massive cloves and tend to have the most intense garlic flavor. Purple Stripe varieties like Chesnok Red have colorful skins and a sweeter more complex flavor profile when eaten raw. Rocambole varieties are known for the richest flavor of all but they have thinner papers and don’t store as long, which is why we don’t currently grow them for seed.

Softneck splits into two main subgroups that most growers will encounter. Artichoke varieties like Inchelium Red, Susanville, Sicilian Artichoke and Red Toch produce large bulbs with multiple layers of cloves and store for eight to ten months under good conditions. Silverskin varieties tend to store even longer but produce smaller bulbs with tighter cloves, which is why they’re favored for commercial softneck production and long-term storage.

Then you have the outliers. Asiatic and Turban garlics are technically their own subgroups with distinct genetics, faster growth cycles and specific vernalization needs that most growers don’t encounter unless they’re sourcing from specialty farms. We grow Korean Mountain (an Asiatic) and Thai Purple (a Turban) and we’re offering both in limited quantities this season. If you’ve ever tried to source either of these, you already know how hard it is. Most sellers who carry them cap their orders at a pound or two per customer, which is barely enough for a serious home grower and nowhere near enough for anyone planting at any real scale. We’re not under those kinds of limits but we’re also not going to pretend we have unlimited supply.

The reason all this matters to you as a grower or a buyer is simple. The variety you choose determines your climate requirements, your storage window, your flavor profile and your planting strategy. Asking “what’s the best garlic” is like asking “what’s the best dog.” It depends entirely on what you want it to do.

Our Varieties and Who They’re For

We currently grow six varieties for bulk seed sales and two more in limited quantities for growers who want something uncommon. Each one earns its place in our lineup for a different reason and each one suits a different type of grower.

One thing worth saying up front before you read the flavor descriptions below. The distinct flavor profiles of different garlic varieties only really show up when you eat them raw. Once you apply heat, the varieties start to taste a lot more similar to each other and most of the heat dissipates entirely. This isn’t specific to our garlic — it’s true of garlic as a crop. If you want to taste the actual differences between a Music and a Chesnok Red or between Red Toch and Sicilian Artichoke, you need to try them raw. Sliced thin on bread. Rubbed on toast. Cut into a fresh salsa or a raw dressing. That’s where the character of each variety lives. Cooked garlic is still great but cooked garlic is mostly just garlic.

Music — Hardneck Porcelain

Music garlic is the variety most people picture when they think “good hardneck.” Bulbs are large and uniform with four to six massive cloves arranged around the central stalk. Raw, Music has the most intense and classic flavor in our lineup — the sharp, hot garlic bite people associate with serious garlic. Music stores well for a hardneck, usually five to seven months under proper conditions, and the bulbs are dramatic enough that growers selling at farmers markets tend to sell them on looks alone. If you want one variety that does everything a hardneck should do, this is it.

Chesnok Red — Hardneck Purple Stripe

Chesnok Red carries eight to twelve cloves under striking purple-striped papers. Raw, it’s sweeter and more complex than Music with layered notes that come through when you slice it thin and eat it on something simple. Roasted, it stays ahead of the pack too — all roasted garlic gets sweet and nutty, but Chesnok’s high natural sugar content makes it roast sweeter than most other varieties, which is part of why I think it tends to do well in flavor competitions. Storage is comparable to Music. Good choice for a grower who takes the time to actually taste their garlic and who wants a variety that performs on both sides of the heat line.

Inchelium Red — Softneck Artichoke

Inchelium Red came out of the Colville Indian Reservation in Washington State and it’s still one of the best softnecks in serious cultivation anywhere in North America. Bulbs are large with multiple layers of cloves. Raw, the flavor is mild enough that people who find hardneck varieties too aggressive tend to love it. Storage runs eight to ten months under good conditions which makes it practical for anyone who wants garlic on the shelf well into the following spring. A good everyday variety.

Susanville — Softneck Artichoke

Susanville is likely named for the town of Susanville, California, about ninety miles east of our farm, though the exact origin isn’t documented. It performs well in California growing conditions and produces large bulbs with good clove counts and a medium-intensity raw flavor that sits between Inchelium and the more pungent softnecks. Storage is strong at eight to ten months. If you’re growing in a similar climate to ours Susanville is a variety that tends to just work without a lot of fuss.

