Garlic harvest...

[NwMtGardener]

Just referencing this tread to figure out about my garlic harvest...i'm ready to pull the one variety i planted last fall today. Funny thing about my varieties...i planted 3 kinds, last fall. And for once, i thought "i'm going to be organized and write a tag that says when i planted, and what variety it is" so i grabbed a sharpie and some white plastic lids. Wrote everything down, because this is my 1st time growing garlic, and i wanted to figure out what variety i like best. So...this spring, i realize, all the sharpie marks had worn off! So i have these blank white lids in the garden, rather pointless!

Speaking of Point, the point of this thread is to ask about curing, and the garlic greens, or tops. One variety the tops are definitely dying, so i'm sure they're ready to harvest. So...i see thistle cures hers for a month. Do i cut the greens off before this? After? Does it matter?

 

[JimWWhite]

Lesa, everyone but me must be able to see your garlic pic. All I see is a little thin box with a graphic in it but no pic. Anyways, I have no idea why but we didn't get any garlic in this year. Last year Teresa stuck a clove in each corner of every raised box in the garden and we still have some left in a plastic tub in the pantry. Hopefully when we plant the fall garden in late August or early September there'll be garlic going in the ground.

Hope to see the pic you posted to see what everyone's raving about.

Jim

 

[Chickie'sMomaInNH]

actually Jim, this is an old thread from last year. so she might have removed the pic from her uploads since it was originally posted. i'm sure we'll get to see some nice harvests for this year.

 

[lesa]

Oh, I probably did remove that to make room for other pics... I had a really nice harvest this year. But, you will have to take my word for it, since I didn't take a pic. I leave the tops on until the garlic is cured. It is laying on a screen door in an old carriage house right now. Plenty of ventilation. Around September I will get it and cut the tops off and store it in the basement for winter use. I am surprised you didn't end up with any garlic, Jim. I wonder if you had enough drainage? Not many critters will bother garlic. The only thing I can think of is rot?? You should definitely try again. I throw the cloves in the ground in October and like magic have garlic in late June or July.

 

[plainolebill]

Pencil works better than a sharpie on plastic plant stakes believe it or not.

I've harvested all my garlic other than the Killarney Red. I bundle it and hang it from the joists in my garage with a small fan running to circulate air. Smells pretty good in there.

Garlic is kind of tricky to harvest, too soon and you don't get maximum bulb size/development - too late and you lose wrappers or the heads can split open shortening storage life. I'd rather dig sooner than later. I just read a great book about garlic and learned some things that I didn't know - each leaf of the plant is a wrapper for the bulb, that's why you don't want to wait until the tops are entirely dead. Last year I procrastinated and some of my hardnecks split open or didn't have more than one good wrapper.

 

[Chickie'sMomaInNH]

how moist if your soil Bill? i just wanted to get and idea of how well the Killarney reds will do for me on another property next year. that property gets a lot of run off around the area i planned my garden from what my dh and a couple of neighbors tell me. it's fertile ground but it stays moist most of the year because of this. i'll be amending the soil with my coop clean out so it might help dry out the area a little better for the garlic.

is that the Growing Great Garlic book you're talking about? i'm deciding if i should get that or if i can find it locally at my book exchange.

 

[lesa]

Chickie's drainage is super important for garlic, and most garden crops for that matter. What I would recommend is hilling the rows you are going to plant. If you have mounds of soil and then aisles, your veggie roots aren't sitting in water. There have been years when my garden aisles look like canals-but my veggies are high and drained.

 

[Chickie'sMomaInNH]

i've always done the hills and trenches in my garden so no problem there for me. this soil is quite loamy so it's not the usual sand i'm used to where my parents live or the house we're currently in which are both by a river and a brook. our other house where the garlic will be growing isn't close to a river but it is on a slight slope and just downhill from the farm area. the dandelions and ferns were loving the area before i tilled it. but it won't be a pool of water there, that tends to collect a little further down in a corner of the land before it dries up. it is more seasonal run off than year round.

 

[lesa]

Sounds like it will be a perfect spot!

 

[plainolebill]

Our soil is clay with standing water during the rainiest part of the winter so we have raised beds for drainage and so that we can plant before the soil would ordinarily be workable.

Like Lesa said.