Harvesting the Garlic

This week I harvested garlic from the Raised Bed 20 Years in the Making, a 2 x 3 foot mini-garden we created out of an old shipping crate and filled with compost. Our experiment growing garlic netted a respectable harvest, not overwhelming, but enough to encourage another attempt next year. The yield was roughly 12 ounces of heads the size of a baby’s fist. I showed our harvest to Liz, a gardener friend, and she reminded me that smaller heads often keep better than the larger heads.

We had missed the perfect time for scapes, those curly tendrils that develop on the ends of the shoots. If you catch them while they’re still green and tender, they can be used pretty much like garlic. The scapes on our garlic had hardened into papery clusters like tiny garlic heads. I’m told they can also be used as seed but that they take a bit longer to grown into full heads– 3 years is what I’ve read! We’ll try that experiment next.

Conventional wisdom is to let the harvested heads sit outside for a couple days so they dry out and prepare for longer term storage.

20 Minute Jan tried her hand at a braid of garlic. Not too shabby.

I knew it was time to harvest because the tops had wilted, browned and fallen over. The condition of the tops made it a little difficult to find all the heads. Thus it was quite convenient to have grown the garlic in a raised bed because I was able to scoop into the fluffy soil and then actually sift out the heads using our compost strainer.

We planted our garlic in the mild spell of last November. As noted then, we’d missed the opportunity of using purchased “garlic sets” so instead used store-bought garlic separated into cloves for planting. This fall, we’ll use garlic sets for a point of comparison in our ongoing garden experimentation.

Garlic takes a good 9 months of growing time. We’ll plant more in this same bed in a couple months but for the time being I sowed a second season crop of beets. I hope the beets will also enjoy the soft, stone-free growing bed.