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Transcript: Curing hardneck, garlic. And here are the four things to keep in mind. You want to find a place that is warm, that is dry, that is out of the direct sun and has lots of great airflow. And so once you harvest it, we immediately cure it. If you even let it sit in a small pile, or even overnight, you think you don’t have time. That is actually one of the worst things that you can do for your garlic, it will create so much additional heat. And the chances of it rotting are great. Or being more susceptible to little bits of rot. That will mean that you still have garlic for a few months, but not for the winter. And so be sure that when you’re harvesting your garlic, make enough time in your life to not only harvest but be able to set your garlic up to cure all in that same day.
And if you only have a few slash if you have a ton of screenspace by all means set them individually, singly on those screens. But if you have a ton and you have a barn with marvelous rafters as we do, or another way to hang it, I highly recommend that you hang them. You can see I have these beautiful heads of garlic hung on just some baling twine that I’ve tied around 10 to 12 stems and I’ve tied it super tight as tight as I possibly could. And because you can already see they’re quite loose. And that’s because when we hung these up, there was still quite a bit of green and these stems in the upper leaves. They were still very turgid and so full of water. So by even yanking down as hard as I possibly could, they’re still that that looseness, which if you do it as hard as you can, that’s totally fine. Because even though it’s a little loose, there’s no way that’s coming out.
As I was bundling these, we took the time and we trimmed the roots off first. And that’s because when you freshly harvest your garlic, those roots are nice and pliable, they’re soft. And here even a handful of days after they’ve been curing. They get quite dry and leathery. You can totally cut them at this stage or in a week in three weeks. But they continue to get more tough and you’ll need sharper equipment. So I highly recommend when they’re soft and pliable just after you harvest them. Make it part of your routine to cure them, without excessive roots — we leave about a half inch of the roots still on.
And anything else you need to know: out of the direct sun is so key, the sun would make the cloves green. If you’re eating your garlic throughout the winter and noticing that there is green in the cloves, that means that it had too much light in the curing process and chances are they won’t store that much past December.
And you want it to be warm, warm but not too hot. Anything above 90 even 85 degrees can easily damage the garlic and it won’t cure down as well.
And you want there to be tons of great airflow. There are 1,2,3,4 we have a half dozen fans blowing on thousands of bulbs of garlic here in this barn. And if it was a larger barn, if we had more garlic, I would have more box fans. We have them hung leveraged in interesting places so that we’re getting the maximum airflow all the time.
And in general, if you want to dry something down that’s sensitive to heat, you can’t use heat to dry it. Air is excellent. with air wicks away moisture. Think of the last time you were in a desert. If you were so fortunate to have been in a desert recently. And you feel those winds and it just crazy. You can feel the water wicking out of your face out of your mouth out of your brain. And so yes, subject to your garlic to that kind of curing process. Tons of airflow will help it dry down that much more quickly.
And And one final piece friends, you want to check in on your garlic regularly. Like we often will check in to make sure the fans are still running. I’ll check in to make sure that it’s actually drying down and not actually like staying soft and potentially starting to mold. I’ll just check in on it in the same way that sure, A Watched pot never boils, but you want to be really, really sure that everything is going going well with them. The most common pitfalls of curing garlic are this, all of this moisture up top. It’s too constricted and there isn’t enough airflow up here, whether you’ve had them laid out singly on a screen or if you have them in bundles. And so making sure that these tops aren’t rotting and aren’t creating these moist pockets is the is one of the main problems that people have and know that if you do, there’s no reason to not eat the garlic right now. But if you want to be storing your garlic for winter, here are the Hot Tips, and now you know.
