All the right ingredients - Family known for producing delicious garlic in tucked-away town
By GWEN FLORIO/Photographed by ASHLEY McKEE of the Missoulian
DIXON - Doug Baty’s grandfather settled here in 1910. Nearly a century later, Baty still works the same land, his fields lush with the aromatic crop for which Wild Plum Farm is known.
No, not melons. Dixon might be tiny - about 200 people - but its variety goes beyond Harley Hettick’s deservedly renowned cantaloupes and watermelons, which get their own festival each summer.
Baty grows garlic.
There’s no festival for that. Nobody flocking to this town on the Flathead Indian Reservation for a parade in honor of the pungent bulbs. No garlic-eating contest - although, according to “The Complete Book of Garlic,” if you were going to bite into a raw bulb, you’d want to grab yourself a nice Inchelium, the kind that Doug and Antje Baty grow on the five acres of produce that largely support their family.
Antje Baty, left, and her daughter Yvonne, 6, peel garlic bulbs last week on Wild Plum Farm, their family farm, in Dixon. The Baty family plants about 18,000 garlic plants yearly and sells the bulbs to stores in Montana.
“Tasting raw garlic can very quickly become rather brutal, and a mild, less assertive garlic such as Inchelium Red can provide an abused palate a measure of relief,” according to the book by Ted Jordan Meredith published earlier this month.
Meredith described Inchelium as “pleasant,” and indeed, the fast-growing stacks of harvested bulbs beside the Batys’ barn last week wafted a sharp but agreeable scent, every bit as enticing, in its own way, as that of the sugary melons down the road.
The melons might make for a fine dessert, but if you want to make a main course sing, you’d better go for garlic.
Antje Baty wasn’t ever supposed to eat the stuff.
Born in Hamburg, Germany, she grew up at a time when her city home had its own little hayfield, where the family raised chickens and rabbits, and kept a kitchen garden.
“For me, that was enough,” said Baty, who described herself as an old-fashioned sort of child. “I wanted to be a farmer, but I was born in a city of 2 million people. ... When the modern world moved in, I thought it wasn’t necessary. I didn’t want an indoor toilet. I didn’t want those things in the grocery store. I was in awe of plants, these things that feed us.”
But - at least back then - garlic wasn’t part of a good German cook’s repertoire. “I wasn’t allowed to eat it,” she said.
When, as an adult, she finally tasted it, “my rebellious mind said, 'This is good!’ ”
By then, though, there was nowhere for her to grow it. Hamburg, already a large city, grew even more after World War II. The hayfield disappeared. Food came from the store. And Antje’s rebellious spirit propelled her from the old port city across the Atlantic Ocean, first to visit relatives in rural Iowa, then on a cross-country trip that included a stop in Montana, where she met a fellow named Doug Baty, 12 years her senior.
“Within 48 hours, we knew we wanted to make a life together,” she said. “He was 35. He knew it would be difficult to find a lady who didn’t want new furniture, nice things.”
She didn’t. She wanted exactly what Doug Baty had to offer - a life of hard outdoor work, far from cities, nary a grocery store in sight.
They had the property in Dixon, but it was no longer a working farm. Antje noticed garlic growing wild and wondered whether it would be possible to cultivate it. Not only was it possible, the Batys discovered, but the plant is uniquely suited to Montana’s climate.
“Native to Central Asia, wild garlic is subject to harsh, hot, dry summers and severe winters,” Meredith wrote.
Actually, winters in Dixon aren’t all that severe. Tucked into a fold of the Jocko Valley, wrapped in a bend of the Flathead River, the town sits in a tiny banana belt. Hence, the melons - and the Batys’ big, beautiful garlic bulbs.
If you’ve bought garlic at the Good Food Store in Missoula, there’s a good chance it was from Wild Plum Farm. The farm is among three growers the store uses for most of its locally produced garlic, said assistant produce manager Andy Thompson.
“His stuff is immaculate,” Thompson said. “Appearance-wise, if you had put something on the cover of a book, that would be it.”
Thompson contrasted the Batys’ garlic with the “small, dried up” bulbs that sometimes arrive from Mexico and Argentina.
Put that on the display table next to the Batys’ garlic, with its firm, fleshy cloves - “well, anything that shines like that, you’re going to buy it,” he said.