Sicilian Artichoke — Softneck Artichoke

Sicilian Artichoke traces back to Mediterranean heritage and raw it brings a gentler, more aromatic profile than most softnecks. Bulbs tend to be medium-large with tight clove layering. The flavor works especially well in raw applications like fresh pasta toppings, marinades, anything where you want garlic presence without overpowering heat. Storage is strong, typically eight to ten months.

Red Toch — Softneck Artichoke

Red Toch is from the town of Tochliavri in the Republic of Georgia and it’s widely considered one of the best-tasting softnecks available. Raw, it’s mild, sweet and almost buttery — a completely different experience from the sharper hardnecks. Bulbs store extremely well, often pushing past the typical ten-month window when cured and held properly. Red Toch is the variety I point culinary customers toward when they ask me what to use for everyday kitchen work.

The limited-availability varieties

We grow two additional varieties that won’t appear on the bulk pricing page — not because we’re trying to keep them scarce, but because we genuinely don’t have enough seed to sell in real quantity yet. We started with about a pound of Thai Purple and half a pound of Korean Mountain four years ago and this season is the first one where we’ve built up enough stock to offer either of them for sale at all. The hope is that in another year or two we’ll have real quantities available and can list both on the bulk pricing page alongside everything else.

If you’ve ever tried to source either of these before you already know how restricted the market is. Most sellers who carry them cap their orders at a pound or two per customer, which isn’t enough for a serious home grower and nowhere near enough for anyone planting at scale. We’re not under those kinds of limits but we’re also not going to pretend we have unlimited supply.

Korean Mountain — Asiatic

Korean Mountain is an Asiatic variety, which puts it in a different growth category from the hardnecks and softnecks above. Asiatics have distinct genetics, faster growth cycles and specific vernalization behavior that most growers never encounter. Expect about six to eight bulbs per pound. If you’ve been looking for an Asiatic in any real quantity this season is likely your best shot.

Thai Purple — Turban

Thai Purple is a Turban variety with similar bulb-per-pound counts to Korean Mountain. Raw, the flavor leans sulfury and pungent in the best possible way — the kind of heat that announces itself in a dish without needing to dominate it. Turbans have their own growth quirks that separate them from standard hardneck and softneck culture. Limited availability this season.

Buying Seed Garlic: What Actually Matters

If you’re reading this you’re probably thinking about buying seed garlic for this season’s fall planting and I want to save you some of the trouble I’ve had. Good seed garlic is not the same thing as cheap seed garlic, and cheap seed garlic is where most of the real mistakes happen. I’ve been on the wrong end of this myself — we ordered seed once from a broker who had cleared USDA customs and it showed up covered in bulb mites. The broker’s response was to fumigate the whole shipment and resell it as conventional instead of organic. We never did business with him again and we learned something in the process that shapes how we ship garlic out now.

Here’s what actually matters when you’re evaluating seed garlic.

Clove size. Large cloves grow large bulbs. Small cloves do not have value as seed. This is the single most important thing and it’s the thing the budget suppliers cut corners on. If the cloves are small at planting they will produce small bulbs at harvest, no matter how good the soil is or how well you water or how clean the field is. Seed garlic is sized for a reason. Pay attention to what you’re getting.

Paper integrity. Good seed bulbs have at least five intact papers around the bulb at harvest. Those papers are what protect the cloves inside during curing, shipping and storage — they’re the bulb’s armor between the field and the ground you’re going to plant it in. Once a bulb’s outer papers start peeling back or cracking, the cloves underneath lose their best defense against moisture loss and handling damage. If the bulbs you receive have torn, cracked or missing papers, the cloves inside have already been compromised before they ever got to you. Individual cloves have their own single layer of skin around them, and that skin stays with the clove when you plant it — but that thin skin alone isn’t enough protection on its own. The bulb’s outer papers are what keep the cloves viable long enough to make it to planting.

Certification. Organic certification matters but it isn’t the whole picture. A certified organic bulb from a broker who doesn’t test for pests or doesn’t cure properly is still a bad bulb. Certification tells you the farm followed specific rules during production. It doesn’t tell you the bulbs survived shipping, storage and handling in the condition they left the farm. Ask where the seed was actually grown. Ask how long ago it was harvested. If you can’t get straight answers to those questions, that’s its own answer.

