Mary Mary quite contrary, how does your garlic grow?

GWN-- Thank You, LM

GWN what a crop! Beautiful! I thought the bottom leaves are supposed to be browned and wilted, though, before harvesting them? Yours seem all green so I am confused (again).

A few weeks before harvesting stop watering the garlic. Different growers have different rules of thumb regarding the best time to harvest. The dying back of the leaves is only an approximate indicator.

To determine whether the garlic is ready to harvest inspect a few bulbs in the ground by carefully scraping away the dirt. You can feel the bumps of the cloves through the wrappers of a mature bulb.

Lift the garlic from the ground when the bulb has reached a good size and before the wrappers begin to deteriorate or the bulbs begin to split open. If a bulb is not well-wrapped, and the skins on the cloves are not intact, the garlic will not keep well. Learning exactly when to stop watering and when to harvest is a matter of judgment that comes with experience.

I have only harvested a very small portion of my crop. Many of mine had started to split and so I harvested about one third of my crop. According to this source "the dying back of the leaves is only an approximate indicator"
Some sources say when there are 4 green leaves left, some say when there are 6 green leaves left, some say when 4 leaves have turned yellow. I had planted about 80 purple soft neck, which seems to have needed to be harvested early, despite the leaf colour, because the garlic was splitting.

I will likely harvest a lot more of them this week

I just harvested my two types of garlic yesterday between the raindrops!

 1) Late Italian
 2) Chinese Pink

I did find a couple of them that are split halfway up the stalk with some garlic bulbs inside. What do I do with them?
 1) Do I take the little garlic bulbs out and use as soon as possible and cure the main bulb?
 2) Or do I cure the entire bulb with stalk and little bulbs inside stalk?

I can't take a picture because I ruined by camera by jumping in the pool with the camera down the top of my bathing suit.....weird....don't ask...lol

I would try to cure them as they are, leave the leaves on. The ones that are split, could be stored as separate cloves. ...as turan said in an earlier posting. I am trying to cure mine just as they are whole, with the leaves on. But I will check on the split ones frequently for signs of rot.

Thank you GWN!
I love your harvested garlic - they look awesome!!

The little bulblets forming in your garlic stems are kinda like the bulbils at the top of regular scapes.  You can plant them in a nursery bed in the fall and they'll grow into larger cloves that can then be planted the following fall to form nearly full size heads of garlic.  Some kinds of garlic form these funny pseudo scapes--kind of an arrested-development thing.  Nonna

Oh I am sorry Dunkinjean, I totally misread your post... I just saw split and thought you were talking about split garlic.
THANKS Nonna for clearing that one up.
 

It's ok GWN.
Thanks Nonna.
The camera is working! Whew.... 

Below are pics of my garlic harvested last week....hopefully.
 

Very NICE haul Dunkinjean...

Dunkinjean, how many per square did you plant?

I have a question regarding my garlics.  Hopefully you experienced gardeners can help.

Are these the equivalent of scapes?  No bulbs, just funny looking leat blades that don't want to separate and stand alone like the first bunch of leaf blades.
 I'll try to take a wider picture tomorrow.

The garlic are from cloves from my grocery garlic, that I planted March 31.  The leaves are starting to dry and I read somewhere that I should stop watering a couple weeks before lifting them out so the "paper" can start drying. I dug down and I can actually feel fair size garlic growing.  I only have 6 of them. Again, I'm first time gardener.

Sanderson, I think those are just leaves. Scapes are hard and round stalks meant to support a flower.

most garlic from the grocery store, are softnecks and they do not produce scapes...
Hiwever you can weave soft necks.

I believe I planted 4 garlic per square.

Just ordered my garlic for fall planting.  1 hardneck and 1 softneck variety.  Nootka and Japanese. 

GG

What made you select those two particular varieties?

Mild to medium flavor and supposedly both can handle very cold winters.  I want hardnecks for scapes, and softnecks to braid and store.

GG

I picked one of the garlic. It had several withered leaves at the bottom. It also had the most slender stalk of all the plants. It is quite small. Must it be cured or can I just use it now? Also, do you think it was so small (only just over an inch across) due to the slender stalk or because I picked it too early? It does seem formed into very small cloves inside the wrapper.

cpl, sometimes they just stay small. Those are the ones you want to cook with any time now. Any larger bulbs or cloves you harvest can be used for next season planting. You can use the garlic as soon as you pull it out of the ground. Curing of unblemished bulbs  is recommended for any garlic bound for storage.

My garlic harvest has also begun with the few small scrawny plants.

This is the first year I planted garlic. They went into the ground May 18. I still cant see their green tops like on my onions that were planted at the same time. Should I be concerned?

They are probably gone if there is no foliage. Repurpose the squares and plant more garlic in the autumn.

Where did you get your seed?

camprn wrote:cpl, sometimes they just stay small. Those are the ones you want to cook with any time now. Any larger bulbs or cloves you harvest can be used for next season planting. You can use the garlic as soon as you pull it out of the ground. Curing of unblemished bulbs  is recommended for any garlic bound for storage.

My garlic harvest has also begun with the few small scrawny plants.

I see that the garlic you pulled has leaves that are still quite green. I thought they were supposed to brown first? Most of mine have more brown than what you have pulled. Also, does the diameter of the stalk directly correlate with the size of the bulb below in most cases? Thanks!

My first garlic!  

I posted a photo a few days ago of funny looking curly leaves. Replies seem to indicate it might be a soft neck since it was from a grocery store garlic clove.

Couldn't help myself this morning!!  I "lifted" it and have it hanging on the back porch.  

We've come back from a gloriously hot long weekend away & spent over £ 10,000 doing it  .

So yesterday was spent checking out the SFG beds and making the first Dalek of three of compost using all my own ingredients .

 On taking out a few weeds from the odd square I noticed that the really small garlics in a couple of squares had withered and gone dead grass brown coloured in their tops .

 I took these squares apart and found that I'd somehow planted the commercial purple cloves at least 4 inches deep , the cloves had failed to produce any worthwhile bulbs.

 Wondering what to do with these two dozen or so small bulbs ( 1/2" dia max ) I decided to try for the first time ever to make some garlic & herb olive oil and also hope to actually use the garlic bulbs as a raw garlic bulb steeped in herbed olive oil as part of salads.
 
Is this how you guys " pickle " ( Is this the correct term ?) garlic in olive oil or are there different methods ?

Nice garlic sanderson  

Welcome back David