Farmers market find: bouquets of garlic from Chubby Dove

By AMY SOWDER

There’s a stand at the North Salem Farmers Market where the garlic comes with a bonus: a handful of colorful dried flowers tucked into the bundle, just because.

Ariana Scecchitano displays her garlic bouquets at her stall at the North Salem Farmers Market. AMY SOWDER PHOTO

“I hang dry flowers in my living room and need something to do with them,” said Ariana Scecchitano, who farms alongside her partner, Todd Stevens, at Chubby Dove Farm in Highland Mills, an hour west of North Salem.

The two started the farm in November 2024, growing what Scecchitano calls “very organic” produce — using organic methods without the official USDA paperwork to match. They moved to Highland Mills from North Salem in January, and garlic came with them as the anchor crop.

“When we moved from North Salem, garlic was the easiest thing to grow,” Scecchitano said. “Plant it in the fall. Harvest your crop in the summer. It’s my favorite crop, and it definitely sells.”

Stevens, known around these parts as “Farmer Todd,” has some retail celebrity in his back pocket. As produce manager at Harvest Moon Farm & Orchard in North Salem, he ended up sharing a field with Big Bird, Rosita and Elmo, joining a five-episode “Sesame Street” arc filmed outdoors during the first COVID-19 pandemic summer. He explained tomatoes to a giant yellow bird on national television.

His real love, though, is dirt over deli counters. 

“If you’re into farming, you’re somewhat stubborn and independent,” Scecchitano said, describing the pull that eventually drew him back into the field full time.

Garlic, it turns out, is a plant with a split personality.

“It’s a two-crop plant,” Scecchitano said while arranging flowers at her vendor booth before the crowds poured in. “You get garlic scapes in June and garlic in late July and August. If I had my way, I’d just grow garlic, flowers and honey.”

That two-part harvest is a hardneck garlic specialty. Softneck varieties, the kind bagged and shrink-wrapped in most supermarkets, skip the scape stage entirely. Hardnecks send up a curling flower stalk that farmers cut off before it straightens, both because it’s tasty on its own and because removing it pushes the plant’s energy back into the bulb, sometimes yielding bulbs up to 30% bigger. Scecchitano’s timing cue is simple: “Cut while the stem is pretty curly.”

Garlic’s growing arc is unusual for a vegetable. It goes into the ground in fall, not spring, needing a stretch of cold to trigger proper bulb formation. 

“It likes the split between the cloves that happens when overwintering,” Scecchitano said. “Garlic grows like tulips, wild onions and daffodils — any bulb.”

By midsummer, the plant tells you it’s ready.

“They’ll start browning at the end,” Scecchitano said. “As the plant grows, the scape grows. As the tips of the leaves of garlic start to brown, then you know to harvest.”

Once it’s dug, garlic needs to sit and dry, a process called “curing” that can take three weeks or longer depending on humidity.

“You want the stem to dry out entirely,” Scecchitano said. “That cures it for storage. It will last a long time if they’re stored in a cool, dry spot with no direct sunlight.” 

Skip that step and the bulbs are “really susceptible to mold.”

Garlic’s résumé stretches back … a bit further than this farm. Egyptian laborers ate it for strength, and cloves turned up in King Tutankhamun’s tomb. Greek Olympians chewed it before competing, an early attempt at performance enhancement, and Hippocrates prescribed it. That reputation holds up under modern scrutiny too. Recent research links garlic to real drops in cholesterol and blood pressure. And allicin, the compound behind its bite, shows antimicrobial activity that bacteria struggle to develop resistance against.

That bite doesn’t exist in a whole clove, by the way. Garlic only turns pungent once it’s cut or crushed, triggering a reaction between two compounds that otherwise sit apart. Cook a clove whole, and it stays mild and sweet. Chop it and let it rest before it hits the pan, and you get the sharper flavor most recipes are chasing.

Chubby Dove’s garlic sticks around as long as the markets do, or until it sells out. After farmers markets close for the season, Scecchitano said, they sometimes sell their crop at Mount Kisco Seafood.

That farmers market is getting a lot more chances to sell it, though. North Salem Farmers Market ran monthly for two years, but demand pushed it to a weekly schedule this year. It’s now every Saturday through Oct. 10, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., in Croton Falls, with more than 25 vendors, live music, kids’ activities and, on a good day, an axe craftsman carving handles on-site.

As for the farm’s name, that’s its own small story. 

“Todd would call me ‘little dove’ in Spanish, which also means popcorn,” Scecchitano said. “He wanted to call the farm Little Dove, but it sounded too pilgrim-y to me. And me being self-deprecating, I thought Chubby Dove.

“When you see a dove, you want to see a plump bird, not an anemic bird. Then you’re concerned about it.”

Chubby Dove Farm is located at 22 Sweet Clover Road, Highland Mills. The North Salem Farmers Market is located between Back and Lumber streets in the back parking lot of the Croton Falls train station.