Variety transparency. The supplier should be able to tell you what subgroup the variety belongs to, whether it’s a hardneck or softneck and what climate it’s suited to. If they just say “garlic” and can’t go deeper, you’re either buying from somebody who doesn’t know their own product or from somebody who’s mixing varieties and doesn’t want you to know.

The source. This one is harder to evaluate without experience. Seed garlic from a farm that grows it is almost always better than seed garlic from a broker who sources from multiple farms. The broker model has less accountability — if something goes wrong with the seed, who exactly do you talk to? A farm that grows what it sells has its reputation attached to every bulb that leaves the property. That matters. There’s also a real price difference people don’t talk about enough. Single-origin garlic bought directly from the farm is usually meaningfully cheaper than the same garlic going through a reseller. We’ve had our own garlic resold by brokers for double what we charge on the farm. Same bulbs, same harvest, twice the price — the markup is the broker’s cut, not quality you’re paying for. If you can buy directly from the grower, you’re getting the better product at the lower price.

If you want a deeper walkthrough of what to look for when you open a box of seed garlic and how to spot problems before you plant, that’s what our complete seed garlic buyer’s guide covers in detail. For everything we ship, we sort by bulb size rigorously, we reject anything with fewer than five intact papers and we grow every bulb ourselves on the farm. Nothing we sell has been through a broker or a repacker.

Growing Garlic: The Full Year

Garlic is a fall-planted crop and that one fact catches more first-time growers off guard than anything else. People see garlic at the grocery store year-round and assume they can put some in the ground in spring the way they would with tomatoes or peppers and get a harvest that summer. It doesn’t work like that.

Hardneck garlic in particular needs a period of cold to trigger proper bulb formation, and if the cloves don’t get that cold exposure the plant will grow leaves and maybe a single round but it won’t divide into a proper bulb with cloves. That’s the first thing worth understanding before any of the rest of this makes sense.

Here’s what a full year of garlic actually looks like on a farm like ours.

September through November: Planting

Cloves go in the ground in fall, usually six to eight weeks before the ground freezes hard. Most growers plant in October or November, but we plant intentionally early in mid-September. There are real tradeoffs to early planting that deserve their own discussion (we cover those in our complete growing guide) but the short version is that we’ve found it works for our soil, our climate and the varieties we focus on.

You break the bulbs apart, sort the cloves by size, and plant the large ones pointed end up at the right depth for your climate. Small cloves get set aside because small cloves do not have value as seed. Once the cloves are in, they put down a root system that anchors them for winter before the above-ground growth really starts.

Winter: Dormancy and vernalization

Through winter the cloves are quietly doing one of the most important things in the entire cycle. They’re experiencing the cold exposure that signals the plant to produce a proper divided bulb in summer instead of just a single round.

Hardneck varieties are strict about this and really require the cold. Softneck varieties benefit from it but don’t require it the same way — they’ll still produce bulbs in milder winter climates, just without the same vigor. This is why growing garlic in regions with warm winters takes different varieties and different strategies than what works at our elevation.

March through April: Spring growth

When the soil warms and the days get longer the plants start pushing real top growth. The bulb underground is not forming yet at this stage — what’s actually happening is that the leaves are storing sugars in the plant tissues, which is why green garlic harvested in early spring is especially sweet and tasty. That changes in late April or early May when the bulbs finally start to swell.

Something most growers don’t realize until they’ve been doing this a while is that the bulb puts on nearly all of its final size in the last six weeks of its life. That’s a short window for bulb development, but it doesn’t mean the weeks before it are some kind of easy coast. Weeding and watering have to stay consistent all the way through spring.

If the weed load gets out of hand early in the season the weeds shade the garlic leaves, and shaded leaves produce less sugar — which means less energy stored up for the plant to draw on when the bulb finally does start forming. High weed pressure also means the weeds are out-competing the garlic for soil nutrients and water, so by the time you get to the final growth window there isn’t much left in the ground for the bulbs to use. You cannot copy another farm’s watering schedule and expect it to work. You have to read your own land.

Late April through June: Scapes

Hardneck varieties send up a flower stalk called a scape. If you leave it on the plant it’ll pull energy away from bulb development, so scape removal is one of the routine late-spring and early-summer jobs.

