The journey of Gourmet Garlic NZ

This week I had the pleasure of talking to Gary Patterson of Gourmet Garlic NZ, and because we got talking, I have shelved our usual blog to give you a larger interview.

Kicking off Covid with a trailer and some dirt

Gary has a tiny amount of land by commercial standards- 400sqm- in Kingston, down south. “Living where we are, it's all glacial hill, gravels.” No, literally- he doesn't live on soil, he lives on rocks. Once every 3-6 months the city council shreds all of the town's organic waste, leaving huge mounds of beautiful, hot, rich compostey soil.

So during lockdown he popped down the road to the town's green waste dump, and loaded up a trailer of the stuff. Then another, then another. He did 150 trailer loads over a month and a half, picking up the compost, and taking it back to his land, where he pushed it through a huge steel frame wrapped in chicken wire. (For anyone wanting the math- about 3.5 trailer loads per day.)

This left him with a mound of sieved dirt and a pile of sticks, so the good dirt was mounded 40cm high, into long, broad rows, and the sticks went between the rows. This helped to drain water from the beds when it was really wet, as the water would collect under the sticks; he could also walk on the sticks which meant he didn't compact the soil and get muddy. (Parts of the bed that he wasn't going to use yet were left with the sticks on top, which mulched down and stopped weed growth and germination.)

See! (credit photo: Gary Patterson)

“When the garlic dies off, I don't really want to put a cover crop in... I go back to green waste, I put more soil in, one year growing, two years of rest, I guess a 3 year rotation”

Social media, the blessing

One of the things that really drew me to Gary was that we have a very similar, ‘gotta catch em all’ attitude, and no issue with leveraging social media in order to get our way.

There are 10 garlic ‘families’ in the world, and Gary combed the internet to find them, asking social media especially to hunt them down within New Zealand. “I was laughed at,” he says, “they said they didn’t exist in New Zealand.” But, as the weeks went by, he was able to slowly tick them off… each new bulb had to be quarantined for 2 years, grown and identified properly, before being introduced to his patch.

Someone in Canterbury had Porcelain, but believed it was Rocambole. Gary grew it over 2-3 years and got the bulbils, the cloves, the scapes, took photographs of each part as they matured, checked the shape and colouration, it was definitely Porcelain. Woo! Similarly with Purple Stripe, and a grower in Matakana sent down the Asiatic type, again he grew it out over years to confirm the variety.

Photo credit: Minette Tonoli, from Meadowsweet Herbs and Flowers

Eventually, all ten varieties in his hands, Gary worked tirelessly to develop the incredibly thorough website, Gourmet Garlic NZ, and sell his bulbs to residential garlic growers.

Social Media, the curse

“I was reasonably convinced it was white rot, since I grow for growers, I didn't want to give anyone white rot, as white rot lasts a very long time in your soil...”

This year, a small patch of the garlic field had what appeared to be white rot, a soil borne fungus which is an ongoing issue for allium (onion, garlic, leek) farmers worldwide. “As soon as I found some white rot, I thought well that's it for me. I thought it was time to call it quits.”

Disclosure time! There are different opinions on whether white rot is currently at epidemic levels, or an ongoing issue which requires management. There is a huge spectrum of opinion on how to respond to any fungal issue. I am not qualified to tell you what should be done if one finds white rot. We all know I have opinions, though-

White rot is not an issue for garlic you eat, but it will remain in the soil for 20+ years, and my stance is that it would be inappropriate to let any alliums leave a property which has white rot. I reckon it would be appropriate to consume your own alliums, and bring more in, but not send them out anywhere else. As someone who grows garlic to supply to other growers, Gary elected to immediately stop selling garlic.

“As soon as I found it, I went on Facebook and told the users that this is what my situation is, and I wouldn't be supplying this year.”

Not only had Gary decided he couldn’t sell anymore, he quickly left a garlic growing group when one member took his news extremely personally, believing that there is a white rot outbreak which Gary has contributed to.

“He contacted me straight away, he was very offensive, it was over the top, he was cursing me and all sorts, it's not the sort of way I run… as soon as that happened I didn't want to be a part of it, I just pulled myself off straight away.”

No longer selling garlic, no longer contributing to social media discourse about garlic, Gary has a very garlicky few years ahead, consuming a field’s worth of garlic.

Some things I’d like to take from this

I hope it didn’t get past you that this interview was with someone who built a business with a soil-less land, knowledge and no capital, and became one of the New Zealand experts in his field within three years… and now the business has ceased selling garlic in year four.

Every single patch of land, regardless of how well it is run, has to deal with pests and disease on the regular. Orchards and all commercial farmers fight similar battles, it is no reflection on the quality of work done on the land. You can’t just kill off all fungi in the soil, and it is notoriously hard to manage. Fungi has a vital place in our soils, just, sometimes the wrong one turns up.

I think about what I would do in that situation, and I would end up shutting down commercially, because even if sold for consumption, the people buying the garlic are the same sorts of people who would compost part of the garlic, or plant a clove or two in their own gardens, so it wouldn’t be responsible to let the garlic leave the site.

It was an enormous and admirable decision to stop selling garlic, and although he was only selling for a short while, Gary has been so generous with his research that hopefully the website and knowledge will stick around in some form.

I’d like to close out with what Gary himself closed his story with…

“I thought I'd start growing popcorn, so I'll plant popcorn in different varieties…”

Have a great week everyone! Ngā mihi o Matariki, te tau hou Māori.