Garlic Harvest

Garlic's growing season has come to an end.  It started last fall when I planted the garlic cloves at the end of September.  Some of the garlic was left over from last year's crop - though by that time many of the cloves had gotten soft so there weren't many salvageable cloves.  The rest of the garlic was from heads that I bought at the local farmer's market.  I made sure to choose the largest heads I could find.  These made the biggest, healthiest heads of garlic this year.  I only wish that I could remember what kind of garlic it was, but at this point it doesn't really matter.  We are going to use it one way or another.

This is the garlic bed in April, shortly after I removed the hoop house that covered them through the winter.  They actually sprouted last fall about a month after I planted them.  They grew very slowly through the winter and held up beautifully through the cold snaps we had.  They even continued to grow after the couple late season snows that covered them.

 

Here they are in May coming right along.

 

One month later they have grown a couple inches taller and filled out with a few more leaves.

 

A couple weeks later the garlic have reached their peak.  The bottom leaves have turned brown and many have fallen off.  I dug up one of the larger looking plants just to see how filled out the bulbs were.  It looked gorgeous and it tasted divine.

 

So this weekend I spent a day harvesting my garlic crop.  The ground was still a bit wet from the last watering, but they came out fairly easily.  It was cleaning off the roots that was the time consuming part.

Here is a freshly dug bunch.

 

This is the entire crop for this year after the first run through.  After they spent a few hours in the sun to dry out I pulled the remainder of the dirt out of the roots.  The next step is to let them cure for the next few weeks.  Last year I made the mistake of letting them cure in the sun and ended up losing a large portion of that crop.  This year they are going in our back room where they can dry out of the sun with a fan to help air circulation.

 

 

Today I think I counted upwards of 150 heads of garlic drying on the floor.  There were a good number of larger heads that I will save to plant in a few short months.  The smallest bulbs will be made into garlic powder.  The medium sized bulbs will hopefully be good keepers that we can use through the fall and winter in many delicious dishes.  Happily out of all the garlic I planted only a handful were thrown into the "must use first" group.  These were the sickly looking plants or plants that lost their leaf stalk so wouldn't cure properly.  These bulbs will hang out in the fridge until they are all used up and we can move on to bigger and better bulbs.