Owner, Kent Knock
The Story
Garlic “seed”is the main product of Afternoon Zephyr Farm here in the Rogue River Valley of Southern Oregon. We raise the garlic for “seed”or planting purposes in small quantities, mainly for gardeners. Raising garlic in quantity is very labor intensive requiring careful handwork at several stages to produce a good product. We do not normally hire outside labor, so we raise only small quantities in order to produce superior “seed”bulbs for sale.
Our climate in Southern Oregon is “Mediterranean”with hot, dry summers and mildly cool, damp winters. That climate is good for growing seed crops because the plants can grow during the fall and mild periods in the winter as well as in spring with minimal irrigation. Then, as the crops begin to mature, rain becomes infrequent, and the seed can mature and dry well. This applies to true seed as well as bulb crops like garlic.
The advantage of our climate for garlic is that some varieties (Artichokes and Creoles come to mind) are favored by the warm or mild winters. The disadvantage is that some varieties that prefer colder winters do not do as well here. We can grow a number of hard neck varieties although one our favorites in Connecticut, Georgia Fire, cannot stand the heat here in our part of the Rogue Valley. So we enjoy a climate that produces planting garlic which can do well over much of the United States.
We care for our garlic to provide the best quality planting stock. This year we even have a new barn so the garlic curing (drying) there is not exposed to the sprinkles from the thunderstorm that just passed by as I am writing. We select only the best good sized bulbs for sale to our seed customers.
We have been participating in Bob Anderson’s website, gourmetgarlicgardens.com for several years now. We consider our website to be an offshoot of Bob’s website. He has enormous amounts of information on his website that we have not duplicated here. In the future we will probably add a lot of the additional information here, but for now we are just starting this website and are relying on Bob for all that information he has on his website. Thank you, Bob!
The People
The people at Afternoon Zephyr Farm are Kent Knock and his wife Hueylee. We do all the work to produce our garlic, except when unsuspecting relatives or friends who happen drop in at a work time!