Garlic Harvest Day

Today I harvested all the garlic from my high tunnel greenhouse.  It was a very hot day and especially hot in the greenhouse.   By the time I was finished I was dripping wet!   But after a couple weeks of drying, we will be able to sell quite a bit of the garlic at our market booth.   Fresh garlic sells extremely well.  If I had a half acre of garlic planted, I could still sell it.  Much of the garlic that is found in supermarkets comes from China, and I certainly would not want to eat that!   It's anyone's guess what Chinese garlic is grown in and what is used to water it.   I am glad that the harvest of garlic coordinates nicely with the advent of my pickling cucumbers!  This weekend I will be making Polish dill pickles with my fresh garlic and fresh dill from the garden.

Here I am digging out the garlic bulbs.  You can't just pull the bulbs - they must be dug.  The garlic stems are easily broken from the bulb.

I pull away excess dirt from the bulb.   This is a dirty job, but my gardener's soap takes care of filthy hands!  My favorite soap for cleaning dirty garden hands is from Perfectly Posh called a "snarky bar".  This is a gritty soap with sugar crystals in it instead of pumice.   It doesn't clog the sink with pumice, and leaves hands nice and smooth and clean. 

I put the bulbs in a large bucket until I can take them inside and dry them on the special garlic rack we have.

By the time garlic is ready to harvest, there are lots of weeds in the patch.  I never disturb these weeds about a month before harvest so as not to accidentally pull up a garlic bulb that isn't ready yet.

There are lots of different sizes to the bulbs.  I plant both large (elephant) garlic, and commercial sized garlic.   When the bulbs are dry and ready to sell, I cut off the dry foliage, and take a soft old toothbrush to brush off dirt from the roots.   Then I trim the roots to about 1/4 inch. 

I ended up with 3 buckets full of bulbs, plus about 8 bulbs extra to use right away for pickles.

This is called a garlic scape.  It appears as a sort of blossom coming from the stem of garlic that is almost mature.   Usually these are snipped off to encourage larger bulb growth.  There were a couple that I missed.  Some cooks use these scapes in cooking, as they do taste like garlic, but not quite as tangy.   I have tried them in cooking, but did not care for the mild taste or texture of them.   I have heard of some cooks pickling them to use in various recipes.  To my taste, scapes taste almost "grassy" instead of like real garlic.

It always amazes me that I plant garlic bulbs in the high tunnel in late October and they make it through the winter, and come up in the spring to be harvested in July.   We had a very long and very cold winter and I didn't think anything would survive in the high tunnel.   This winter damaged so many of the fruit trees around here.   Our apple tree has apples, but the tree looks sick, and the leaves are small and curled.   Everyone's trees look like that.   The chokecherry trees also took a big hit this year.    So that's why I am happy that the garlic survived the long tough winter.   It must be hardy stuff!