Garlic Harvesting

 Garlic is normally harvested when the leaves start to turn brown, but my pumpkin vines pulled down my garlic stalks, so I decided to harvest early.

Harvesting is easy.  Just dig beneath the bulb, loosen the soil, and gently coax the entire plant from the earth.  Remove the larger clumps of soil from the root ball and bulb.


When you get everything out of the ground, hang the bulbs upside down and allow them to cure for a few weeks until everything is pretty well dried out.  The curing station should be out of the sun in a well ventilated area.  I used a wire shelf to hang the bulbs I harvested.

Once everything is dried out, you can trim the roots and leaves, or braid the leaves into a string of garlic.  It should store pretty well provided you keep it dry and relatively cool.

Garlic Update

Further to my post last fall regarding garlic, I took a couple shots yesterday of the garlic bed.

Look at these babies!  They grow up so fast.

You can already see some of the leaves are starting to wilt.  When about 1/3 to 1/2 of the stems are wilted, I will dig up the heads and set them out to dry.  I'll update this site to show my progress.

Growing Garlic

Garlic is supposed to be one of the easiest plants to grow.  You just put the cloves in the ground and wait.  I've read plenty of articles about growing garlic at home, so I thought I'd give it a try.