Garlic lovers will be flocking to Clatskanie in August

Perhaps garlic flavored ice cream is not your cup of tea. But don’t knock it until you try it.

Garlicky ice cream will be among the tempting taste treats at the 9th annual Clatskanie Farmers Market Garlic Festival, to be held 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 17, at Cope’s Park.

Darro Routon and Steve Routon, founders of the event, are ready to welcome visitors to the small Columbia County town, located 35 miles east of Astoria on Highway 30.

“Darro and I have been interested in garlic for a good, long while,” Steve Routon said. “We had grown it in our market garden, then I decided it would be a great idea just to set up in the center of the Clatskanie Farmers Market.”

He added you’ll see vendors filling up the park, and also stretching along the two streets that lead to the park.

“It’s an enormous experience,” he said. There will be about 60 vendors at the event, along with plenty of arts and crafts.

The Garlic Festival is growing every year. Two years ago, the festival attracted 700 visitors. That figure ballooned last year to 2,000 visitors.

“Because of that amount of interest, we are able to get a lot of interest from garlic growers from all over,” Darro Routon said. “We have a huge garlic grower coming in from Washington, some from Eugene, then from all over the Clatskanie area.”

The festival will feature thousands of garlic bulbs of different varieties and strains, and food carts will serve breakfast, lunches and early dinners.

“We’ll have an ice cream vendor that will have several varieties of ice cream,” Darro Routon said. “Garlic ice cream will be on the menu.”

Several types of garlic will be featured at the festival, including Black Garlic, which is an intense, processed garlic that becomes black after being fermented. There will also be pickled garlic and salsas that include garlic.

If sampling different varieties of the ingredient is not your jam, there will also be musical acts at the festival. Briar and Joe, from Seattle, will perform acoustic music and the Lorna Baxter Septet will entertain with jazz and blues.

“We also will have a Libation Garden, so we’ll have locally produced wine and beer,” Darro Routon said. “People can get food, they can get something to drink, set in a beautiful park that’s right in the oxbow of the Clatskanie River.”

She added, “People will have a really great experience coming to a rural area of Oregon, and experiencing something that’s unique to that area.”