Garlic Harvest: 2017

When green garlic leaves fade to brown, it's time to harvest them. It's important to get them out of the ground before tops get too weak to help pull the roots out. Also, as the leaves fade, organisms start eating away the membranes that cover the cloves, exposing these gems to soil. Although dirt readily washes off, bulbs are much fancier wrapped in colorful membrane layers. Also, it's only possible to braid garlic together if the leaves are strongly attached.

Garlic Bed with Parsley Growing Between Rows

Another View Showing Green Garlic Leaves Turning Brown

This year it took six hours to collect about 200 pounds of garlic and stack them exposed to air to cure them. The bulbs must be oriented separately from the leaves so they dry quickly without starting to make "compost". Our new wagon seems to be an ideal tool for curing because the mesh bed allows air to circulate.

Wagon Full of Garlic, Stacked So Bulbs Are Exposed to Air

Knowing that garlic is harvested before the end of July, in early June I broadcast parsley seeds all over the garlic patch. It's now growing very well and by September will be ready for freezing packets of parsley pesto. Last fall the garlic was planted through inches of leaves and other mulch. This spring, some garlic sprouts needed help getting through the larger leaves. Today the mulch has disappeared, processed away primarily by worms, but there was enough left in June to successfully germinate parsley seeds.

Parsley Now Without Competition from Garlic

This year has been cool and wet so garlic scapes didn't appear until later in June. We picked them as soon as they appeared so that the plants' energy goes into the cloves.

Fifteen Pounds of Scapes from the Above Garlic Bed

Summer Starting Well

One spring planting goal is to get major crops in the ground by the first day of summer. We have three staggered plantings of sweet corn, more than 100 each of tomatoes and peppers, Swiss chard, onions, basil, cucumbers, beans, winter and summer squash, kale sugar snap peas, cabbage, broccoli, eggplant, okra and salad items. So far only one tragedy: over 100 basil plants were eaten by some critter the day after they were transplanted! Luckily we have two additional beds with better fences that are growing well. Deer browse our tomatoes and peas, but we have more than enough for sharing.

Asparagus Sprouting

Asparagus are our first vegetable harvest in spring and lasts through early June. Our next harvest is rhubarb that we make into pies. At this time our Guinea fowl also start to lay eggs so we have lots to for custard to incorporate the rhubarb chunks. 

Rhubarb Pie

One trick I use to prompt judicious planting is to soak seeds for 24 hours and then moisten them a few times a day until they sprout. This gives them leg up since they don't have to absorb moisture from the soil. It also insures that only viable seeds get planted. And planted in the order they sprout! Keeping the array of cups with a moistened seeds by the coffee machine, prompts me to check them at least three times a day when I brew cups. Most of our favorite Zucchino Rampicante seeds we saved from last summer's crop didn't sprout. Luckily we still had a few mature fruit in the cellar so we processed the largest one and its seeds grew! We also had to make lots of pies and squash meals.

Cups of Seeds Waiting to Sprout

The Seed Cavity of the Above Squash

One Zucchini Pie

Another sign of spring: when it gets hot, our dog melts and hides deep in the garage, lying on the cool concrete floor. We then know it's time to shave her. Though she reluctantly puts up with the noise of the clipper, she's overjoyed when it's over and she zips around, rolling over and over in the cool grass. She now follows me around but takes advantage of shade when I work in sunny gardens.

Belle, Half-shaved

Our Dog, Belle, Happily Sporting Her "Lion" Cut

Some of Belle's Hair to be Made into Yarn One Day

Shiitake mushrooms are another sign of spring: after a heavy rain, they bolt out of the oak logs we inoculated the year before.

Shiitake Mushrooms Growing out of Oak Logs

Many Pounds of Harvested Shiitake Mushrooms

A few weeks later, oyster mushrooms begin sprouting out of their ash-leaved maple logs.

Oyster Mushrooms 1

Oyster Mushrooms 2

As soon as summer begins, garlic scapes pop out the top of each plant. We incorporate them into many meals, chop them for freezing but donate most to a homeless shelter. We have so many garlic bulbs on the way that store well without taking room in the freezer so we don't need to preserve many scapes.

Broccoli and Garlic Scapes for Dinner!

