First garlic harvest
 

Well , I got some now , how do I prep it for storage and store it ? Cool
dry place , I figure , but I'm not sure how to dry it for storage .

--
Snag

First garlic harvest
 

"Terry Coombs" wrote:

Well , I got some now , how do I prep it for storage and store it

Keep the tops on, if your dirt is as sticky as mine, wash the bulbs with a
garden hose nozzle; spread out on a screen in the shade until dry to the
touch. Then tie up in bunches of 25 or so and hang up in the shade (my
shed has a bunch of nails in the rafters for this), and let cure for a few
weeks. Then trim and enjoy!

--
Gary Woods AKA K2AHC- PGP key on request, or at home.earthlink.net/~garygarlic
Zone 5/4 in upstate New York, 1420' elevation. NY WO G

First garlic harvest
 

Gary Woods wrote:
Terry Coombs wrote:

Well , I got some now , how do I prep it for storage and store it

that's quick!


Keep the tops on, if your dirt is as sticky as mine, wash the bulbs with a
garden hose nozzle; spread out on a screen in the shade until dry to the
touch. Then tie up in bunches of 25 or so and hang up in the shade (my
shed has a bunch of nails in the rafters for this), and let cure for a few
weeks. Then trim and enjoy!


i did that last year and it was so much nicer than
what i'd been doing before (digging it up, laying it
out to dry and then cleaning the dirt off).

when do you take the roots off?

it's gonna be a while yet before ours is ready,
scapes are starting to plump up a little.


songbird

First garlic harvest
 

songbird wrote:
Gary Woods wrote:
Terry Coombs wrote:

Well , I got some now , how do I prep it for storage and store it

that's quick!


Keep the tops on, if your dirt is as sticky as mine, wash the bulbs
with a garden hose nozzle; spread out on a screen in the shade
until dry to the touch. Then tie up in bunches of 25 or so and hang
up in the shade (my shed has a bunch of nails in the rafters for
this), and let cure for a few weeks. Then trim and enjoy!


i did that last year and it was so much nicer than
what i'd been doing before (digging it up, laying it
out to dry and then cleaning the dirt off).

when do you take the roots off?

it's gonna be a while yet before ours is ready,
scapes are starting to plump up a little.


songbird

I read - maybe here - that it was ready when half of the leaves were browned
.. I dug up 8 today , they were all between ping-pong and golf ball size .
But today was reading to wiat until the tops were all brown . These were
planted last October ...
I'm going to have to come up with a dish that will show off the garlic ...
and I'll be using nothing but fresh for quite a while , I planted over a
hundred for the 2 of us .
--
Snag

First garlic harvest
 

On 6/27/2015 9:22 PM, Terry Coombs wrote:
songbird wrote:
Gary Woods wrote:
Terry Coombs wrote:

Well , I got some now , how do I prep it for storage and store it

that's quick!


Keep the tops on, if your dirt is as sticky as mine, wash the bulbs
with a garden hose nozzle; spread out on a screen in the shade
until dry to the touch. Then tie up in bunches of 25 or so and hang
up in the shade (my shed has a bunch of nails in the rafters for
this), and let cure for a few weeks. Then trim and enjoy!


i did that last year and it was so much nicer than
what i'd been doing before (digging it up, laying it
out to dry and then cleaning the dirt off).

when do you take the roots off?

it's gonna be a while yet before ours is ready,
scapes are starting to plump up a little.


songbird

I read - maybe here - that it was ready when half of the leaves were browned
. I dug up 8 today , they were all between ping-pong and golf ball size .
But today was reading to wiat until the tops were all brown . These were
planted last October ...
I'm going to have to come up with a dish that will show off the garlic ...
and I'll be using nothing but fresh for quite a while , I planted over a
hundred for the 2 of us .

You might want to get a 55 gallon drum of nicely scented mouthwash.
Might help. BSEG

We just got a heavy thunderstorm with high winds and hail again at
around 2130 this evening. Probably will have some garden damage to see
at sunrise.

George

First garlic harvest
 

barbie gee wrote:
On Sat, 27 Jun 2015, Terry Coombs wrote:

Well , I got some now , how do I prep it for storage and store it ?
Cool dry place , I figure , but I'm not sure how to dry it for
storage .

How did you know when they were ready for harvesting?
This spring, I had some sprouting garlic cloves that I popped into a
planter, and now the greens are about a foot long, and getting thick
at the base. Do I just occasionally cut some greens off, but wait
til fall, or what?

