About Golden Acres

Golden Acres Farm is a one-hundred acre family farm situated in the rich farmlands of  Southern Ontario.  The Fleischauer family has been farming here for four generations.  The current owners, Robert & Dianne Fleischauer, began transitioning the farm to organic in 1989, and have been successfully growing certified organic field crops since 1998.  The crop rotation and management system that they developed made it easy for their daughters, Sheri and Julie, to get involved, and start growing garlic on a small market scale. 
  The garlic did not begin as a business venture, and in fact, Sheri and Julie stumbled into it quite innocently when a neighbor persuaded Dianne to grow just twelve kinds of garlic.  Included were two softneck strains that they braided without really thinking about it.  The other subtleties and extravagant differences of the garlic varieties emerged like a magic show as they got to know and appreciate the diversified crop they were growing. 
  In 2006 Sheri and Julie had 1/10 of an acre planted in twenty-five strains of garlic.  That was enough to just slightly exceed the family's new-found appetite for roasted garlic on baked potatoes, so we shared a few bulbs with some other growers, and gained a few new garlic strains, and friends, in the process.
  A few years later, the Stratford Garlic Festival started up right on our door step, and we sold our garlic there for 13 years in a row.  We also offer an annual seed garlic catalogue, with shipping available to anywhere in Canada. You can subscribe to receive our email catalogue here, or check out our Catalogue page.

To contact Julie: julie.goldenacres@gmail.com,  or 519-588-5290.

Golden Acres Farm is located at 2579 Line 47, Gads Hill, ON  N0K 1J0

Find on google maps

These are the Garlic Strains that we grew for our 2023 harvest, including test plots.

Porcelain:
Angelo's
Anthony's Italian     
Armenian

Brad Croatia
Chiloe
Crystal White
Eureka Duncan

Fishlake #3
Floha
French Pink
Goergian Crystal
Georgian Fire
Great Northern
Ivan
Leningrad
Moravia

Music 
Newfoundland Porcelain
Newfoundland Tall

Newfie Goldstrike (yellow variegated leaves from Newfoundland Porcelain)
Northern Quebec

Polish Jen
Polish Hardneck
Portugal 1 Azores
Portugal 2

Prussian White
Romanian Red
Sweet German

Ukrainian Mavniv

Wild Buff
Yampolskij
Yugoslavian Porcelain

Marbled Purple Stripe:
Bogatyr
Brown Rose

Central Siberian
Choparsky
Duganskij
Eureka Darwin
Guatemalan Ikeda
Irkutsk

Khabar

Kostyn's Red Russian
Metechi
Red Russian
Ural Mountain

Purple Stripe:
Bousfield
Chesnok Red
Deerfield
Persian Star
Red Grain

Shatilli

Rocambole:
Anna's Hungarian
Belarus
Carpathian
Czech
German Brown

German Red
Hungarian Kiss
Killarney Red
Marino
Mediterranean
Newfoundland Heritage
Puslinch ( Ontario Giant)
Spanish Roja

Zagreb Croatia

Asiatic:
Asian Tempest
Korean Mountain

Korean Purple
Pyong Vang (Pyong Yang)

Creole:
Aglio Rosso
Ail rose de Lautrec
Ajo Rojo
Barcelona Red Spanish
Burgundy
Prescadero Red
Spanish Benitee


Turban:
Basque

Chinook
Cuban
Keeper
Thai
Tuscan
Uzbek Turban
Xian

Artichoke (softneck):
Ann's Italian
Atwater
French Violet
Kettle River Giant
Red Toch
Sicilian Gold
Transylvanian

Silver Skin (softneck):
Chilean Silver
Eureka Danaerys
L'ail rose du Tarn
Mother of Pearl
Nootka Rose

Western Rose

Others:

Beletic Croatia
Marie's Lebanon
Tibetan
Elephant Garlic
Ural Mist

In our 2014 growing season, we maintained a total of 110 strains of garlic, including cultivars from nine different varieties, as well as a few strains that could not be classified.  

2015 fall planting weather was warm and sunny like we hadn't had it in years. A leisurely time we had, getting the cloves tucked in.
The next summer started to get dry, and kinda stayed that way. Luckily we had a nice rain before harvest, otherwise the hard, dry ground would have made both hand digging, and lifting the garlic with the tractor-pulled unit much more energy consumptive.

