Hope you’re all enjoying your summer shares so far!

The newsletters section is up-to-date (through last week) and in an effort to get some more activity happening on the PVF blog/news section, a few new voices will be popping up here and there. The author name will now appear in the same line as the time/date stamp, so you know whose voice you should be imagining.

The summer has officially started – PVF’s farm stands are opening for the first time this week. The Vienna farm’s stand opens Tuesday, July 1, and the Purcellville stand opens Saturday, July 5. Come by and see us!

Directions:

Vienna
Four miles west of Tysons Corner on Route 7 – the stand is on your left.

Purcellville
From Leesburg: Take 7 west for two miles to Route 9. Stay on 9 for five miles and make a right at Berlin Turnpike (287). Make a left on John Wolford.

There’s picking and there’s harvesting. We pick parsley, we pick beans, we pick flowers. Picking means that you are not collecting it all up at once, or for the last time. Harvesting is a much bigger job. You harvest field corn or wheat or potatoes. On our farm, we do a lot more picking than harvesting.

We are in the midst of the garlic harvest now. Even on our tiny farm, it’s a monumental task. Last fall we planted 500 pounds of garlic cloves, one at a time, by hand, and we covered them with a layer of hay mulch and left them alone for the winter. They grew beautifully. In the first weeks of June we harvested all the garlic curls – a light task – and a few weeks later the green tops turned yellow and the bulbs underground were mature enough to dig.

Our harvest methods are probably the same as they were a millennium or two ago. We stick a big fork in the ground and loosen the soil around each garlic plant, then we bend over and pull on the base of the stem. It’s very simple. A child can do it. The hard part is that the garlic patch goes on and on.

On some farms, the garlic harvest is done with a mechanical digger (we have one out in Purcellville) and the process is completed in one day. On our Vienna farm, we dig garlic for about a week, cleaning each muddy bulb as it comes out of the ground. We dry the garlic in the greenhouse and then fidget with it all season long, trimming and cleaning it again before it goes into the CSA bags.

- Hana

Baskets of fresh heads of garlic in the field wait for transport

Matthew loosens the bed of garlic with a digging fork

Carrie cleans off the harvested garlic cloves