Farmish

Betsy and I looked at farm land for garlic seed growing last Thursday. The land looked like this, but with more slope, and untilled. Here we found excellent soil -a silty loam known as BgA/B or Bridghampton silt loam. Zero to 6 percent slope, eighty inches to the nearest restrictive feature, well-drained and far from the water table, but with very high available water capacity, and low in calcium (acidic). Bridgehampton silt loam is derived mainly from gneiss, granite, and schist, with some sandstone, conglomerate, and shale thrown in for good measure. This is glacial stuff and as good as it gets for growing garlic in our neck of the woods once it's been limed.

While the land itself offered only positives, the prospect of harvesting, curing, and storing our crop is still a problem to solve. We intended to be on the north shore, where there is still farming and its apparatus, but the Trust only has space remaining on the south shore, amidst multi-million dollar homes and summer throngs. This can be both a positive and negative, although finding a place that costs almost nothing for 3-5 months out of the year to process our garlic in real estate heaven? Not easy.

We passed this decrepit old potato barn on the main drag out of the Hamptons. It's clearly in disuse, so couldn't the owner let us use it for the price of fixing that garage door or what have you?

I shoved my phone under the broken door to picture the place. Clearly someone's furniture storage.

It could be perfect for curing garlic given its exceptionally high ceiling, concrete floor, eastern exposure, and soil embanked side walls.

The roof slopes down to the soil, with large (and broken) roof vents along the ridge. Luck had a real estate office adjacent, and wouldn't you expect them to know who owned the barn. They called me later to ascertain how much I am willing to spend, to which I could not say anything, only that I needed air footage, not necessarily floor space, and for only part of the year. Basically, I'm looking for a deal. I haven't heard back. This is a problem that needs to be solved before we can move forward with the Trust. Meanwhile, upstate, the earliest garlic is beginning to scape.