Cut scapes about four inches above the last leaf — higher than that wastes growth, lower than that creates an opening where water and debris can get into the plant and cause rot. Scapes themselves are edible and many growers sell them as a shoulder-season product before the main harvest.

July: Harvest

Harvest timing is something you learn by doing. Too early and the bulbs are underdeveloped, too late and the outer papers start breaking down in the ground and the bulbs lose their storage potential.

Most growers watch for the lower leaves to dry back while the top leaves are still green. We harvest a small test bulb first to check the paper condition and clove formation before we commit to pulling a full row. The day itself is usually one of the best on the farm — it’s the one day a year you actually see what all the previous year’s work produced.

August: Curing

After harvest the bulbs need to cure in a shaded, well-ventilated space for roughly three to six weeks. This is where the outer papers tighten up, the neck dries down and the cloves stabilize for long-term storage.

Bulbs cured poorly will not store well no matter how carefully you grew them. This is also where we discovered the hard way that sun exposure during or immediately after harvest can cause problems we didn’t even know existed when we started, but that’s a story for the crop protection section of this guide.

September through next planting: Storage and seed selection

Cured garlic gets sorted, graded and either held for eating stock, prepared for shipping to customers, or set aside as seed for the next planting cycle. The best, largest, cleanest bulbs with the most intact papers get reserved for seed because next year’s crop is only as good as this year’s seed stock. And then the whole cycle starts over in October.

Getting garlic through a full year isn’t about avoiding one catastrophic mistake. It’s about getting a lot of small things right, in the right order, at the right time. Our complete growing guide covers every one of these stages in the depth they actually deserve.

Organic Farming the Basaltic Way

The word “organic” has become a marketing term as much as a farming practice. Most consumers see the label and assume it means something specific about how the food was grown, but the truth is that a lot of certified organic operations are doing conventional-style farming with organic-approved inputs substituted in. Same tillage, same monocropping, same soil depletion, just with different sprays.

That’s not what we do on this organic farm, and the difference shows up in the soil itself.

The foundation is regenerative agriculture. Instead of treating the field as a production surface we work once and extract from, we treat it as a living system that has to get healthier every year or we’re doing it wrong. We cover crop aggressively between garlic rotations, we compost everything we can and we build soil biology deliberately through our practices. Over time the soil structure improves, the microbial life gets more diverse and the crop does better as a result.

I’ll be honest about one piece of this that isn’t fully aligned with strict regenerative principles — we still have to till at planting. Our harvester is essentially a strip tiller that only disrupts a small portion of the soil, so harvest itself isn’t the issue. Planting is. Our planter is limited to tilled ground and we also till to establish a stale seed bed before planting, which cuts the weed load during the growing season. True regenerative farming minimizes tillage because it disrupts the fungal networks and soil biology that hold the whole system together. I’d love to invent a no-till garlic planter some day, but until somebody figures that out, tillage at planting is part of how we operate. The rest of the regenerative work is what makes up for it.

It’s slower than conventional farming but the soil gets better every season instead of worse.

One specific example of what “doing it right” looks like in practice. In our very first harvest year we applied fresh cow manure to the field at planting. That was the common-knowledge advice at the time — manure is organic, manure feeds the soil, manure is what you use. What we didn’t know then was that fresh manure carries bacterial loads that can cause real problems for garlic down the line.

That first harvest we lost roughly half the crop to a bacterial pathogen called Pantoea agglomerans that thrives when garlic bulbs get exposed to high heat and UV right after harvest. The bacteria were already in the field because of the raw manure application, and the sun exposure during harvest triggered the outbreak. We fix that now in two ways. First, bulbs come in from the field promptly — no leaving them out in the sun. Second, we don’t apply raw manure anymore. Everything gets composted thoroughly, with the same manure source broken down with straw in massive piles before it touches the field.

That story is a small example of a larger principle. Organic certification tells a customer we followed the rules. It doesn’t tell them we’ve spent years learning what those rules actually mean in practice and what gaps they don’t cover. We’re certified by three agencies — CCOF, USDA Organic and Real Organic Project — because each one audits different things and holding all three forces us to operate above the floor of any single program. But the certifications are just confirmation of what we’d do anyway.

Regenerative practice is where the real work is, and I think it’s where organic farming as a whole is heading whether the certifiers catch up or not.