Antje Baty said the relationship with Good Food started years ago by handing off a grocery sack of the bulbs to the store. Now they send up to 150 pounds of garlic a week to Missoula. The Batys also sell garlic to the local cooperative, as well as to organic food stores in Helena and Bozeman. In addition to Inchelium, they grow garlic that’s come to be known as the Dixon Strain.
“We have not raised as much as we can sell,” she said. “This year, we’ll run out in November.”
By then, next year’s plants will be in the ground. The couple and their two daughters, Annika, 18, and Yvonne, 6, plant them in October by hand, 18,000 bulbs in all, and nine months later, they take them back out of the ground, also by hand - gently inserting small digging forks beneath the bulbs and easing them up out of the loamy soil.
There are machines that harvest garlic. Machines that load it. Machines that peel it.
Antje Baty shuddered. She, her daughters, and family friend Anna Krafft, 15, of Germany, sat in the shade of the barn last week, rubber gloves shielding their hands (all except for Annika, who brags of her toughness), stripping the outer peels from the bulbs, leaving them white and gleaming.
“They have to be handled really gently,” Antje Baty said, “or else they bruise.” The bruised parts dry out, making for inferior bulbs, she said - the kind too often found at the supermarket.
Such labor-intensive methods mean the yield from the Batys’ half-acre of garlic is barely a blip on the screen of the worldwide market, which features giant growers in California, themselves squeezed by increasing competition from China.
So what?
That’s Doug Baty’s attitude. The family only cultivates about 10 of its 280 acres, and half of that is grass for Annike’s horses. Five acres is planted in the garlic, seed corn, squash and paste tomatoes that provide most of the income for the family, as well as their five horses, two dogs, four barn cats, a starling and a “pet” black widow named Susie Two (there was, heaven help us, a Susie One).
“It’s a good thing to have a niche, something that you can do well,” Doug Baty said. “This size really fits us. It fits our land base. It fits our labor.”
Doug Baty once considered medical school. But that would have meant classes in the spring, when he wanted - when he needed - to be outdoors.
“I don’t think, emotionally, that I could do anything else,” he said. “I was really grateful that this place was here when I finished college.” The farm, he said, gave him “a way to live in our current world without living with imposed time schedules. Our requirements are imposed by (the demands of caring for) plants and animals, not by a boss.”
It’s a good life, he said. Not easy, though. Doug Baty is 62, Antje 50. How long do they plan on farming?
A swift smile parts Baty’s wispy white beard.
“Forever.”
It would be a stretch to say that Doug Baty’s investment in the same land his grandparents farmed signals a revival for Dixon itself. It’s hard to believe that this tidy handful of homes along Route 200 was once a thriving burg of hundreds of souls, a stop for the boats that plied the Flathead and Jocko rivers, and the headquarters for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.
“This was a really happening little town in the 1920s,” Doug Baty said.
But many of those people left when the railroad robbed the river of its traffic, and most of the rest went when the tribal headquarters moved to Pablo in the 1970s.
“It’s a place that time forgot,” said Hettick, the melon grower. “Have you ever gone to the river and seen the swirl of backwater? The water that goes around and around and around? You throw a leaf in and come back three days later, and the leaf is still there, going around and around and around.
“That’s Dixon.”
Still, noted Baty, “there are quite a few more people living here than when I came in the 1970s.”
He attributes that to the fact that the town put in a sewer and water system some years back.
“Without water and sewer, probably Dixon would have disappeared,” he said.
But it didn’t.
And so the Batys are back, and a couple of other folks have started small businesses, and Hettick’s stepsons, Faus and Guy Silvernale, have come back to be part of the melon cartel. Each year at the end of summer, the population quadruples for a day during the melon festival. Maybe some of those people will look around, like what they see - the long, looping river sparkling in the sunlight, the ragged peaks of the Missions poking up behind the rounded bald hills of the National Bison Range - and decide to stick around.
No matter what, the town will shrink by at least one person in a year or two. Annika Baty, who is in her senior year as a correspondence-course student, will go off to college, likely to Missoula, where she’ll study “something to do with biology - something with life - something with animals.” (Or, maybe, arachnids?)
She might not have homed in on her exact course of study, but her goal is clear.
When she’s done, she’s coming back to Dixon. Where, melons be damned, she’ll grow garlic.
