Way back in November of 2012 we were preparing for our garlic planting. We had prepared a block of beds and had already purchased two varieties. One variety is an artichoke type while the other is a silverskin type.
Artichoke types have very large bulbs and several overlapping layers of cloves. They are great keepers and can be stored for 8-10 months.
Silverskin types are excellent storage garlic. They keep longer then the other types (up to a year) and are often the highest yielding.
Once we got our garlic, we sorted out the largest bulbs from the smaller bulbs, checked them for any molds, and then each healthy bulb was peeled to sort out the larger cloves from the smaller cloves. The smallest cloves were kept for kitchen use, while the largest to medium cloves were to be used for planting. Thanksgiving Day was the perfect day to enjoy some dessert and sort cloves.
Beds were dug and covered with rice straw and each bed was sown with one size of clove. The garlic was in the ground by November 23rd.
By January 27th, our garlic was well on its way to growing.
By March 11th, the plants were getting bigger.
April 10th, bigger still and watering of the garlic became less frequent.
May 12th, biggest yet and we stopped watering all together.
Until June 23rd when it was time to harvest! An unusual summer time rain storm was due to pass by within the day so we were working against the clock to harvest all the garlic before it got drenched. The rainstorm could have ruined our whole crop.
Each bed was carefully loosened so as to lift up the soil below the garlic.
The soil was carefully dug away around each bulb until it could be excavated from the ground.
Each bed took us about one hour to harvest.
Four rows of garlic for each bed takes time and each bulb had to handled with the utmost care in order to prevent any damage to the bulb. As we were told, garlic should never ever make a sound as you harvest and handle it!
We again carefully sorted each bulb into small medium and large from each bed. Turns out that large cloves do indeed produce large bulbs!
Any bulbs that had "rosetted" or were very small or with imperfections were sorted into group 3, medium sized bulbs that had all layers of skin attached were put into group 2 which will be for our CSA, and the largest bulbs were put into group 1 and would be stored for use as next years seed garlic crop.
Once the garlic was removed from the ground it was stored in bins with shade cloth over it to prevent the sun that would occasionally peek behind the passing clouds from cooking our garlic.
Only a couple of rain clouds threatened rain on us as we harvested, but we weren't done as we still had to bring the garlic up to the house to process it for curing.
Boxes and boxes of sorted garlic lined the house.
Since rain was a sure thing by the next day, our only choice to store the garlic until the weather changed was to lay it out in our living room, again sorting it into variety and then by bulb size.
One variety got the space on the living room floor.
While the other variety got the space in the workshop. The bulbs were cleaned of the lower drier leaves and carefully stacked.
Lucky us, all the garlic fit on top of the workshop table.
The workshop is mostly open to the elements, but the conditions are right with it having plenty of airflow, shaded from the sun, and cool. The only thing we worried about was keeping out the deer who might just find our table of garlic appetizing. Using netting and a slew of other items we created a somewhat
Once the rain had moved along and the weather warmed back up, we were able to move all the garlic that was inside the house to the outside where we constructed a makeshift curing area.
The garlic will cure over the next few weeks until we can braid them into lovely storage braids for our CSA. These braids were the trial run using group 3 bulbs just to test the method. We are finding that the drier the stems, the easier it is to braid the garlic.
After all that, we are so happy to have our first garlic crop to share! We've been enjoying cooking with the garlic that landed in group 3 and we think they are still tasty, even if they aren't the largest, healthiest bulbs we grew.
