Harvesting Garlic

This is a late entry for Real Food Wednesday hosted this week by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.

It’s about time to harvest garlic around here. We planted ours last October. There are two varieties of garlic:

1. Stiff neck or Topsetting Garlic, and
2. Soft neck Garlic.

The Soft Neck Garlic is the variety you find most often in the grocery store. It has many cloves, including those annoying small cloves in the center. It is reputed to do better in the Southern U.S. than the Stiff Neck. That has not been my experience. I find they both do well.

Stiff Neck Garlic has a hard center stem that sends up a flower stalk. These flower stalks, or Scapes, are really cool as the coil 360 degrees round and then uncoil again before flowering. Sort of like a pigs tail. In order to maximize your garlic bulb yield, it is best to cut these flower stalks off your Stiff Neck Garlic plants as soon as they appear. This prevents the garlic plant from using its energy to make seed and concentrates it all in the bulb. The Garlic Scapes can be chopped and used in stir fries, on pizza, or anywhere you want a mild garlic flavor. They can also be dried and used in flower arrangements (best while they are still coiled) or pickled.

I like to leave a few of the flower stalks in place in order to harvest some of the tiny seed cloves. We plant these seed cloves when we do our full sized garlic cloves to provide garlic greens in the Springtime. These seed cloves take 2 years to grow a full size garlic bulb.

Garlic Scapes about to flower.

Now how do you know when to harvest your garlic? Well, you can dig a garlic bulb and see if the skin has formed on the outside of the bulb. Or you can watch for bottom 2 or 3 leaves to yellow and dry. Why does this work? The yellow, dry leaves are also the outside skin of the garlic bulb. If the leaves above the ground are dry, then the bulb skin is dry as well and ready to harvest.

A Garlic Plant Just Ready for Harvest.

If you harvest your garlic before it is ready, the individual cloves may not be completely formed. This is fine and you can go ahead and use the garlic. It will be delicious but it won’t last as long and any cloves you attempt to save for planting may not grow.

If you wait too long to harvest your garlic, the dried skin will be gone, rotted away and your bulb will begin separating into individual cloves in preparation for sprouting into many new plants. This is one way wild garlic proliferates. If this happens, it is fine too. You can still eat the garlic but as with harvesting too early, the garlic may not store well. It also tends to be dirty around the cloves when you harvest it later. The garlic bulbs I harvested from the ones I left to go to seed were like this. They’re still good to use, but not pretty and definitely dirty.

It is best to dig your garlic up, not pull it up. Pulling it often leaves the harvester sitting on the ground with a bruised backside and garlic stalk in hand less the bulb. Once you’ve carefully dug your garlic (we use a garden fork), shake and rub the dirt off. It is fine if some of the skin comes off in this process but don’t peel it all off!

Next, tie your garlic in bunches, or braid it if it is the Softneck variety, and hang it in a warm, airy place to cure. It should be cured out of direct sunlight. An attic, barn, or garage works well.

Garlic Curing in the Woodshed.

We use our woodshed for curing. It is open and airy and out of direct sunlight. Curing takes a few weeks. The purpose is to allow the garlic skin on the outside and around the cloves to dry completely. Once cured, your garlic bulbs should last 6 to 9 months.

But don’t think you can’t eat your garlic right away! You can and we certainly do! Just cut a bulb, pull it apart and eat away. Well, maybe you want to put it in something first.

Don’t forget to set a pound or two of your biggest and best garlic bulbs aside for planting this Autumn. Garlic is one of the easiest and yummiest crops to grow in the home garden!

July 10th, 2009