Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

It's that time of year again for harvesting garlic. This year we got the 
jumbo colossal garlic from California. We always find it's a lot better to 
buy the garlic from an organic market and plant instead of buying "seed" 
garlic. We do the same thing with our fingerlings. Here the garlic gets 
harvested just before the start of monsoon season in early July. Always save 
the biggest cloves for replanting Oct 15 or so..........

Barb



 If you have purple flowers forming at the top of your garlic (they're called 
scapes),cut them off for bigger bulb production.
The scapes sell in gourmet shops for $2 a dozen. They are
wonderful in stir fry, sautéed or any way imaginable. I never let them
go to waste. I also throw them on the warming shelf of my grill when
cooking steaks and garnish the meat with them and suck out the pulp
from the flower head or just eat the whole thing. Once the heads have
been cut off aprox four inches from the actual bulbils you let the
plant give all its energy to formation of bulbs not leaves. Remember
that each green leaf translates to one skin (wrapper) around the
forming bulb. So if you have 8-9 green leaves you have 8-9 wrappers.
The bottom leaves will brown completely and those wrappers will
deteriorate leaving you with fewer skins around each bulb. Over the
next couple of weeks the remaining 5-6 green leaves will begin to
brown at the tip and you will need to start thinking about harvesting
the garlic. This is where it becomes more of an art form than a
science, as you want as much bulb development as possible but at the
same time you don't want to jeopardize the wrappings around the bulb.
Four or five good wrappings will result in well cured garlic with a
solid three skin wrap which will store well. If you harvest too late
you run the risk of wrappers being broken (not hermetically sealed so
to speak). This is not all bad news as you must have cloves to replant
on October 15th and certainly the garlic with less than complete
wrappings is ideal for next years crop. You plant your biggest cloves
for next year's crop. Harvest on a dry day preferably in the early
morning or later in the day. Do not bruise the bulbs. Do not let them
lay in the hot sun. Get them in a well aired space and watch for any
mold that can occur early on in the drying process. With the extreme
wetness that we had there can be various forms of the "noble rot:
(google if interested knowing more about this). Make sure the
harvested bulbs are cleaned off (without damaging skins) of excess
soils, well aired as the plant is full of water and cured in a
moderate temp and not direct sunlight. After two or so weeks of curing
cut off the vegetation and be careful that bulbs are allowed to air
and cure sufficiently before putting them too close together as there
is still a chance for mold to develop as the bulbs are still
considered green. Do not water garlic from this point forward as we
don't need leaf production and it will only make this potentially
worse with more moisture and possible rot.


Optimal timing for your garlic harvest




Plants tell us a lot with their leaves. In the case of garlic, they
tell us when the bulb is ready for harvest. Or do they?

Scanning some of the literature written by expert growers, we saw
differing opinions on what harvest signs we should be looking for:

Garlic is mature when the tops fall over (mid July to early August).
-Eliot Coleman, Author of the Four Season Harvest
http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=kitchengarden-20&l=ur2&o=1

When half to three-quarters of the leaves turn yellow-brown, it's
harvest time.
-Organic Gardening Magazine

Each green leaf above ground represents a papery sheath around the
cloves. Once the leaf tips begin to yellow and die back, its time to
dig the garlic. The lower six to eight leaves still being fully green
indicate optimal harvest timing: This allots 5 to 7 protective
wrappers around the bulb after curing. Our harvest here in northern
New Hampshire begins the latter part of July and gets completed by the
first week of August.
-Michael Phillips
http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=kitchengarden-20&l=ur2&o=1,
Heartsong Farm

It's time to harvest garlic in the late summer when the bottom two or
three leaves have turned yellow or the tops fall over.
-Ed Smith, author of the Vegetable Gardener's Bible
http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=kitchengarden-20&l=ur2&o=1

Harvest in summer when the bottom leaves are beginning to yellow and
before more than one or two leaves turn brown (July through August).
-University of Wisconsin Cooperative Extension

Fully green, yellow, or brown: so who's right? Well, in a way, you
could say that all of them are. It depends on what your garlic goal
is. The longer you wait, the larger the bulb. The danger in waiting
too long is that the bulb will start to split apart into individual
cloves. If Michael Phillips urges an earlier harvest when the plant is
still upright and showing a lot of green, it's because he has a
different goal: long term storage. An earlier harvest helps insure
that the garlic cloves are "well-wrapped" for fall and winter feasts.

One surefire way of knowing whether your garlic is ready is to dig up
a test bulb. If it's a decent size and seems well formed, then you can
harvest the rest of your crop with confidence.

http://www.kitchengardeners.org/2007/07/timing__your_garlic_harvest.html