Garlic Harvest

 At the beginning of this week, I harvested my garlic crop.  Most of the stalks had dried off about halfway up, and it was time to dig the bulbs.  This is the first year I've tried growing garlic in the garden (because it has to be planted in the Fall, and DH may or may not get around to tilling the garden in the Fall, depending on weather, his work schedule, and his hunting schedule).  Instead, I've always grown it in one of the terraced beds in the retaining wall behind the house/garage.  Usually that gives me a so-so harvest, as it is not an easy area to water without dragging a couple hundred feet of hose and a sprinkler from either the front of the house or the south side (terraces are on the east). 

Last year, I decided I was going to plant my garlic in the spot where (someday) the greenhouse will be added on to the south side of the garden shed.  And *I* tilled that spot.  Then I cleaned the chicken coop of it's summer accumulation of bedding and added about three tractor buckets of chicken litter to my freshly tilled spot.  Chicken manure has a high nitrogen content, and garlic loves nitrogen.  Then I tilled that spot again and let it set a week or so before planting the garlic bulbs.

I planted every single bulb of garlic I had from my 2022 crop, which hadn't done all that well.  It was garlic that I'd been growing from seed stock originally purchased around 2016.  The seed stock had been grown by someone in Wisconsin that I knew from an online homesteading forum. He was known for his really good garlic.  Unfortunately, he passed away in 2021, so if I couldn't have success with the coming year's garlic crop, that would be the end of that variety for me because after his death, seed stock was no longer available.

Once the garlic was planted, three rows worth, I mulched it with several inches of straw, then covered the straw with strips of hardware cloth (leftover from an old rabbit hutch we'd dismantled years ago when the kids lost their interest in rabbits) weighed down on the edges with scrap lumber (or big rocks) in order to discourage my free ranging chickens from scratching in the straw and digging up the garlic cloves.

Then I waited.  And waited.  All through the winter. In the spring, my efforts were rewarded with garlic shoots poking up through the straw!

Then came the removal of the hardware cloth so that the shoots didn't get strangled in the wire.  And hoping the chickens were busy enough elsewhere to not come around the far side of the shed and see all that uncovered straw.  For the most part, they stayed away.

Then there was weeding, and watering, and waiting through the early part of the summer for the garlic to grow and develop.  Some of the shoots died off when I didn't get the weeds pulled in time before they crowded out the garlic.  But, for the most part, the crop grew well and thrived.  Scapes were sent up, and cut off, trying to force the energy back down into the developing bulb.  My knit garden gloves still give off the aroma of garlic from that pruning.

Finally, this week was harvest time.  I carefully loosened the soil on the edges of the rows with a spade, and pulled out the garlic by the stalks.  There were some bulbs that were the size I was used to getting in the terraced bed; in other words, okay but wimpy. But most of the bulbs were good sized.  And more than a few were nearly as big across as the palm of my hand!

This is undoubtedly the best crop of garlic I've ever grown. I harvested about 100 bulbs, most of them good sized, which gives me more than enough cloves as seed stock and to have a lot for use in canning and cooking too. 

I have been laying the garlic out daily on the (covered) front porch to cure and finish the drying down of the stalks before removing the heads.  The above picture is from the first day.  I don't have a picture from yesterday, but the stalks are 100% yellow now. More than likely I'll remove the heads tomorrow.

Then I will choose the best ones to set aside as seed stock to be planted this Fall. My supply of Martin's Garlic (the only name I know for this variety) is safe for another year!