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Post by ferdzy on Jul 12, 2012 6:40:16 GMT -5
I can never tell when the garlic is ready to harvest and generally leave it too long.  Can anyone tell by the photo if we should be pulling ours now? Attachments:
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Post by mnjrutherford on Jul 12, 2012 7:02:55 GMT -5
Well, you should have 6 sets of dead leaves at the bottom of MOST plants. I would suggest that you gently "lift" a single bulb and examine it.
I'm thinking you might need another week based on the fact that you are in Canada. However, WHEN did you plant it?
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Post by bluelacedredhead on Jul 12, 2012 8:13:35 GMT -5
I've dug my garlic up on Tuesday. Ferdzy, I'm sure much more knowledgeable folks like Martin will have good advice for you, but in the meantime, read what Boundary has to say about when to harvest. www.garlicfarm.ca/growing-garlic.htm |
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Post by ottawagardener on Jul 12, 2012 9:47:30 GMT -5
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Post by ferdzy on Jul 12, 2012 19:04:30 GMT -5
Okay, think I shall pull up a couple tomorrow and see what I think. Part of the trouble, I expect, is that we have 9 different varieties, and they may not all be ready at the same time. Next year, I think we will do a lot fewer.
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Post by paquebot on Jul 14, 2012 20:41:48 GMT -5
We began on 3 July and finished on 9 July. All 200 or so varieties were in excellent condition despite the extreme drought. Those which normally may have had splits didn't have them this year. I still have several hundred to dig from a bulbil project but they'll all be for processing so it doesn't matter if the bulbs are 100% intact or not.
Martin
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Post by ferdzy on Jul 14, 2012 20:46:05 GMT -5
200 VARIETIES!?!
Seriously, can you tell the difference when you eat them? My conclusion is some of them are bigger and some of them are smaller, some are all white and some have purple streaks or patches, some have more cloves and some have fewer, but really, they all taste of garlic. The one exception is Tibetan which is a bit hotter in flavour. Maybe I lack much sense of flavour discrimination but Iwouldn't have thought so particularly.
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Post by ferdzy on Jul 14, 2012 20:46:38 GMT -5
Also, we did pull up one variety today and it looks very good. We will continue on with more tomorrow.
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Post by littleminnie on Jul 14, 2012 22:20:10 GMT -5
We began on 3 July and finished on 9 July. All 200 or so varieties were in excellent condition despite the extreme drought. Those which normally may have had splits didn't have them this year. I still have several hundred to dig from a bulbil project but they'll all be for processing so it doesn't matter if the bulbs are 100% intact or not. Martin What is the bulbil project? I never know what to do with them. |
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edwin
gardener
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Post by edwin on Jul 15, 2012 10:38:29 GMT -5
Normally we eat the scapes or cut them off to maximize energy in the garlic head.
Bulbils are tiny clones that are clear of disease etc - they refresh the crop - or so I've heard.
You plant a bulbils and you end up with a clove of garlic. You plant the clove and you end up with a head of garlic.
We take the type of garlic that looks the most anemic and keep the bulbils. We plant them on a 4" spacing (very tight), and leave them for two years. The resulting heads are quite small. We then take the biggest cloves from each head and plant.
We are just finishing our first cycle with a garlic we found by the side of the road. Experimenting with cloves from this garlic (extremely small) we think we will have garlic heads that double in volume from our planting. I would hope that in subsequent years they become bigger still. We started with this garlic not because it was anemic, but because we did not want to take too much out of the ditch.
Our next garlic will be Tibetan garlic.
I don't know what a bulbil project is either.
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Post by darwinslair on Jul 15, 2012 20:11:06 GMT -5
I increased Spanish Rojo from bulbils. Theirs are quite large, and give you a head of garlic the first year (albeit smallish, maybe 1.5 inches across) and then planted those out the following year, and they gave me full sized heads, some just as big as those from my best cloves.
Have not done it, other than accidentally, from the tiny bulbil varieties.
Tom
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Post by caledonian on Jul 15, 2012 20:17:35 GMT -5
When two thirds of the leaves have shriveled, it's time to harvest the garlic.
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Post by paquebot on Jul 15, 2012 22:54:06 GMT -5
What is the bulbil project? I never know what to do with them. There's been some varieties which we were only able to start from bulbils as they can be imported into the US without a lot of hassle. In fact, one Canadian company only sells bulbils. I already have a personal database of over100 varieties and the type of bulbils they produce. Anyway, several years ago, it was determined that the only type guaranteed to produce a divided bulb from bulbils were the rocamboles. I saved bulbils from about 20 or so rocamboles and found a wide range of results. Some produced a 1" or less bulb with perhaps only 3 or 4 small cloves. Others produced 2" bulbs with 6 to 8 large cloves. Regardless of what they were at that stage, all produced 2½" to 3" bulbs this year. Just about all of those this year are now additional stock for We Grow Garlic. Large quantities of bulbils were only saved from several varieties this year and I'll offer them only on one forum. I do not plan on planting back any bulbils this year since that study has been completed. I will plant at least 1,200 on my account but probably only 3 varieties. Martin |
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Post by templeton on Jul 16, 2012 6:54:23 GMT -5
Ferdzy,
re when is garlic ready?
The point is to harvest your garlic when most of the energy from the leaves has been turned into bulb, but not leaving it so long that the 'papers' over the bulbs begin to rot - you are also trying to maximize the number of layers of paper over the bulbs for longevity- this can be a season by season and variety by variety thing. I've left some varieties a bit long sometimes, and then wet weather has resulted in very thin skins as the outer layers have got wet and decayed.
I look for about half of the leaves to have yellowed off. I'm also a bit keen to get the garlic pulled to get another crop into the bed, so go a week or so early some years. doesn't seem to really influence the size of the bulbs or its keeping qualities to go a bit early, but can result in loose skins in some varieties as they dry off and shrink away from the bulb.
My advice - use this as a learning year - pull a few now, leave some a bit longer. Keep note of which ones you pulled when - You'll learn heaps by just observing how your patch and your crop works. If they start to go off in storage, eat more garlic!
T
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Post by ferdzy on Jul 17, 2012 19:23:06 GMT -5
Martin, very interesting. That's serious garlic!
Thanks, Templeton.
Well, we've pulled all but one type of garlic at this point. We are leaving the Tibetan garlic for a few more days as we left the scapes on them so we could harvest and plant bulbils this fall. But by the end of the week I think they'll be up too.
That leaves 8 different types of garlic that we grew. Six out the 8 types were in great shape and looked very good, with bulbs ranging from small to very large, with most in medium to large range.
The two varieties that had problems, interestingly enough, were varieties we bought at local markets and planted. We've grown them for a couple of years without any problems. This year though, one of them was full of what we identified as onion maggots, and we destroyed about 75% of what we pulled. The rest will be eaten and not replanted. The other variety looks like what Templeton described above - the skins look like they got wet and decayed. Which is bizarre, because it's bone-dry here, and we tapered off on the watering at least 2 weeks ago, and none for the last week. No othe signs of disease or insects though, so I don't know what else it could be. That one is also being dropped from the roster. We wanted to pare it down anyway so those2 were easy.
Overall, we have at least 50% more garlic and probably 50% bigger heads than last year, even with those problems. And the last type to pull up still! This was a good year for garlic, if nothing else.
Part of the reason for this is we pulled all the plants we put in as bulbils 2 years ago, and so we have a lot of small to medium-large heads from that. We got the bulbils when we saw them growing by the side of a local road, where a house had burnt down probably decades ago - we figure you don't get more locally adapted than that!
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