Garlic is usually planted in the fall - this was planted last October .
When the leaves turned brown halfway up I dug up a couple , they had nice
bulbs . Then I read that I should wait until the foilage is all brown , but
I think any time after half is brown will work . I'll wait a little longer
to harvest it all and hope a hundred plants will be enough for seed and our
table .

--
Snag

First garlic harvest
 

songbird wrote:

when do you take the roots off?

After the drydown/curing stage (unless you're French and like untrimmed
roots, of course).

it's gonna be a while yet before ours is ready,
scapes are starting to plump up a little.

I just snapped off scapes last week and made garlic scape pesto; time for
another round to get the ones that were too small or missed. Too wet
today, though.


--
Gary Woods AKA K2AHC- PGP key on request, or at home.earthlink.net/~garygarlic
Zone 5/4 in upstate New York, 1420' elevation. NY WO G

First garlic harvest
 

"Terry Coombs" wrote:

When the leaves turned brown halfway up I dug up a couple , they had nice
bulbs . Then I read that I should wait until the foilage is all brown , but
I think any time after half is brown will work

If you wait until all leaves are dead, you won't have good wrappers on the
bulb. Half brown is fine; by then the bulbs are as big as they're going to
get.


--
Gary Woods AKA K2AHC- PGP key on request, or at home.earthlink.net/~garygarlic
Zone 5/4 in upstate New York, 1420' elevation. NY WO G

First garlic harvest
 

Gary Woods wrote:
"Terry Coombs" wrote:

When the leaves turned brown halfway up I dug up a couple , they had
nice bulbs . Then I read that I should wait until the foilage is all
brown , but I think any time after half is brown will work

If you wait until all leaves are dead, you won't have good wrappers
on the bulb. Half brown is fine; by then the bulbs are as big as
they're going to get.

Good to know that , thanks !

--
Snag

First garlic harvest
 

In article ,
"Terry Coombs" wrote:

But today was reading to wiat until the tops were all brown . These were
planted last October ...

All brown you won't have a decent wrapper, and you will have dirt in the
cloves. You want 3-4 green leaves, indicating 3-4 layers of wrapper on
the bulbs. I used to wait too long, so I know from experience.

Drying needs to be in full shade, protected from dew. Commercial growers
use wagons with a sunshade so the plants are shaded as soon as they are
dug up. Got a barn/shed, a covered porch, something like that? I have
used various methods over time; the easiest one was laid on some crap
bookshelves I diverted from going to the dump, inside an airy barn -
just laid the plants out in single layers on the shelves and left them.
I have also tied them in bunches of 5 on a long string and hung it,
placed them on screens and hauled the screens inside every night and
various other things that are more work. If you have adequate space to
set them on a shelf and leave them be for a few weeks, it's the lowest
work input / handling way to deal with them I've found so far.

Hardnecks (scaping garlic) are virtually impossible to braid, so after a
few weeks drying I cut the bulk of the foliage off and store them in a
bin. I'm essentially out of growing softnecks at this point, as the ones
I was growing petered out and the hardnecks seem to do better for me,
here.

While sorting/drying I set aside the nicest heads for seed, and have
eventually both read and seen that I need to set aside enough nice large
heads that I can use only the nice large cloves for seed, and eat the
small cloves from the seed heads when the seed heads are broken up for
planting.

--
Cats, coffee, chocolate...vices to live by
Please don't feed the trolls. Killfile and ignore them so they will go away.

First garlic harvest
 

barbie gee wrote:
Terry Coombs wrote:

Well , I got some now , how do I prep it for storage and store it ? Cool
dry place , I figure , but I'm not sure how to dry it for storage .

How did you know when they were ready for harvesting?

usually i try to get mine out of the ground
before all the leaves are brown. we have pretty
heavy clay soil which sticks to everything so
the longer the garlic is left in the ground
the more likely a rain will come along and make
it harder to harvest and clean up.


