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.

Grape Arbor

I decided this spring to plant some grape vines in my back yard.  It may be too hot here in Georgia for good grapes, but hopefully with time I will get something that is nice to look at if not tasty to eat. 


If you want to have a grape vine, then you need to have something that will support it.  Enter the grape arbor project.  After doing some basic research online, I constructed a grape arbor using mostly materials found around the house. 


To construct my arbor, you need:

- at least two sturdy support poles (wood, metal, plastic should all work);
- galvanized wire (enough to span the distance between the support poles); and
- nails, or some other fasteners for the wire.

Instructions after the jump.