Taste, image and lifestyle all comes into play when thinking of garlic. Garlic can take on many forms but it always tends to enhance any food it is paired with. Owner Stephen Chamberlain and his partner Beth Palmer of Duchess Farm in Castleton, have garlic now in their veins alongside growing so many other vegetables.
Marking their second year attending Garlic Town USA in Bennington over Labor Day Weekend, it is all about understanding the possibilities of garlic but also the path it takes to bring it to the table. Sitting in their home, with a barn and greenhouse outside drying garlic and onions while they're farming land a few miles away, life is about balance. Stephen speaks of the beginnings.
“It started in 1986 with the farm itself. And we've been going all those years..
.almost 40 years.” He says garlic wasn't originally part of the plan at the very beginning of the business because there has to be a very specific strain to grow.
“It's not really like ordering,” he adds. “I guess you can order from a seed catalog, like you order your tomato seed or your lettuce.” But he says garlic's a little different, because it is about buying sets.
In terms of their first crop of garlic, they probably started five or 10 years after that initial farm. Stephen grew up in Buffalo and went to college in Binghamton where he graduated with a language degree in German and French. During college, he went down one summer to Virginia to work on a farm that was run by a few families.