We love to share what we love... and we love garlic and shallots! You'll find gorgeous seed garlic & shallots listed here every late Summer/early Fall. And don't forget the fertility... our Organic Garlic and Shallot Fertilizer has specially blended diverse amendments to feed both our soil and our alliums, and in turn, us!
Transcript: Glorious day has arrived, and you are so ready to finally harvest your garlic. But when do you know exactly how to harvest your garlic? And that is a wonderful question: When do you harvest your garlic? Because there’s lots of different varieties, there are lots of different maturity dates. And they’re all generally within a two – three week period, all generally around mid July. But here’s a few things to look for.
Take a look at these two varieties; this is a soft neck; there was no scape. This is a hard neck; here was the scape that we snapped off. And in general, soft necks will dry down prior to the hardnecks. And you can see, in fact, these leaves are already drying down where the lowest most leaf of this hard neck is gone. But the rest are totally green and solid still. And here’s the thing, each of these leaves corresponds with a wrapper around the bulb of your garlic. And so the trick you’re really looking for is to see when half to two thirds of these leaves have drive down sufficiently. So the corresponding wrappers around the bulb are dry enough. And at that point, it is totally marvelous ready to harvest.
If you only have, you know, less than 100 bulbs or so, it’s going to be really easy if you have one variety that clearly is ready to be harvested and another isn’t, to harvest them on different days. And often here on our farm, we grow seven-, eight-plus THOUSAND bulbs of garlic each year. And so we really try to make it one day that we harvest and know that when you do that you generally tend to sacrifice, you know –this one we’ll harvest later than is ideal. And this variety we might harvest a little earlier than is ideal. So know that if you have different varieties, it will pay you better in the long run to harvest them at the exact right time.
And here’s another thing to take a look at. Get a knife and cut into this top. And you want to see the clove development and how thoroughly the cloves are separating from one another. And this is a softneck and artichoke type. So there’s lots of different cloves. And take a look, I’m really amazed how separately, each of those cloves have their individual wrappers. And let’s just pause for a moment. Remember back in the fall when you planted your garlic and you planted one single clove. And now that clove divided in the depth of the cold of winter into all of these separate and then amazing. And so it takes a lot of energy and a lot of time for that individual for that splintered individual clove to turn into all of these separate cloves that then have their fully separate individual wrappers. And yeah, once I can fully start to separate those wrappers, because those wrappers for the last if I had opened them up a week ago even and certainly months ago, they would have been contiguous, and I wouldn’t have been able to peel it back.
But lo and behold there is a clove of beautiful garlic. And this of course since I’ve opened it up, we’ll be eating in the next few days. But if you want to store your garlic, that is an entirely separate scenario. And stay tuned for next week when we harvest all of this beautiful garlic and I’ll show you exactly how to harvest it, exactly how to store it so that you can enjoy it all winter long.
