Hotchkiss – Only two months to go before the annual harvest is celebrated with the quaffing of garlic martinis, the consumption of all manner of garlic edibles and the ‘scuse-me-while-I-kiss-the-sky strains of Jimi Hendrix.
But already the unmistakable scent of 1,600 pounds of burgeoning cloves wafts from the field at the Purple Haze Garlic farm, where foot-high shoots poke through straw beds.
Come July, this field will be a tangle twice as high and triply fragrant. And garlic aficionados across the country will be anticipating bags and braids of a mysterious “stinking rose” grown on the high- desert Redlands Mesa on the Western Slope for more than 75 years.
Purple Haze used to be known by the more homey name “Archie’s Garlic,” during the half a century the late gardener Archie Ware handed out bags of the purple heads to grateful friends.
When Nancy Horn and Mark Welsh started growing it commercially in the 1980s, they tried but failed to learn its origins and scientific name. They ended up simply calling it “Homegrown Garlic.”
But when a friend helping with the labor-intensive harvest in 1989 stopped for a breather and said, “you know, when I look around, I feel like I’m in a purple haze,” the garlic had a name that put a spell on – a name that set it apart in a world of garlic that already boasts monikers like Brown Tempest, Georgia Crystal, Shantung Purple and Morado Gigante.
Elsie Winne and Sven Edstrom knew the name was a keeper three years ago when they bought the business – one of only a handful of strictly garlic farms in Colorado.
“We feel lucky to be the ones to let the garlic do its thing,” Winne said while sitting in a home that exudes a nice hint of Purple Haze.
Winne, 30, and Edstrom, 32, started purplehazegarlic.com last year, and now consumers coast to coast have joined the locals in clamoring for Purple Haze.
“Every Christmas everyone I know gets something from Purple Haze,” said JoAnn Kalenak, a Paonia resident who said she has squirreled away stashes of Purple Haze in her suitcase for trips to the East Coast.
So has Eugenia Bone, a cookbook author hailing from New York City and nearby Crawford. Bone takes pounds of the tasty purple heads back to her foodie friends in the city.
Family-and-friend fans also dig in and help harvest Purple Haze. While the country’s biggest garlic-growing area – Gilroy, Calif. – and smaller garlic centers from Oregon to Florida celebrate harvests with garlic festivals, at Purple Haze, gangs turn out for “garlic camp.”
They dig, sort, clean and braid for two weeks until the quarter-acre garlic field planted in November is once again bare. They camp out in tents and trailers, eat garlic three times a day and walk around reeking of the stuff.
They get paid in garlic. Then they dream up new garlic recipes – like the garlic martini – and come back for a harvest potluck celebration.
“People are fanatical about their garlic,” said Craig Fowler of Fort Collins, who doesn’t grow his own garlic but sold 9,000 pounds of other farmers’ garlic to fans from Iceland to Saudi Arabia through thegarlicstore.com last year.
Winne said she has learned that is true.
“People who like the garlic even send us love letters,” she said.
Staff writer Nancy Lofholm can be reached at 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com.
