Harvesting and Preserving Garlic with Allium Leaf Miner / Homegrown Garden

[Music] hey welcome back to my element garden so we're nearing the end of june now about to step into july and i'm going to harvest all of my garlic today because it's ready for harvest and also the allium leaf miner is a little pest that burrows its way into the garlic and it's affecting my crop and i want to harvest it all and preserve it before they do any more damage so that i can continue to enjoy my crop throughout the rest of the year so i've got here a selection of hard and soft neck varieties of garlic i've got about seven different varieties i bought mine from the garlic farm i bought the garlic lovers selection so i've got a great mix of different varieties in here i planted them all in mid-october last year so they've had all autumn and winter to get their roots down and become quite vigorous plants and our cold winters here we have quite hard frosts which really helps the bulb to split into those little individual cloves so if you find that you plant them quite late in the year and you don't have any hard frosts and you get one single bulb harvest that could be why you might not have had a really hard frost to help split them so how do you know when they're ready to harvest well if you plant them in the autumn they're usually ready early summer time so about now so late june going into july into sort of mid-july if you plant them in the spring they'll be ready a little bit later more towards the end of july into august and basically you're looking out for the leaves the leaves tell you what's going on underneath and the bottom set of leaves will start to yellow and crispen and also the tips will do that as well you can also just harvest them and see how they look you know if they're still look really small and very green give it a few more weeks and then try again but as i said i've got allium leaf miner damage here which means i'm going to be harvesting them a little bit early because i don't want my crop to go to waste signs of allium leaf minor damage include white specks along the leaves also if you're growing onions you'll find they have really distorted leaves like really twisted and gnarled that's a sign the alum leaf miner is doing its damage and finally if you harvest one peel back the layers you'll see the little orange grub the lava stage and that is what does the damage into the clothes so that's the last thing to look out for which is what i spotted on mine but i already did see some of the markings which led me to believe that i had it so yeah i think that's enough talking it's time for me to pull them up and see what we've got now the first ones that i want to harvest are actually my elephant garlic which is more closely related to a leek than a garlic it's a lot softer and milder in flavour to garlic and these ones are usually ready earlier than your actual hard and soft neck varieties and you can see that the leaves have really yellowed it did have some garlic escapes on that i've harvested already and i'm just wondering how big are my elephant garlic are they going to be enormous or kind of average now luckily my soil is quite loose that i can actually just use two hands and carefully pull it out but if you have quite hard clay soil you may need to tease it okay well i thought my soil was soft enough to just gently pull this one out but maybe it's bigger than i imagined so i'm actually using my hori hori knife to gently try and tease it out of the soil i don't want to be digging it up well there we are first elephant garlic harvested let's see how the others look now this is quite interesting so in the autumn time when i planted all the garlic and that elephant garlic i didn't have room for all of the others so i planted a few cloves into a seed cell tray and then i planted those out once they shot up in early spring next to the elephant garlic and i've just harvested one of those now i can't remember if it was a hard or soft neck variety but it's done that thing where it doesn't split so i've got here just one single big bulb of garlic i mean it's still perfectly edible it's just not split into those clothes so what it means is it didn't get enough hard frost to help it do that so yeah i'm not going to plant in the spring from individual cell trays again so yeah good to know [Music] now on this one here i must have had two clothes planted together or something because i've got a bit of a a twin thing going on so i've got one big clove one bulb even and a really small one [Music] do [Music] do it's been really interesting to see the different sizes of them come out for the different varieties that i planted and so far i've had some brilliant results from the iberian white garlic and also this is the solent white garlic some really really big fat cloves i've still got the rest of the row to pull i've only pulled a few so far but they're really massive and i'm absolutely chuffed so it's a good idea to plant a few different varieties so that you know which one in the future will grow best for your climate so i remember reading on the garlic farm website that the solemn white is particularly adapted to the uk winters so they don't mind growing in soil that's wetter perhaps a bit heavier maybe clay conditions and right throughout the growing season in the winter and the early spring it was always miles ahead of all of the others i remember it was much thicker and the leaves were already much taller so it's really tempting to use and consume all of the biggest cloves and the biggest bulbs but actually what you want to do for your future harvest so long as they are good for storing and keeping is to save the biggest and the best dry them and use them for growing next season so we'll be planting them again in the autumn time mid-october so i'm going to hope that i can store some of these and they won't be too damaged from the leaf miner we'll see how they clean up the size of that one it's absolutely enormous oh really really big cloves or bulbs should i say again those outer layers are starting to tear away so i know they wouldn't store for very long it's definitely time for them to be harvested look at that chuffed a bit yeah i can definitely see allium leaf miner in here there can you see allium leaf miner there's one there one there one there another and another right down here and that's why these are not going to store very well at all so i'm not going to be able to dry these as you traditionally would instead i'm going to have to freeze them as i mentioned in my june tour video the allium leaf miner is quite a new