A Place to Keep the Harvest

New producers have a pretty steep hill to climb.

Every now and then, though, the trail offers a place to catch your breath. Sometimes another path appears. You can continue straight up, or take the one that hooks off and meanders a little.

For us, taking the offshoot trail has meant preparing grants.

We are still climbing, but the pace changes. For a while, we stop thinking quite so much about the goal itself. Instead, we begin reflecting on our process, how it connects to the larger community, the land, and a changing climate.

This work asks us to step back from the daily chores and consider why we do things the way we do. Grant writing is deeply reflective in that way. There are numbers to crunch and questions to address, but slowly the separate parts of the farm begin to connect into one clear, cohesive picture.

This year, that path led us to AgWest Farm Credit’s New Producer Grant.

Before the crop is planted, we hustle to prepare the land, buy essential equipment, fix or build infrastructure, and teach ourselves an astonishing number of new things. Nearly everything requires an investment before there is a harvest to sell.

But growing the crop is only part of it.

Once garlic comes out of the ground, it needs to be cured and protected. Here on Whidbey, marine air, a.k.a. fog and major humidity, can make this part challenging, so our attention shifts to preserving the harvest so we can bring it into more kitchens.

There’s a small, well-insulated building sitting on our property with a peaked roof and few windows. It’s a mini replica of our home. It has been imagined as a studio, a guest cottage, although for us, it served as storage until it became clear that it would be the perfect Curing House.

It quickly became the place where the garlic is cured, sorted, cleaned, weighed, packed, and prepared to leave the farm. It is where something we planted clove by clove, kept a close watch on through the winter, and eventually pulled from the soil becomes food for someone’s home kitchen or part of a chef’s vision.

This month, we learned that we were among 30 producers selected to receive a $15,000 award through AgWest Farm Credit’s 2026 New Producer Grant. This generous grant will allow us to equip the Curing House for more stable curing and longer-term storage, with better temperature and humidity control, improved airflow, increased shelving, additional work surfaces, monitoring equipment, and separate microclimates for culinary and planting garlic.

All of that equipment matters. But what the grant really gives us is time.

A garlic harvest arrives all at once.

Relationships do not.

Relationships with chefs, restaurants, home cooks, and the wider community develop gradually, and for a new producer, having the time to traverse that path thoughtfully and allow those relationships to deepen is an enormous gift.

AgWest is not simply helping us purchase equipment. They are investing in the part of farming that happens after the hopeful beginning and before a new operation is truly established. They are giving us the ability to protect what we have grown while we do the slower work of finding its place in the market.

There is still plenty of work ahead. Equipment will arrive. Electrical work will begin. Cooling, humidity, and airflow systems will be installed. The space will be divided, measured, monitored, and, because this is farming, almost certainly adjusted more than once.

But we have a plan.

Our little Curing House is becoming a place that can truly hold the harvest: protecting it, preserving it, and giving us the time to carry it forward from our field to more kitchens, more chefs, and more tables.

For a beginning farm, that is no small thing.

The summit is still ahead. Thanks to AgWest, this is a very good place to catch our breath.