Garlic harvest
Good
things come to those who wait. And experiment. And research.
We planted cloves of
garlic straight from the grocery store in January
2007 and got pretty much no yield. September 2007, we put in some
top bulbs from my Mom, again to no avail. Finally, last October,
we got it right, planting
four varieties of Virginia-grown garlic in carefully built raised beds. And look at the
harvest!
Actually, we probably
should have dug our garlic about a week
ago. As you can see in the photo to the right below, a few of the
heads had lost their outer wrapper layer, meaning that we waited a bit
long to harvest. This
website gives the
best description I've seen of how to plant, harvest, and cure your
garlic.
Despite the fact that
we're really supposed to let our garlic cure for
a couple of weeks to get the best garlic flavor, I couldn't resist
harvesting our first basil of the year and doing a pesto
taste-test. We weren't really sure we could tell the difference
between the varieties, so we'll have to test them again once they're
fully cured. All four pestos were delicious, though, especially
after we realized this meant we may never have to buy grocery store
garlic again!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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