Broccoli and Scape Curry With Rice

First Garlic Scape Harvest: 15 Pounds, 10 to a Homeless Shelter

Processing Garlic Scapes

In June, hardneck garlic produce scapes, flower "buds" that produce small garlic bulbils. Bulbils are tiny, undivided bulbs that can be used as seed. Garlic do not have fertile flowers so do not produce true seeds. 

See: https://www.cog.ca/uploads/TCOG%20Articles/Growing%20garlic%20from%20bulbils.pdf

Curly Garlic Scapes Emerging  from the center of Garlic Plants

Some years we let some of these scapes produce large bulbils that we plant. The following year, each bulbil becomes a single large clove, ideal for processing. These are sometimes available in farmers' markets at a premium because these large cloves are so easy to peel and a single one is perfect for many dishes. In the second year, each of these former bulbils become an ordinary garlic with a dozen, or so, cloves. But if garlic scapes are left unattended, these bulbils get distributed (each year we rotate every crop) overproducing and becoming weeds, literally, thousands of garlic plants competing with everything. One former garlic bed, long abandoned, is so thick with overcrowded garlic, it looks like grass!

Last Year's Missed Bulbils with Scapes: Imagine If All the Bulbils in These Scapes Matured and Planted Themselves. Result? Garlic Grass!

Garlic Scapes Ready for Harvesting

We're trying to get on top of our garlic's propensity to take over our growing spaces and rigorously harvest every scape. Should any escape and, left on their own, they become a dozen or two garlic plants not far from where they grew.  Early scapes are much more tender than later ones so we pick them as soon as they appear. It's sad that the plants continue to grow scape stems after picking them early, but the resources needed to produce bulbils goes into cloves below ground. 

Belle and First of Two Baskets of Garlic Scapes

This year, after cutting off the fibrous "hat", we chopped these scapes in a food processor, portioned them into sandwich bags and sealed in zip-lock gallon bags for freezing. Our 200 square feet of garlic plants made 6 pounds of chopped scapes, ready for 30 to 50 pestos, soups and curries.

Garlic Scape Processing Operation

Summer Squash, Apples, Corn and Garlic

Following a dry spring, timely precipitation since May resulted in bumper crops of shell peas, sugar snap peas, string beans, potatoes, beets, strawberries, raspberries, currants, gooseberries, and many different herbs. 

Garlic Scapes Being Prepared for the Freezer

We're harvesting enough summer squash to be able to share more than 40 pounds a week with neighbors and a homeless shelter. 

Striped Zucchini Squash

Yellow Summer Squash

Our first planting of sweet corn was fully mature and we've harvested ears from all 160 plants. It's a hybrid yellow Se+ Corn called Sugar Buns from Johnny's Selected Seeds. 

The First Crop of Corn Has Been Pulled Out and Laid Down So It Can Compost. Four Rows of the Second Crop, in the Background, Is Beginning to Ripen.

 We steamed the ears for a few minutes and then stripped the kernels from the cobs using an implement made for this purpose that has a cylinder of stainless steel with tiny teeth on one end. By squeezing the handles together, the cylinder becomes smaller so it matches the diameter of the cob.

Seventy Pounds of Corn Ready for Stripping Off the Kernels

Leather Gloves Are Required to Process This Amount of Corn Because the Handles of the Tool Are Small And Eventually Cause Blisters. The Hand Opposite the Stripping Hand Often Gets Hit by the Sharp Teeth of the Stripper and a Glove Prevents Blood That Would Contaminate the Kernels.

160 Corn Plants Not Only Delivered a Few Dozen Meals for Us and Neighbors But Also This Pile of Cobs and Ready to Freeze One Pound Packages. Each Tray Weighs Around 35 pounds.

The next harvesting effort will be processing apples. One of our trees is laden with perfect apples - when last year it did not produce a single one. This process probably interrupted the parasite cycle so that there were none to devour this year's crop. Until they are all gone, each week we'll deliver 50 pounds of freshly picked apples to the homeless shelter we support. Every day we gather a bucket or two of drops that we'll process into juice and sauce. We've already made a few pies and crisps and will probably make a few more. We also have a few Granny Smith Apple Trees that are loaded, but their crop won't be ready until late September.

The Apple Tree Had So Many Fruit That Props Were Necessary to Prevent the Limbs from Breaking. 

This Unnamed Variety of Apple Is the Earliest Ripening One We Know: Last Week of July.