Protecting Your Crop

Even the best-grown garlic can be lost to problems that show up quietly and cost you everything if you don’t know what to look for. The biggest risks aren’t usually dramatic events like a late frost or a heat wave — those are visible problems you can react to. The real danger is the diseases, pests and handling mistakes that don’t show symptoms until it’s too late to do anything about it.

The most serious threat in commercial garlic production is white rot, a soil-borne fungal disease that can stay viable in contaminated soil for fifty years or more. Once white rot is established in a field, that field is effectively lost to the entire allium family — not just garlic, but onions, leeks, shallots and anything else in that group. For practical purposes you’re looking at taking that ground out of allium production for a generation. This is why clean seed stock matters more than almost anything else you can control. If the seed you plant carries white rot spores, you’re not just losing that year’s crop — you’re losing the ability to grow garlic, or any allium, on that land for decades.

Beyond white rot there’s a handful of other pathogens worth knowing about. Fusarium basal rot attacks the root plate and shows up as yellowing plants and soft bulbs. Bulb mites can hide inside imported seed and spread quickly through storage. And there’s Pantoea agglomerans, the bacterial pathogen I mentioned in the organic farming section that taught us why raw manure and unprotected bulbs don’t mix. Each of these has its own prevention protocol and its own early warning signs.

Pests are less catastrophic but can still take a meaningful bite out of a crop. Wireworms, nematodes and certain moth species target garlic at different points in the growth cycle. Good rotation practices, healthy soil biology and careful seed sourcing cut most of the pest pressure before it starts.

One problem that almost nobody talks about but can fool you badly is grass tillers. Certain grass species send up shoots called tillers that can grow right through a developing garlic bulb as it swells in the ground. When you harvest and see the damage, it looks exactly like insect boring or some kind of pest tunnel, and plenty of growers have spent time chasing a pest problem they don’t actually have. The way you figure it out is by pulling up one of the affected bulbs and finding a long blade of grass running through it. Grass management during the growing season isn’t just about competition for nutrients and light — it’s also about keeping grass tillers from showing up inside your harvest.

The single best piece of crop protection advice I can give any grower is this: buy clean seed from a known source, watch your field carefully during the growing season and cull aggressively at harvest and during curing. Nothing spreads a problem faster than planting compromised stock or trying to save a suspect bulb for next year’s seed. Our crop protection resources cover each of these threats in the depth they deserve and include the actual visual identification markers you need to know.

After the Harvest

Most of what separates good garlic from great garlic happens after the plant comes out of the ground. Growing is half the job. Curing, storing and handling are the other half, and plenty of otherwise well-grown crops have been ruined by what happened in the weeks between harvest and sale.

Curing is the first critical step. Freshly harvested garlic holds moisture throughout the bulb, not just in the neck and papers, which is why fresh-pulled garlic has a watered-down flavor compared to properly cured garlic. That extra moisture also makes the bulbs vulnerable to mold, rot and handling damage until it draws down.

Proper curing means roughly three to six weeks in a shaded, well-ventilated space where air can move around each bulb and the moisture can evaporate out naturally. Temperature should stay moderate and humidity should stay relatively low. Hanging in bundles or spreading in single layers both work as long as there’s airflow. As the bulbs cure, the flavor concentrates, the papers tighten up and the neck dries down. That’s what turns green garlic into the storage-ready product you actually want in your kitchen or your shipping box.

Once bulbs are cured the storage rules take over. The right storage environment is cool but not cold, dry but not arid, and stable. A basement shelf, a pantry, a dedicated storage room all work better than the refrigerator. Refrigeration is actually counterproductive for most garlic — the cold signals the clove that winter has arrived, and then when you pull the bulb out and bring it back to room temperature, that warmth signals spring and the clove starts trying to grow. Good softneck varieties will hold eight to ten months under proper storage conditions. Hardnecks tend to run shorter, usually five to seven months at best.

Beyond fresh storage there’s a whole set of preservation options that extend usable life well past the natural storage window. Freeze drying, fermenting, oil infusing and dehydrating all have their place. Freeze dried garlic in particular holds its flavor and nutritional content far longer than fresh garlic and it rehydrates almost perfectly for cooking. We produce our own organic freeze dried garlic for customers who want premium garlic year-round without the storage management.

