As the garlic harvest work party began, rain fell steadily.
Gardeners wondered whether many team members would be up for a very wet harvest.
No worries. Gardeners turned out for one of the most fun and satisfying work parties of the season.
Garlic is easy to harvest: Just pull it out of the ground, lay it gently in a wheelbarrow, and bring it back to the work area. Then the sorting begins.
Gardeners reserve the largest, best-looking garlic heads as seed for next season’s crop. The rest of the harvest is divided into shares, one for each gardener household. This season, a share is about eighty heads of garlic. The photo above right shows several piles of garlic, each one a share for a gardener to take home.
We grow hardneck garlic varieties: porcelain, Moreno hillside, jell-strain, and a little elephant garlic, which is not a true garlic but tasty nonetheless.
Important sorting task: The garden is contributing these gorgeous garlic heads and veggie seeds to a new ollective community garden like this one: people growing together at someone’s home. A gardener here moved to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom and brought the spirit of this garden with her. It’s an honor to help the new neighborhood garden grow.
A gardener spreads our seed garlic to dry. All the garlic is soaked from the rain. Once it dries some, we’ll gently brush off the dirt, clip off the stalks, and spread the heads on indoor drying racks. The seed garlic will dry there until after frost, when we’ll plant next season’s crop.
On the right, a gardener pours a refreshing cup of garden-herb-and-cucumber-infused water.
Refreshments included Spanish-style garlic bread: Bread brushed with olive oil, sprinkled with sea salt, and smeared or layered with just-harvested garlic. Fresh garlic is delicious and milder than dried garlic. Curing garlic concentrates and sharpens its the flavor, also delicious.
Back out in the garden, gardeners wasted no time weeding and replanting the garlic beds for fall crops. Rainbow chard and radishes were tucked into two rows. What else? More greens, surely. Possibly peas.
After harvesting garlic, taking her share, and planting chard, this gardener picked even more food to take home. This time of the season, there’s no end to the food. The garden is producing bush beans, beets, carrots, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, chili peppers, greens, perennial herbs and basil galore, husk cherries, and so much more.
Garlic had us laughing and singing in the rain!
Within a couple days, gardeners had taken their garlic shares.
This photo, used with permission of gardener and photographer Nancy MacDonald, shows garlic being as beautiful as it is delicious.
