Baker City, Oregon

About Us

 

We are a small family owned and operated farm outside Baker City, Oregon.  We have five children ranging from 17 - 1 year old.  Most of the garlic farming is done by hand.  What we and the kids can't do, extended family and local friends help fill in.  We farm about one acre of garlic a year, but have five acres set aside that are managed strictly towards the garlic crop rotation.  All together we have 29 varieties that we are either testing out to determine the varieties that will thrive best in our location, or have been planted for production.  Each year we try a few new varieties and abandon others.  At 3,600ft above sea level, our winters are long and cold and spring is slow coming.  We are surrounded by the Elkhorn and Wallowa Mountains.  We often have hard frosts into the first weeks of June and starting up again at the end of August, much like a lot of the Asian and Eurasian native homes of many hardneck varieties. 

2014-2015 has been an odd year.  We got an early bitter cold snap in November, and then a mild and dry winter offering very little snow.  Spring came in February (usually in April here) with more dry and warm weather.  It has finally started to rain in May (we are very thankful).  But the garlic looks like our best crop yet!

The winter of 2012/2013 delivered us many weeks of temperatures from -15 to -20 and was upon us before we were able to apply the mulch.  So everything available for the next few years is VERY COLD HARDY!  (We are having plenty of cold and dry weather this winter too!)

Our garlic farm was Certified Naturally Grown in 2013.  We use no chemical fertilizers, herbicides, or pesticides and use sustainable methods in our farm management.  Instead we use green manure (plowing under a wide variety of green crops such as alfalfa, vetch, canola, mustard, sudan grass, triticale, peas, oats and barley), crop rotation and livestock parking to promote optimum soil fertility.  We now produce winter triticale to mulch our garlic beds.  Due to constant visits from Elk and Deer herds, we cannot use other popular mulches for garlic.  Our fields will only be planted in Garlic for one year out of every five, and are rotated into grains (hay for the wife's sheep) and then back into legumes (hay for our cattle) and into soil building crops the summer preceding garlic planting.  Our soils are sandy loam and we are slowly building up our organic matter, year after year.  We are still in the process of applying for Organic Certification, but have been managing our cultivated land in a natural and organic manner since 2000 when it was converted from sage fallow, and we were recently Certified Naturally Grown.

On our farm we also produce grass fed cattle, sheep and hay.  We have a large personal garden and raise all sorts of crops to feed our growing family throughout the year. We sure enjoy the fruits of our labor, and hope that you will too.