This spring, I had some sprouting garlic cloves that I popped into a
planter, and now the greens are about a foot long, and getting thick at
the base. Do I just occasionally cut some greens off, but wait til fall,
or what?

you can eat the green leaves like chives, but
that does limit how big the head of garlic will
be if you cut off too many leaves. the green garlic
(forming bulb, stem, leaves and scapes) are all
edible, they don't start getting tough until the
leaves start dying back or the scapes open up and
start to dry out.

i suspect that growing the garlic in a small
planter and cutting the leaves off will end up
giving you a pretty small head of garlic with tiny
cloves.

i purposely grow green garlic to use like green
onions (burying the cloves a few inches deeper than
normal) because it grows very easily here as compared
to green onions. i use it any time after it starts
growing up until the scapes and leaves start drying
out.


songbird

First garlic harvest
 

songbird wrote:

i purposely grow green garlic to use like green
onions (burying the cloves a few inches deeper than
normal) because it grows very easily here as compared
to green onions.

A commercial grower I know takes all the small cloves left over at planting
time (you know, the "tweeners" and others too small to make a good bulb
next year) and throws them at the end of a bed, to be harvested next spring
for green garlic. Good cash source at a time of the year when not much
else is feeding the till! He has a goodly Asian community nearby, which
helps.


--
Gary Woods AKA K2AHC- PGP key on request, or at home.earthlink.net/~garygarlic
Zone 5/4 in upstate New York, 1420' elevation. NY WO G

First garlic harvest
 

On 6/29/2015 8:55 AM, songbird wrote:
barbie gee wrote:
Terry Coombs wrote:

Well , I got some now , how do I prep it for storage and store it ? Cool
dry place , I figure , but I'm not sure how to dry it for storage .

How did you know when they were ready for harvesting?

usually i try to get mine out of the ground
before all the leaves are brown. we have pretty
heavy clay soil which sticks to everything so
the longer the garlic is left in the ground
the more likely a rain will come along and make
it harder to harvest and clean up.


This spring, I had some sprouting garlic cloves that I popped into a
planter, and now the greens are about a foot long, and getting thick at
the base. Do I just occasionally cut some greens off, but wait til fall,
or what?

you can eat the green leaves like chives, but
that does limit how big the head of garlic will
be if you cut off too many leaves. the green garlic
(forming bulb, stem, leaves and scapes) are all
edible, they don't start getting tough until the
leaves start dying back or the scapes open up and
start to dry out.

i suspect that growing the garlic in a small
planter and cutting the leaves off will end up
giving you a pretty small head of garlic with tiny
cloves.

i purposely grow green garlic to use like green
onions (burying the cloves a few inches deeper than
normal) because it grows very easily here as compared
to green onions. i use it any time after it starts
growing up until the scapes and leaves start drying
out.


songbird

We grow both garlic and onion chives, mostly around our fruit trees as
they are supposed to keep borers away from the tree. So far it has
worked. In addition we plant scallions, bunching onions, and regular
onions. Generally we plant a few Texas 1015Y sweet onions too. Some of
our bunching onions are the children of some a friend gave me over
twenty years ago. Pull a bunch, put one or two back in the ground and
cut the top off above the start of green. So far so good.

We had another horizontal rain burst last evening, scared the heck out
of us as we were sitting on the back porch when it hit. Got another two
inches of rain out of it plus some corn stalks blown over.

First garlic harvest
 

On Sat, 27 Jun 2015 16:13:15 -0500, "Terry Coombs"
wrote:

Well , I got some now , how do I prep it for storage and store it ? Cool
dry place , I figure , but I'm not sure how to dry it for storage .

Good advice on this page.
https://www.garlicfarm.ca/garlic-har...g-pospisil.htm

Ross.
Southern Ontario, Canada

First garlic harvest
 

Gary Woods wrote:
songbird wrote:

i purposely grow green garlic to use like green
onions (burying the cloves a few inches deeper than
normal) because it grows very easily here as compared
to green onions.

A commercial grower I know takes all the small cloves left over at planting
time (you know, the "tweeners" and others too small to make a good bulb
next year) and throws them at the end of a bed, to be harvested next spring
for green garlic. Good cash source at a time of the year when not much
else is feeding the till! He has a goodly Asian community nearby, which
helps.

that's the first time i've heard of anyone selling
green garlic commercially. i love cooking with it or
eating it right out of the ground when i'm out weeding
it's not too rare for me to pull up some garlic and
chomp on it right there.

some year's i've buried five gallon buckets full of
scapes or the tiny cloves i've found during processin in
deep holes because i can't ever use all of them for
planting. the worms take care of 'em. worms also seem
to thrive off garlic pieces and left over chaff from
peeling and sorting through them. i cut the cloves near
the bottom to keep them from resprouting if i'm going to
feed them to the worm bins as otherwise they'll keep
trying to regrowing for quite some time.


songbird