Harvesting Garlic: Signs, Tips, and Storage Guide

and I can tell by kind of how knobby that looks there yes we indeed did get stratification we've got individual clothes going on there what's up Lazy Dog fam hope all yall having a wonderful day it is Sunday May 26 here in South Georgia and I think it's finally time to harvest our garlic after being put in the ground all the way back last November so I'll show you the three different types of garlic we've got growing we'll talk about when to harvest eats the signs you'll need to look for we'll Harvest it see how we did and then I'll show you how we store it under our barn there so we planted three types of garlic last fall all from seed stock we had saved from previous year's Harvest we've got a decent amount of elephant garlic right here we've got some Spanish Roa hard neck garlic right here and then we've got some Island star soft neck garlic in this raised bed so for us down here garlic is in the ground a long long long time if we think November all the way into the following May we're looking at 7 months that the garlic is in the ground growing so it's quite the investment of time to grow garlic but once you get your own seed stock going you just replant it year after year and we haven't bought any garlic cloves in quite a while so just keep multiplying it year after year we don't have an awesome grow out every year but usually decent enough to give us a good seed stock for the following year now I've grown enough garlic down here to know that ours is usually going to be ready to harvest in late May early June that can vary by a few weeks every year but we're getting around that time where it should be ready to pull it off but depending on the type of garlic you grow the kind of ready to harvest signs are going to be a little different so let me walk you through what we're looking for on the Elephant Garlic the hard neck garlic and the soft neck garlic so for the Elephant Garlic which is the easiest to grow in my opinion we first want to look for these Scapes or these seed heads now that one there hasn't opened up yet but you can see that purple one right there that's what they look like once they open up once we see those we want to cut those off and I did cut the majority of these off or the boys did looks like they may have missed three or four but once those appear usually before they even open up we go through here and cut all those off so all these plants you see here had Scapes they were cut off and after we cut the Scapes off we keep watering the garlic may even keep feeding the garlic and then we want to start waiting until we see these plants dying back a little bit kind of yellowing and turning brown that's about the right time to start pulling it now on this hard neck garlic here it's a similar timeline to what we've got with the Elephant Garlic over there we want to wait until those Scapes appear cut those Scapes and then wait till the plants start Browning up some now these plants here still still look pretty nice and green so I don't think I'm going to harvest these today we may find a few down here that have yellowed a decent amount we may pull those to see what we got but I'm going to leave the majority of the hard neck garlic cuz I haven't even seen a scape yet and then lastly on the soft neck garlic we don't get Scapes at all so what we're looking for here is just some nice yellowing and Browning of the plants that tells us it's time now you may be wondering how yellow or how Brown do the plants need to be before you pull them do you waight till they completely dive back or when they're just a little bit yellow and brown it's very kind of qualitative measurement there well I found something online that said you want to wait until about 40% of the plant is yellow or brown so ours are probably at least half yellow or brown now so I think we're good now one more thing to note about this Spanish Roa hard neck garlic here that's still looking pretty good like I said we haven't seen any Scapes on this yet but last year we got a ton of Scapes what they call witches broom so you basically get Escape forming from every little clove you have on that bulb down there and it looks kind of crazy coming out haven't seen any of that this year haven't even seen a single scape which is kind of odd to me I expected to see the same thing we saw last year now additionally I was talking to my buddy Matthew up in Athens and he said his County Extension agent up there told him that you shouldn't replant garlic from plants that formed witches broom brooms the previous year now we did here all our plants had witches brooms last year we replanted all those cloves and yeah we've got some plants that don't look very good at all about half that roow and that could be why but we've also got another half of the road that looks really really good so I don't know if that's completely true or not now before we pull up some of these plants let's talk real quick about stratification because that's what we want to see when we pull up a garlic plant on that head there we want to be able to see individual garlic clothes we don't want just one big ball of garlic now stratification is usually not an issue with elephant garlic down here we almost always get stratification or the individual cloves on the head in a bigger spot of elephant garlic like that I might end up with five or six just balls of garlic or what we call Pearls but most of those will stratify every single year we don't really need cold temperatures for that to happen but for the soft neck and the hard neck garlic those don't always stratify down here in a warmer climate and so as I've explained to you in previous years what you can do if you want to grow hard neck or soft neck garlic in the deeps out put the cloves in the fridge for 6 8 10 even 12 weeks before you plant and you kind of trick the cloves of going through this cold cycle that you might not normally get outside and that way you'll get stratification you'll get individual clothes as opposed to just one big ball of garlic and I have done that whole fridge storage process with my hard neck and soft neck garlic every year up until this year so this year I was feeling froggy and I thought I'd take a little chance so I didn't put hard neck or soft neck cloves in the fridge they had just been out there underneath the barn on the storage rack we broke them up put them in the ground here so we'll see if that really mattered or not when we pull some here in a minute so let's start off here with the Elephant Garlic since we have more of that than anything else then we'll pull the soft neck and then maybe a few of the those hard neck garlic stalks there so I'll just pull this up Shake It Off throw it all in the wheelbarrow there and we'll see what we got all right so we got all that pulled got us a nice wheel bear load full of elephant garlic this stuff smells amazing we do have a few runs in there but you're always going to have that most of these look pretty good A lot of them look like that right there nice big old heads of elephant garlic and I can tell kind of how knobby that looks there yes we indeed did get stratification we've got individual cloves going on there now I'm not going to really dive into the whole