Warm weather moved garlic harvest day to two weeks earlier than last season. Gardeners were ready!
Gardeners harvest what they want of most crops as they’re ripe and ready. Garlic is one of our share-divided crops: We harvest it all at once and divide it by the number of gardener households. This season, there were eighteen shares.
For gardeners of all ages and abilities, garlic comes out of the ground easily, Just wrap two hands around the stalk and pull.
Each type of garlic we grow—Jell strain, Moreno hillside, porcelain, and elephant garlic—is separated into two piles: seed to plant for next season and shares for gardeners to take home.
Nearly every gardener attended garlic-harvest day. Here are three shares of garlic and yellow onions (we’ll harvest red onions and shallots soon) awaiting pickup.
The heads that will be separated into garlic seeds (1 clove = 1 seed) are drying indoors. In the fall, once frosts begin but before the ground freezes, we’ll plant next season’s crop. We wait so the seeds don’t sprout before winter but rather begin growing in early spring.
The rest of the garlic, divided into shares, goes home with gardeners. Garlic is delicious fresh. Any that doesn’t get eaten right up can be dried for months and months of storage. Garlic is one of the garden’s most successful crop and a gardener favorite too.
Here’s how one gardener stores garden garlic in a basement mechanical room. Garlic is delicious fresh, right out of the ground. Because our garlic harvest is more than most gardeners’ households can use up while it’s fresh, drying, or curing, the garlic in a dry, airy space preserves it for many months, sometimes more than a year. The longer it cures, the sharper the taste, Yum!
