The Garlic Harvest

I like growing Garlic! This was my first year, so I'm likely benefitting from so much beginners luck, but I found it so easy. I also like the cycle, how it needs to be harvested in the middle of summer, leaving space in the garden to plant your winter crop. 

So, to catch you up, I planted the garlic on October 10th, in plenty of compost and leaf mulch. It started growing in february and got pretty big by mid June, when...

The garlic scapes began to emerge out of the center of the stalks. These are flowers, or plantlets, but I was advised to just clip and eat them, to help make my bulbs bigger. 

They are delicious, and were abundant. The first veg we got to eat out of the garden this season.

Fully a month later, after digging up one bulb per week to see if they were ready to harvest yet I decided they were.

I decided because the cloves were seperate from each other, and big. But they were not bursting out of the skins, which really reduces the amount of time they can be stored for.

Satisfied that it was time to roll I used a pitchfork and dug up all the bulbs, and left them out to dry flat, in the shade for a few days.

Then I removed the outer leaves, and much of the dirt in the process. Then the bulbs were hung to dry out of the way in my cool bike storage room.

About a month later they were dry enough to try braiding. Not easy, at least for me, but I finally got the hang of it right at the end.

But still, this is my best braid, and as you can see, its a little messy. What an art form, next year I'll have to grow lots more garlic to practice this on.

These are some of my seed bulbs, they are the biggest ones I got, and the ones in the best condition. They look like the nicest garlic you can get at the farmers market and I love them so much they are currently hanging up in my living room. I look forward to planting them in October and starting the cycle again.