Celebrating the Stinky Rose at the Verona Garlic Festival

Julie Druker | Sep 10, 2015

Lovers and growers of the ever popular “Stinky Rose” (a.k.a. garlic) descended on the Verona Lions grounds for their annual garlic festival on Sept. 5, which this year included 55 vendors offering up everything garlic, from seeds, single and braided bulbs to flavorful spreads, jellies, and much more. The event attracted upwards of 1500 visitors, who wasted no time in sampling and loading up on the bounty of vendors from as far afield as Manitoulin Island and London, Ontario, though local growers from Kingston, Bath, Verona, Harrowsmith, and Enterprise made up the majority of vendors.

The annual event is run by the Verona Lions and has become increasingly popular over the years and as always, numerous growers competed in the Eastern Ontario Garlic Awards at the festival. The judge this year was Ann Babcock of Harrowsmith, a long-time Ontario Horticultural Association qualified judge. She was assisted by Heather Lebeau of Carleton Place.

Bill Kirby of Harrowsmith, who specializes in a rarer variety of garlic called Yugoslavian Gold, won the overall champion award and was presented the $100 prize donated by the NFU's Local 316. Kirby is one of the only growers of that variety in Eastern Ontario, which he described as “a beautiful bulb that grows to a large size and tastes fabulous both raw and cooked. It has a potent flavour due to its high level of allicin, the compound in garlic directly associated with its health benefits.”

Denis Craigen of Newburg, who has been growing organic garlic for family and friends for five years, participated for the first time this year. He won the second place reserve champion trophy and its $50 prize donated by Local Family Farms in Verona. His selections included varieties of Siberian Fire, Red Russian, Artichoke, Music and two Rocambole varieties. He said his win this year will likely see him return at next year’s festival.

Local garlic guru Paul Pospisil, editor of The Garlic News, Canada's only newsletter solely devoted to everything garlic, spoke at the event on the subject of cooking and storing garlic. “I often speak on how to grow garlic and since everyone these days seems to know how to grow it, I decided to speak this year about cooking with garlic because not everyone knows how to eat garlic”.

He said that the entire garlic plant is edible including its early spring leaves, which he said, “are delicious in salads, omelets.” He mentioned of course the edible scapes and the bulbs, but also the smaller white roots of the plant, which contain lots of oil and are also very flavorful.

Asked about the challenges to growers, Pospisil said this year's growing season was one of the worst. “A late spring robbed the garlic of three weeks of growing time, which resulted overall in smaller, shorter, plants with fewer leaves and generally smaller bulbs.” Then a subsequent cold period with frost also set back the plants, as did the later heat waves in the season. Rain and heat at harvest time also posed problems and created fungal diseases that resulted in crop loss. As a result, the bounty this year was overall smaller than usual, but that did not seem to affect the crowds and sales at this year’s festival, where growers were selling their harvest hand over fist. Those wanting a taste of Bill Kirby's winning Yugoslavian Gold can visit his farm at 625 Colebrook Road near Harrowsmith.