2016 planting happened a bit earlier than it needed to, according to the number of nice sunny days we had afterward. Some of the garlic grew nice little four inch leaves before the winter set in. I never worry too much about that though, because the harvest was quite nice.

2017 - 2018 Best germination/lack of winter kill in a couple of years. Surprised me, (Julie) as there was nearly flooding in spring, and lots of freezing and thawing. Spring held off for a long time, and summer was short, hot and dry, right up to garlic harvest. But you'd hardly know it, the bulbs were nice sized. The late ones got some rain, just before harvest, and it stayed wet into the fall.

2018 - 2019 I had plans to try planting a bit later than I usually do, but ended up planting September 18 - 20th, which was on time, if not early, compared to the last couple of years. Fall was wet wet wet! We were super lucky to get the garlic planted. A lot of farmers struggled to get the corn and beans and other late crops harvested.
Spring was a carryover of more of the same. Many flowers and bushes that bloom in early spring were delayed by as much as two weeks. But then it warmed up, and the garlic was nice and tall. 

2020 - I feel like we had two springs, and two falls...snow at Mother's day changed the garlic from green to a sickly yellow for a couple days, and then back to green as the warm weather finally showed up for good. Then it was hot...hot...hot...and dry. We were more fortunate than our neighbours two roads south, because we managed to be in the path of a few mini storms...and one declared tornado (F0 or F1, I forget what it was classified as, but it took down a couple of trees across the road and decimated a barn NW of us on the other side of the highway). Even the fall was dry, and it took a long time to reset the moisture levels deep in the soil, it was that depleted by all the heat and lack of rain fall. What a crop of garlic though! Luckily it stormed a bit, days before harvest, or I'd have needed a chisel to dig most of it up out of our lovely clay loam soil. (Clay is good for holding moisture, but it can get pretty solid during a drought.)

2021  Every year is an education, when farming! Years of counting cloves per pound and I still get caught by surprise to discover that the cloves were larger, and so, fewer per pound. Luckily I had enough seed to fill my alotted garlic plot size  of 24 single rows, 300 feet long, including a space for spring planting the Creoles and Silverskins. Spring planting was a dream this year! The ground was so soft and dry. I have never spring planted as early as March 21, and certainly not in a T-Shirt. As of April 10th, those little spring cloves were just coming up, and the fall planted cloves were about six inches out of the ground. The whole plot was tine-weeded twice - another first - usually the soil is too wet or too chunky at this stage, and then hand weeded throughout the summer. When it is hard to trust the calendar with phenomenal weather like this, I put more trust in the wisdom of the plants and flowers, they usually know what's going on better than the rest of us ;-)

2021 - 2022  When you farm with the same crops in one location, long enough, you learn to trust the method - Sept 20 is the time to plant. We rarely get another shot of good weather to dry the soil up after that, and this year was no exception. A lot of rain was forecasted, but the amount still took us by surprise. We planted nearly all of the garlic on Sept 19 and 20th. By Sept 22nd, half of the plot was under water from 5 inches of rain that fell in a day and a half. Luckily it drained off quickly (thank you drainage tile!!!) and the rocamboles had a 1/2 inch sprout 1 week later. By October 8th, many hardnecks were up out of the ground. I planted the Turbans by hand on October 1st, in a short, semi-dry period, and they also emerged by Oct 10th...which was what I was trying to avoid by planting later, but alas! They are so eager to sprout! 

2022  One of the longest drought summers we've had for a while. Our clay soil got pretty hard, and I hand dug a good portion of the garlic before realizing that the undercutter actually could get in the hard, dry ground. Amazingly the garlic looked fine, and was really good seed. I found that the eating garlic did not keep very well however, and we made a lot of garlic preserves and black garlic out of it by January. Our planting weather in the fall was also very leisurely and dry.

2023  Our water table came back up this year, thankfully, and the garlic took it's sweet time drying down in the field, thanks to an abundance of moderate rains spread consistently throughout the months of June and July. I find that later harvests usually mean bigger bulbs. Some of the Porcelains in particular are exceptional in size, and we are fortunate so far to have decent drying weather to cure them.