Garlic Harvest 2010

Yesterday we had the kids harvest all the garlic and weed the back-most garden.  Not as punishment for anything, but because it needed doing and Bill and I have been working on the house.

So here's our haul:

There were four or five other heads of garlic we'd picked a few days earlier, to make room for the squash or a tomato plant or something, so those, plus all this, comes to about fifty heads or bulbs of garlic.  YAY, GARLIC!  I laid them all out on an overturned plastic sled in the sun to dry for a while.  After that I was able to knock off any dirt still clinging to them.

We're giving a couple to my dad to plant in the fall, and a couple to a friend of ours, and we'll save some for ourselves to plant, and then the rest will be for cooking. 

I might take some of them and roast them, puree them with olive oil and then freeze the puree in ice cube trays.  I love having roasted garlic on hand.  So yummy mixed into just about anything - a couple cubes added to whatever pasta sauce I'm making, or blended with herbs and tossed with sliced, roasted potatoes, or added to the pan when I'm making gravy. 

We'd cut and cooked most of the garlic scapes - the seed pods that grow from the garlic plant - but these two were late bloomers, so I just let them go - and we've got these mini little garlic bulbs now. 

The next step in the whole garlic process was to let them cure.  Basically what's happening here is the outer layers of skin dry out.  This protects the inner layers from mold and allows you to keep them a nice, long time (if you don't use them up quickly). 

You need to have good air flow around all the garlic, otherwise you could have areas that remain damp and are more prone to mildew and rotting. 

I'd seen something online that someone had built for this purpose - two long pieces of wood spaced maybe an inch apart and held together somehow (I'm so technical here, I know) and you just hang the garlic in the space so the head rests on the wood and the stalk hangs below.  Air circulates, the garlic dries, and yee-ha, you're all set.

I didn't feel like building one like that, so I poked around in the garage to see what I could find that would serve the same purpose. 

So what you see in the images below is the mattress support from one of the kids' cribs.  It's sitting on an old ironing board.  I've used tape to make the spaces in the mattress support narrower, and then I poked the garlic through.  I spaced the garlic so that no bulbs were touching each other.  And that's it.  Pretty simple, right?

Same view in the next shot, but I used a flash, just in case the above image was too dark.

And that's the story of this year's garlic harvest! 
 

Comments

[twitter.com/josordoni]

that is cleverer than clever - you are a clever girl!

[Judith]

I've always wanted to grow garlic, but I don't know where to start. Should I start with seeds or the actual clove? What time of year would be the best time to start?

[Maria]

here in Malta (Europe, not the town in the US) we actually hang them the other way round, as farmers say that the bulb keeps taking nutrients from the stalk (and in fact they do tend to get bigger). After some time the stalk turns brown and dries, and it pretty much falls off.

Ours have already reached that stage, otherwise I would have posted a photo of our bunch.

@Judith
I'm no expert but over here we use the actual clove. In fact, if you leave cloves out, after a while they start growing! I don't think we've ever used seeds, so I can't comment about that :)

[Jayne]

We plant the cloves, not seeds. And we plant them in the fall - October, I think. Spaced about 6 apart and a couple inches deep, pointy end up. Cover, water, and ignore them. They might even start sprouting in the fall, which is fine. Just leave them alone through the winter and theyll be fine. Weve harvested ours about the end of June, but yours may be ready sooner, given the warmer climate. You wait til a bunch of the leaves go yellow or brown and droopy, and then its time to pull them. Good luck!

[Brittany McClure]

I recently got married and my husband and I moved into a new house and discovered that next to my newly planted garden there was garlic.....! I harvested for the first time last week and was wondering how should I start my next batch and when? I read some of the comments before that you can start it by using the cloves but can you use the seeds?

[Jayne]

Hi Brittany,

What a great find!

Ive got absolutely no experience in growing garlic from seeds. As I understand things (given my limited garlic-growing experience, of course), seed garlic is merely garlic (the individual cloves) used to grow more garlic. So if you want to grow garlic again, just choose the best head of garlic youve harvested and let that dry out until the stalks are brown, cut about an inch or so above the garlic bulb or head, and store in a cool, dry place (we keep ours in a brown paper bag). Then, in the fall, we break the garlic apart and plant the outer, larger cloves. Those are the seeds. There are also plenty of websites out there devoted to growing garlic - Id check those out, too. Good luck!