Garlic production provides year-round income

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