But thousands of those devotees were on hand last weekend for the East Coast's biggest garlic celebration, the 16th annual Hudson Valley Garlic Festival in Saugerties, N.Y., a usually sleepy town 100 miles up the Hudson River from Manhattan.

o	HANGING OUT Keith Stewart has some 36,000 bulbs curing from every available inch of his old dairy barn in Greenville, N.Y. CREAMY ESSENCE Bar Jamón serves a Catalan-style tortilla with aoli.

bruschetta, burgers, bratwurst, pickles, chocolate and mashed potatoes. Boy Scouts served garlicky beef on a stick.

At dozens of stalls, shoppers reached for raw garlic samples and queried farmers about New York's growing conditions. "We have the right climate, the right rainfall and some darn good soil," said Stan Erkson, who brought a ton of garlic from his Fort Plain farm.

That enthusiasm for local garlic, at every stage of its life cycle, is a staple of restaurant kitchens around New York.

After a dormant winter, green garlic's mild bulbs and scallionlike leaves flavor spring sauces at Blue Hill in Greenwich Village. When curlicue scapes shoot up from summer bulbs, they are blanched and wrapped around lamb at Eleven Madison Park. Even when garlic matures and resembles its supermarket siblings, chefs like Shea Gallante of Cru in Greenwich Village demand the local. "It's spicy and extremely aromatic," Mr. Gallante said of the garlic he buys from a Dutchess County farmers' cooperative.

Still, Saugerties is not Gilroy, Calif., where the nation's largest garlic festival has been held for the last 26 summers. But that may be a good thing.

After decades of successive plantings, the soil in Gilroy, America's garlic capital, is riddled with disease, sapping its ability to compete with China, the world's largest garlic producer. From 1997 to 2002 Chinese garlic imports rose to $20.5 million from $42,000, while the value of California's garlic crop fell by $70 million. Over the last three years garlic acreage in California has been cut in half, said Michael J. Coursey, a partner at the law firm of Collier Shannon Scott in Washington, which represents the California Fresh Garlic Producers Association.

Don Christopher of Gilroy, the founder of Christopher Ranch, one of the country's largest fresh garlic producers and packers, said his company had reduced the amount of garlic it grew and had started to sell Chinese garlic.

While New York is the country's fourth largest garlic producing state, after California, Nevada and Oregon, its farmers don't fear competition. "We're a different market," said David Stern, an organic farmer from Rose, N.Y., and co-founder of the Garlic Seed Foundation, an unofficial trade organization. "It's a specialty crop.

New York's 240 garlic farms harvested 265 acres, while California's 339 harvested 28,690 acres in 2002, according to the federal Agriculture Department. The high productivity is because the garlic varieties in California are soft-neck types, which can be planted and harvested mechanically. The cold winters in New York are better suited to hard-neck garlic, which has fewer, chubbier and juicier cloves with a central stalk that shoots up a scape in June.

Hard-neck garlic (which enjoys a fan base among small growers in California, as well) cannot be mechanically farmed. The scapes must be snipped so the plant directs growth underground, and cloves require careful planting, root side down, which can be achieved only by hand.

New York growers harvest bulbs in July and August, but chefs say the best time to enjoy them is now, after they have cured for two months. Their flavor is fully developed and the bulbs still burst with juice.

Curing garlic, which is essential for winter preservation, is a delicate, and idiosyncratic, art. Some braid multiple bulbs by the leaves and lay these on racks in well-ventilated rooms. Others hang sheaves from nails in open sheds. The goal is to dry the hard-neck's stem as quickly as possible, rendering it airtight and bacteria free.

But recent rainy autumns in upstate New York increased exposure to bacteria. "I've known people who've lost their entire crop in storage," said Mr. Stern, who is talking with Danish tulip producers to replicate their gentle air-movement systems for preserving the flowers' bulbs.

Keith Stewart, who is known for his earth-crusted organic garlic at the Union Square Greenmarket, has some 36,000 bulbs hanging from every available inch of his old dairy barn in Greenville, N.Y. Last Monday he stood under what looked like a row of empty nooses, which represented the few thousand cured bulbs he had already sold.

