WETASKIWIN, Alta. — Hanging on the farm shop wall beside the combine and the seeder are thousands of bulbs of drying garlic.
Using the existing farm equipment and buildings enables Kristin Graves to build her Fifth Gen Gardens farm business while working alongside her father, Richard Graves, on their Wetaskiwin-area farm.
“It is so neat to see the two generations together. It is the perfect blend of both worlds. My dad is bringing a lifetime of experience with equipment and farming knowledge and I take charge of marketing and social media. We work well together,” she said.
After almost 10 years in health care at the busy University of Alberta hospital, Graves was looking for a change and she headed back to the farm to start a market garden and community-shared agriculture business. Adding garlic to the gardens was a way to have year-round income.
The first year, Graves planted 100 garlic cloves as an experiment to see if they would grow in central Alberta, an area where she was told they wouldn’t grow.
The crop was so successful, the next year they planted 20,000 cloves with a cobbled together seeder.
“The first big crop we planted 20,000 and had a make-do seeder and it did not do. It was terrible. We ended up planting all 20,000 by hand and it took more than a week. After that year, we both said never again; we are buying a seeder.”
Last fall, they planted 100,000 cloves and in October they planned to plant an even larger garlic crop.
Each year, they have added a new piece of specialty equipment to help seed, harvest, clean, dry, size and process their garlic into dozens of specialty products.
“I harvested garlic by hand once. I will not do it again. You can’t just pull it, it has to be dug. It can be challenging and tough,” said Kristin, while pointing out the features of their garlic harvester that ties the garlic bulbs together with twine like an old-fashioned grain binder.
Once the garlic is harvested and dried, Kristen and Richard spend the winter dehydrating, processing, packaging, marketing and creating new garlic products.
“I don’t have as much downtime anymore and my winter is starting to turn into my busy season, especially the lead up to Christmas and the fall markets. It is a nice change for my business.”
With 70 acres of wheat left to harvest and a few wet days, the pair have been getting garlic ready for planting. The bulbs are put in a special cracking machine that breaks the bulbs into cloves and sorts them by size. Only the largest cloves get planted to create large garlic bulbs, often with five or six cloves to a bulb.
“We want a minimum of five cloves. Every year, we are getting bigger and bigger bulbs because we are more selective of what we plant. We are looking for uniform bulbs and five or sometimes six cloves per bulb,” she said.
The garlic is seeded in several spots around the farm. The locations are chosen for their proximity to water for irrigation, winter snow cover and sometimes because it is an odd-shaped corner of the field the large grain equipment doesn’t fit.
With five old gravel pit ponds around the farm, the family uses the water in the ponds for irrigating and creating habitat for wildlife. Instead of reclaiming the pits, the sides of the pits were sloped and black soil added and the edges seeded with clover, alfalfa, willow and bullrushes.
“We are trying to recreate wetlands and are seeing boosts in animals. The moose love marshy ground. My whole life I can never remember seeing a moose. Last year, I saw eight moose.”
Birds, deer, partridge, grouse, mink and recently a fisher have started to live around the new wetlands.
“Our family is five generations of farmers, but at the heart of it, it has always been about conservation. That is where our passion lies. The farm is functional and it is a farm and we love growing, but the part we hold dear is this wild section of it.”
Part of what fuel’s Kristin’s passion for her garlic business is creating new products with the garlic and other products on their farm.
“I love cooking and more than cooking I love to eat. It has been really fun trying to create all these new different things, especially when it ties into our farm.”
Last fall, they picked high bush cranberries and created a poultry seasoning with the garlic and dehydrated cranberries and called it the ruffed grouse blend, after the bird that feeds on the berries.
Her Rosebrier blend of garlic spice is made from wild rose petals harvested from the farm. She created garlic scape pepper in an effort to find another use for the scapes from the garlic plants.
As another product for the fall markets, Kristin collected dried flowers, bullrushes, corn stalks, silver willow, reed canarygrass, wheat and other plants to create decorative garlic wreaths.
“It is all just something different. Garlic is one of those things people just generally love.”