pest to the uk and it's becoming more and more widespread particularly in the midlands which is where i'm based and there's not really a known treatment for it yet especially organically once the larvae hatches it can actually overwinter in the soil as well so it can affect your following crop the next year if you grow it in the same patch so obviously it's important to practice crop rotation so you don't plant your same crops in the same place but also you know the fly is going to land on the actual allium whether it's garlic or onion so you can prevent it by meshing your crop with a really fine net so it's just a case of harvesting them looking for that damage and then storing your crop accordingly and it's really important that we do not compost any of this leaf material it's going to go into a black bin liner and i'm going to take it home well what a harvest i'm absolutely chuffed to bits with my garlic this is probably my best year ever i think for garlic despite the damage and i'm just so thrilled so now i've got this big empty bed that i'm not gonna let go to waste i've already planted two squash in here and there are lots of other things that we can sow now and grow on through the winter for harvesting either before early autumn or into the winter months so i myself am going to plant lots of beetroot in here probably some more chard and spinach but you could also plant out brassicas like your broccoli and brussels sprouts for winter so that's my harvest and i haven't counted them but there's at least 50 cloves here and they're all great no white rot either which is a first and white rock can stay in the soil for quite a few years and you really can't get rid of it or grow in the same patch again and it's basically like a white fluffy mold that develops around the garlic so yeah i'm really lucky that i didn't get any of that this year but now it's time for me to i'm going to peel back a few layers cut away the foliage so it's easier for me to get these home because this basket is really really heavy and then when i get home i'll show you how i freeze them but if you are going to be storing them long term and drying them then you want to gather them in groups and hang them up if you can in a cool and dry environment where there's lots of ventilation so they're not going to go mouldy or fussy and you don't want it to be in really hot conditions either like in a really hot sunny greenhouse because that will impair the flavor you might also have a rack that has holes on it such as a seed table or tray and you can just lay them out and leave them for about three or four weeks to fully dry before you plat or store them so i'm going to get these cleaned up and take them home now and i'll see you in a bit [Music] do [Music] okay so at home and i'm going to show you how i would now de-clothe all of my garlic bulbs ready for storing and the first thing to do is to grab your garlic and start peeling away all of those outside layers and this is actually much easier to do when it's still soft and fresh so do it as soon as you can and after you get down to the cloves you want to separate them off so that we can tidy those up in just a moment and now we've got a long stem on these so we're just going to trim them off just above the actual clove and then once they're trimmed you should be able to give it a squeeze and this is actually the outer casing of the garlic which would usually be quite papery layers if it was dried so we now just got to peel that away as well to reveal the garlic clove that you want and then all you need to do is to trim off that little woody end with a nice sharp knife i was hoping to save some of my biggest bulbs for growing next year but i realized that the alum leaf miner had really hidden itself down deep into the cloves which means that they i didn't want to risk any of them rotting so i wasn't going to store and dry any of them they're all going to go into the freezer this really is quite a time consuming job but if you just set yourself up in front of a film uh you can get through quite a few in a few hours and whilst my hands did egg and stink of garlic for a long time afterwards knowing that i'm not gonna have to buy or peel any more garlic for a good few months is just such a relief you know i'm gonna have my own homegrown garlic it's gonna taste so much better than anything from the shops i'm gonna be freezing my garlic in two separate ways the first way is to freeze them whole so i'm going to tip out all of those individual cloves onto a baking sheet which is on top of a baking tray or a board nice and flat you want to spread them out so they're on a single layer and then you're going to freeze these once they're frozen i'll put them into a glass jar which will then return back to the freezer just remember the more solid the storage jar the less chance it is of stinking out your freezer another thing i like to make is garlic paste which is great for curries and you want to take your garlic cloves put them into a food processor and blitz them for a good minute or so and after a while you may want to add a few drops of water or some people prefer to use an oil and then whisk it up some more until it forms a paste consistency take off the lid scrape down the sides give it another blitz check the consistency and then when you think it's ready take it out and spoon it into a suitable container for your freezer i'm using a plastic sandwich bag here make sure you label it then seal the bag and what i do is i press it all out into a thin sort of layer and try and create little parcels or little pillows of garlic paste so it's easy to break off for my curries so i use the back of a knife to make an indent like a bit like a quilt cover onto the bag so that when it freezes i can actually break off these segments quite easily well thank you so much for joining me on my garlic harvest it's been really fun and i'm so charged with my haul this year how's your crop been have you harvested them yet or are you gonna wait a few more weeks let me know in the comments i'd love to hear from you thank you very much for watching and i'll see you again next time [Music] you

Channel: homegrown.garden

Views: 65,000

Rating: 4.9640565 out of 5

Keywords: allotment, garden, gardening, grow your own, organic gardening, horticulture, edible garden, homegrown vegetables, nottingham, urban garden, community garden, victorian garden, english garden, wildlife, gardener, garlic, allium leaf miner, harvest video, preserving garlic

Id: N9TvX8L3R3E

Length: 16min 36sec (996 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021