He has been rooting through the rafters for next year's planting stock, some 7,000 bulbs he will bury in a hilly field beside some poplar trees in October. The crop will sit acres away from last year's, an old organic farmer's trick to avoid the sort of soil problems Gilroy has had.

Mr. Stewart grows a variety called rocambole, favored among chefs for its big cloves and sprightly flavor. His entire crop stems from a bag of bulbs bequeathed to his wife from an Italian neighbor, who claimed they had been smuggled over from Calabria.

Rocamboles, Prussian Whites, German Musics, the hundreds of types of garlic seem as varied as the autumn leaves. Except, it turns out, they're not.

In July, Gayle Volk, an agriculture department scientist who works out of the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colo., published the results of a two-year study in which DNA tests confirmed only six different types: rocambole, porcelain, Asiatic, purple stripe, marble purple stripe, and artichoke.

"A lot of the growers are passing around the same stuff," Dr. Volk said in a telephone interview. Different varieties grown on the same farm will be more similar than the same variety grown on different farms, she said. Nurture over nature.

To garlic collectors with hundreds of garlic cultivars, this is hobby-shattering news. But to farmers who have long scratched their heads wondering why small purple cloves purchased from seed catalogs turned out bulbs that were large and white, it's a long-sought explanation.

This discovery matters little to chefs, even local garlic enthusiasts. "It's hard to taste the subtle differences," said Dan Barber of Blue Hill, who harvested 1,000 pounds of hard-necks at Stone Barns farm, where he has a second restaurant of the same name. But he said he could distinguish a few, like his coveted Italian Red, in a blind tasting.

In many kitchens, soft necks are still standard. At 66, Jean-Georges Vongerichten's Chinese restaurant in TriBeCa, Alan Yu, the restaurant's chef de cuisine, flies through 50 to 60 pounds of whole bulbs and packaged peeled cloves weekly.

In dishes like crispy garlic chicken, the chef blanches cloves three times before frying, a trick he picked up in his family's Cantonese restaurants in Washington. "Definitely, it reduces its bitterness," Mr. Yu said.

Peter Hoffman, the chef of Savoy in SoHo, said his garlic, from Mr. Stewart, needs no blanching. "There's nothing bitter there," he said. Anita Lo, chef of Annisa in Greenwich Village, gets hers from the backyard. She planted some of Mr. Stewart's cloves in her garden last fall, harvested the bulbs this summer, and cured them for fall specials, like pork belly slow-roasted with garlic and fennel seed.

"With garlic this good," she said, "you can eat it raw."

Customers sitting at Casa Mono's kitchen-flanked bar in the Gramercy Park neighborhood watch Andy Nusser using raw garlic every which way: a small square mince offsets earthy mushrooms, garlic-parsley oil adds bite to razor clams' brine, raw clove rubs season crispy pan con tomate. In all of these dishes, garlic's fresh flavor flashes up front, then steps back.

"I was so unaware of how much I used garlic," Mr. Nusser recalled of his Italian tenure at Babbo in Greenwich Village. When he switched to Casa Mono and Bar Jamón's Spanish kitchen, he said, he surprised himself by using even more garlic, more ways.

His favorite is whole cloves steeped in simmering sherry, which yields a sweet background for patatas bravas and braised cockscomb. He whirls these butter-soft bulbs into spiky-sweet aioli.

When asked if customers complain about all this garlic, he paused and said, flatly, "It hasn't happened."

That's great news for growers like Mr. Stewart. When he first planted garlic in 1988, he said, "We were the counterculture of vegetable growers, the rebels."

The National Agricultural Statistics Service reported only 11 acres of New York garlic in 1992.

Since that time, annual consumption in the United States has leapt from  3/8 of a pound per person to 3.1 pounds, and many local farmers say they will sell out by December, at $5 to $9 per pound.

But for all the work garlic takes, it's a crop you can make money on, Mr. Stern said. In New York, that is.