The one mistake I see over and over is growers who spent months getting a beautiful crop out of the ground and then cut corners on handling in the days right after harvest. Most storage failures I’ve seen trace back to curing problems or bulb damage during post-harvest handling. Take care of your garlic in those first few weeks and the rest of the year takes care of itself.

Cooking With Real Garlic

Most of what people think they know about cooking with garlic is based on what they’ve experienced with grocery store garlic, which is usually a generic softneck grown for shelf life instead of flavor. Real garlic — the kind grown for eating rather than logistics — cooks differently, tastes different and deserves a different approach in the kitchen.

The first thing worth understanding is that raw garlic is where variety actually matters. Sliced thin on good bread, rubbed on toast, mixed into a fresh salsa or dressing, raw garlic shows you what the variety really is. Music tastes sharp and classic. Chesnok Red tastes sweeter and more complex. Red Toch tastes mild and almost buttery. That variety character is mostly what you’re paying for when you buy quality seed and grow it well.

Cooking dulls the differences. Once garlic hits real heat, most of the variety-specific character fades and you’re left with the general cooked-garlic flavor profile — sweet, nutty and less sharp than raw. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just worth knowing so you can match the variety to the use. If you’re going to cook your garlic most of the time, almost any well-grown variety will work. If you’re going to use it raw often, variety selection matters a lot more.

A couple of practical kitchen notes that apply to any real garlic. Peel it fresh rather than buying pre-peeled. Pre-peeled garlic oxidizes quickly and loses flavor within days. Smash the clove with the flat of a knife before peeling to make the skin come off easily. And when you mince or slice it, do that right before you use it rather than prepping a big batch in advance. Cut garlic starts losing its volatile compounds the moment the cells break open. The garlic you cut and use in the same minute tastes noticeably better than the garlic you cut twenty minutes ago.

One of our specialty products worth mentioning here is garlic honey, which takes advantage of the raw garlic character by infusing it into raw honey over time. The result is a condiment that carries the full flavor of the variety into a form that keeps for months and pairs with everything from cheese boards to glazes for roasted meats. It’s one of the easiest ways to enjoy real garlic flavor in a ready-to-use format.

Ordering for This Season’s Fall Planting

If you’ve read this far you probably have a reasonable sense of what Basaltic Farms is about and whether our garlic is something you want to plant. Here’s how the ordering cycle works.

Preorders open in March each year for the following fall planting season. Shipping begins in September and runs through the planting window, which for most growers falls in October or November. Our own planting runs earlier than that, but we time shipping for when most customers are ready to plant in their own climates.

The varieties available for bulk seed orders are Music, Chesnok Red, Inchelium Red, Susanville, Sicilian Artichoke and Red Toch. Korean Mountain and Thai Purple are available in limited quantities this season as we continue to build up our seed stock for those two varieties. Pricing, quantity breaks and order details are all on our seed garlic pricing page.

A few things worth knowing before you order. We sort every bulb by bulb size and fulfill orders first come first serve starting with the largest bulbs, so earlier orders get the biggest garlic. We don’t charge different prices for different sizes — every bulb shipped falls within our seed-grade range at a single price. One thing a lot of growers don’t realize is that bulbs on the smaller end of the seed-size range can still have medium to large cloves on par with what you’d find in our largest bulbs. There are just fewer cloves per bulb on average. So “smaller” in our grading still means good, plantable seed that will produce a real crop — it just means fewer cloves per bulb to plant.

Popular varieties — Music and Chesnok Red in particular — tend to sell out before the shipping window closes, so ordering early makes a real difference for both variety availability and bulb size. Every order ships with a QR code on the variety label that links to our garlic growing instructions, which covers everything you need to know to plant and grow what you received. Varieties that don’t have the QR code printed on their labels yet will include a printed copy of the link so you can look it up.

If you have a question that isn’t covered in our materials, reach out directly through the contact page — you’ll talk to someone who actually grows the garlic rather than a sales team.

Farming is a fragile business and small organic operations especially are doing this work against the current of a food system that doesn’t make it easy. When you buy seed garlic from us instead of a big-box brand or a broker, you’re helping a real family farm keep doing what we love to do for another year. That matters to us and it’s something I don’t take for granted.

Year after year we do a little better. With any luck and with people who care about where their food and their seed comes from, we’ll be doing this for a long time yet.