If your garlic looks like the photos above, harvest it last week!

Don't have a time machine?  Right now will work.

Strange leaves poking out of the garlic plant's stalk are a sign that the cloves have already broken through their outer wrapping and sprouted, so the garlic won't store as well as you would have liked.

This year, the garlic harvest snuck up on me.  Usually, we don't dig our garlic until mid to late June, but a mild winter and hot spring matured the heads early.

Only the softneck varieties were precocious, though.  That's what really kept me from digging a test bulb two weeks ago when the garlic leaves started to look ratty.  We hadn't seen any garlic scapes, so no way the garlic could be ready, right?

Wrong.  Even though Music (hardneck) and Silverwhite Silverskin (softneck) usually mature at the same time in our garden, clearly the two varieties handle early springs differently.  So about a third of our softneck bulbs are going to have to be eaten soon after curing, rather than saved for the winter.

Since I know someone's going to ask this in a comment --- yes, you can just leave the garlic in the ground to resprout and grow as a no-work perennial, but I don't recommend it.  If you don't split the cloves apart before replanting them, a dozen little plants will be competing with each other in the same spot and you won't get a good yield next year.

Plus, you can't just go out in the garden throughout the year and dig a head whenever you want it.  That spicy garlic flavor matures as the bulbs cure over the course of a month or so out of the ground.

Stay tuned for a later post about how well our new garlic curing racks worked!

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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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