When to Harvest Garlic

[steev]

C'mon, Blue; there's lots it can be used for; just a matter of figuring out what.

[blueadzuki]

That's where we'll have to differ there. That patch should in theory be the best spot on our property (it's the only one that technically ever gets any sun) in practice, the marauding bands of squirrels and chipmunks decimate anything and everything that goes in there. The only things that normlly take in any appreciable amount are things that are too small for the animals to take much interest in (for example until I put the corn in, there was a thick mat of crimson clover on top, from some sprouting mix I dumped). The soil's too rocky for root crops; to acidic for lettuce (the best lettuce crop we had in the last twenty years was just about big enough that, if you picked the whole thing at once, you could have had one serving of salad.). I think that there are some beans I could TRANSPLANT there (the critters will decimate bean sprouts, but once the plants get to be actual plants, they tend to lose interest), but they have to be either pole types that produce their flowers a long way along the vine or bush beans that grow very tall, so that lets out my Bantu's as candidates (a lovey little workhorse of a bean, that will produce like crazy no matter what, but the plants are so short that the tips of the pods actually dig into the ground as they mature) I'm hoping that one of the other beans I'm playing around with this year will prove a little more amenable, but so far they ALL seem to produce too near the ground. And even that doesn't work all the time; last year I lost my entire rice bean crop (bear in mind that, after the earlier predations, my entire crop consisted of two or three plants) to some critter that wanted the beans so much they chewed throgh the stalk at the based and then pulled the plants down off the poles at a rate slow enough to UNRAVEL them (when I came out the next day, I found an empty pole and the whole stem on the ground; denuded of pods and leaves but still in one single seven foot long peice. So that's why I say that Alliums seem to be the only thing I can put there, Alliums are about the only vegetables the critters WON'T TOUCH.

[blueadzuki]

Havest in, it finally flopped (well kinked, but since kinking means the connection between the bulb and leaves has died they can't get any bigger and leaf death was a few days away in any case) not huge, but at least I got some increase (remember what the suff looked like last year)

[Drahkk]

OK, noob alert! First year growing hardneck garlic!

Now that that's out of the way, I'm noticing that one variety I've got growing, Schoharie County "Sloughter", is producing noticably fewer, larger bulbils than the rest. Here is a Sloughter scape next to a Chesnok Red, check it out: Here's hoping larger bulbils will make larger rounds, and eventually larger bulbs. Of course I have yet to dig up this year's bulbs, so it may be that none of the varieties I'm trialing are thriving in my climate. Are those scape heads as pitiful and tiny as I'm afraid they are? Or are they halfway respectable? Experienced voices?

I put this here because I'm also unsure when to harvest bulbils. For that matter, I usually harvest softneck garlic the end of May/beginning of June, but some of these hardnecks are just now starting to send up a scape. Many have some leaves browning at the tips, but I'm not sure if it means they're ready to dig or just scorched from the heat we've had lately. Help?

MB

[Leenstar]

I don't pretend to be an expert but I have 3 years of garlic experience in my home garden.

In general bulbil use sets you back by a growing season. If you are saving the bulbils they will need to be planted in the next season to make a small head from which you can split and have starting cloves of any reliable size. The heads from bulbil plantings are usually quite small. I typically cut off the scape as soon as I see it and it triggers the plants to form bigger heads forcing them to grow the cloves in the head.

For garlic seed, the people having success are leaving their scapes and delicately plucking out the bulbils to direct the plants nutrients towards those those little flower tendrils. Alternately the scape is cut and kept in water but the bulbils are still removed so as not to suck up the extra nutrients.

[ferdzy]

We pulled our garlic 2 days ago. It is the best garlic we have grown yet, a lot better than last year which was way better than the year before. No insect, disease, or fungus problems that we could see, although we pulled 3 or 4 stunted yellowish plants earlier in the growing season, and removed some of the soil around them too. The rest of them look great and some of them are approaching fist sized. (Admittedly, my fist not Edwin's.)

We've been selecting our very best garlic to replant, and the sacrifice is paying off. Also rotating and mulching with straw once it is well up. We plant earlier than most people too; it's going to go back in the ground probably in late August.

I wish I could post a photo but I am getting a message that there is no space left.

[raymondo]

Ferdzy, could you put the photo on something like Picasa and post a link? Would that avoid the space limit problem?

[ferdzy]

Maybe Ray; try this:

picasaweb.google.com/ferdzy2/DropBox02?authkey=Gv1sRgCMTd6Ivm-cCFFQ#5905440219812507666


Okay! That's Edwin with the harvest looking very happy, as well he might! Garlic now curing in the garage - just don't look at the garage.

[raymondo]

Nice garlic, neat garage too, compared to mine!

[steev]

Your peat moss is upside-down; that will cause things to grow to Oz.

[steev]

The garlic seed Joseph sent me, which made teeny bulbs like Blueadzuki's, is starting to sprout anew in the pots; I think I'm letting it grow on 'til next Spring, when I expect it to have bulbs capable of planting out.