Harvesting Garlic
As the heat of summertime approaches - the garlic patch got me thinking, ok it’s time to bring up all the learning of the past seasons to ready for this year’s harvest. The garlic is, at this time, up to my waist! Mckenna calls this the garlic house, and it has quite a lovely place to sit in the center, where one can be hidden to the untrained eye…
This is the healthiest garlic i’ve ever had the pleasure of tending to. It’s now time to watch for the sending of the flower, it curls it’s way up very subtle like- it’s best to snap the flower stalk while still in a bud form, these can be cooked up with other veggies! A way I like to remember it is- if you let the garlic flower- all the energy will go into producing that. If you snap it off, the energy will go back into the root to form the ‘head’. Really it’s a very similar approach as other bulb flowers (if you don’t cut the stalk after the flower, the plant will focus on the seed…).
Once this has been attended to, you wait to watch the upper portion of the plant begin to die back, at this point you stop watering the lot- it likes to be dry for at least two weeks prior to harvest. My friend Chuck let me in on one of his secrets- when all but three leaves of the plant have died back, it is ready to harvest. I have let mine die all the way down in the past, but end up with a thinned skin head. The ‘three leaves’ technique, gives three solid layers over the head. I tried this with the seed garlic he gave me two years ago, and it was perfect. The hardest part of it was to save the healthiest heads for planting last fall- but I’m so glad I did! We have approximately 90 garlic stalks, 4 different varieties. We’ll save a good portion of that for planting this October, while adding a few more that we couldn’t get last year.
Spending a few hours with the garden and my farm community is such amazing food for the soul- there’s really no words to describe it, this feeling. Divine Love.