corn thing cuz that's usually not something I worry about not something I do but I will briefly mention it so when you pull your heads of garlic you may notice these tiny little look like little bitty garlic cloves these are called corns okay you can leave those in the soil you will inevitably have some left in the soil when you pull up your garlic plants and the ones that are stuck to the ahead here you can pluck those off and plant those but it's going to take 2 years for that to get to this right here so some people will like to grow their garlic as a perennial just have it in the same bed in the same spot year after year they'll leave those corns in the ground and they'll just have a cycle of garlic going all the time I move mine every year so I don't ever worry about these little corns but in case you were wondering what they were and what you can do with them now you know all right now over here to our soft neck garlic let's pull this little bed here and see if we got stratification even without putting it in the fridge before planting and it looks like we did indeed get stratification on most of those now a lot of these heads right here aren't going to win any awards at your local county fair but they will eat and it's good to know that we can still get individual cloes without putting them in the fridge beforehand just taking them from the barn and sticking them in the ground and then lastly even though I don't think gets ready to pull I'm going to grab a couple of these hard neck stalks here so we can compare them kind of see where we're at I'll probably grab one or two right there from the beginning of the row those that just look kind of okay and then I'm going to grab one of these really good looking ones here that we can compare it to all right so here's the two hard neck plants I pulled this one from the beginning of the row and this goodlooking one from the middle of the row and just by looking at these I can tell you we messed up by not putting these in the fridge before planting all we've got is just a big big hunk of garlic here no stratification no individual clothes this hunk bigger than that hunk but no stratification on either of them now we can still eat these but it's not ideal ideally we want to see that stratification we want to see those individual cloves this is what I call Pearls some people like pearls not a huge fan of pearls I'd rather have the smaller pieces of garlic can't really replant this I guess we could but when we get stratification we get a lot more seed pieces that we can work with in the following year so valuable lesson learned there for me at least looks like I can get away with skipping the fridge process for the soft neck can't get away with skipping it on the hard neck if I grow hard neck garlic in the future I will put it in the fridge probably 10 to 12 weeks before I plant it but we're still in good shape because we Diversified our portfolio and we have plenty of other garlic that did well for us now let's get this under the barn and I'll show you how we store it all right so here's our storage rack up underneath the barn I built this several several years ago and it has been extremely handy for us you can see we got some ters down there I'll come back to those in a minute still got some semon old pumpkins from last year hanging around Brooklyn actually made some pumpkin muffins other night with some of these they're still good still hanging in there I have had a few that rotted but a majority of them are storing pretty well there's our kind of lackluster onion Harvest from earlier this year and then down here on this level we've got ters lots ters and still got two rows of ters to add to this I don't know if y'all can see the color real well here there's our Charlotte ters there on the back side of those those kind of pinkish ones that's our rose gold there's our purple Viking right there and then all those are Huckleberry gold got a few Baltic rows back there that we got from the rais beds so probably got too many ters to just put them all on this one rack we'll probably have to come down here for the rest of our ters that we still have in the ground now for the pumpkins and the onions they usually do just fine sitting right where they are this is not ideal onion storage they would store better in a basement somewhere but I don't have a basement they store okay right here for the ters I can't just leave those exposed like that because there is a little bit of light that gets in here as you can see there so I do need to cover these with some black plastic let me do that real quick I'll show you what it looks like so nothing fancy here I probably could have done that a little neater than I did just then I have used just a cheap black tablecloth from the dollar store in the past had an old tarp I cut a piece off it to use that this year all we're doing is keeping the sunlight from hitting these ters and also keeping them from getting wet when we do get a bad storm and get some Mist rolling underneath This Barn still get some air flow underneath there with the hardware cloth and this actually works really really well for storing ters I can get these things to store well into the fall just like this and so now we just need to get all our garlic up there now I won't have to cover the garlic like we do the potatoes I never cover it it always stores really well for me I'll probably put some of that elephant garlic up top there looks like I left a few heads up there from last year and then the rest of it should go right here all right so we got it all up there got our elephant garlic up top got our soft neck garlic right here and I'll probably put those hard neck garlic pearls on the other side of the soft neck garlic there I don't get too particular about how I put this in here just want to spread it out a little bit I don't want bulbs stacked on top of bulbs so we just spread it out it's all right if we have bulbs stacked on top of old foliage though so I hope you enjoyed the video today and let me know in the comments below about your successes or failures with getting soft neck or hard neck garlic to stratify either with or without the fridge trick elephant garlic is easy but the soft neck and the hard neck is what can give us a little trouble down here in the Deep South and if you want to see what that garlic on our storage rack will look like come November when we replant it again watch this video right here when we planted back last November we'll show you the whole process of breaking apart those cloves and getting them in the ground so check that out and we'll see you next time right here at Lazy Dog Farm

Channel: Lazy Dog Farm

Views: 6,546

Keywords: backyard gardening, organic gardening, sustainable living, vegetable gardening, vegetable garden, homestead, homesteading, homestead garden, organic food, small farm, sustainable agriculture, home garden, sustainable farming, sustainable food, organic garden, backyard garden, home gardening, garden advice, garden tips, garden techniques, gardening tips, garden seeds, garden varieties, gardening, garden, how to garden, grow your own food, kitchen garden, clean food

Id: oQNGGTih_pY

Length: 13min 26sec (806 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 06 2024