Garlic Harvest 2023

It took about two and a half hours to harvest, sort and rack the garlic. 70 good sized head plus seven green garlic where I filled in spots where the clove planted in October didn’t survive winter. There is plenty for cooking in the coming year and 100 cloves to plant in the fall. This is what a home gardener hopes for in a garlic crop.

The main learning lessons are these:

• Use wheat straw to mulch over winter. Grass clippings created a too-dense matte that hindered spring growth.
• If there are empty spots in the spring, do plant new cloves in them. They don’t grow to maturity with the rest of the garlic, yet if you harvest the entire plot at once, they make green garlic to use in the kitchen while waiting for the main crop to cure.
• Inspect each head to make sure it is disease-free. As long as the heads are disease-free, they can be used to start the following year’s crop.
• Set aside the largest heads to use as seeds. Don’t equivocate on this step.

Garlic is such a basic ingredient that if one gardens at all, some part of the garden must be devoted to it. In the years I have been growing my own, I never found garlic at the grocer that is anywhere near as good in quality as my own. Producing a good garlic crop is one of the reasons we garden.