How to Harvest Garlic at the Perfect Time (And What Happens When You Harvest Too Early or Too Late)

tonight I'm going to be harvesting my garlic and I wanted to bring you along to show you when is the proper time to harvest your garlic not only am I going to tell you the signs that you can be looking for to know when your garlic is nearing Harvest but I'll also show you what happens if you harvest too early and then what happens if you harvest too late many first-time garlic growers ask when should I expect to harvest my garlic and that will depend on a couple of different factors you might harvest in May and you may not Harvest till July and a lot of that depends on what kind of garlic you're growing if you grow soft nut garlic like I have right here which is what I'm going to be harvesting tonight soft nut garlic actually does harvest quicker than hardneck garlic hardneck garlic you will know by the garlic producing escape this is a garlic scape and it's not like onions it doesn't mean the garlic is bolting that can be a little bit confusing but this is actually a sign that your garlic will probably be ready to harvest in about a month between three and four weeks or so what most garlic growers do when they find this scape is they actually start to cut it off some garlic growers like to wait until the Escape makes two curly cues or one curlicue I don't really mess with it too much but what you do is you just cut the scape off ideally when you cut this off the garlic will shift from this seed production to more bulb production and so that's why a lot of garlic growers cut the scape off you can eat the scape it's delicious in whatever you want to use in the kitchen stir fries things like that but this still tells you that you're about three to four weeks away from harvesting the hardneck garlic but today I'm going to be harvesting soft neck garlic because most of my soft neck garlic is ready so how do you know that your garlic is getting ready to be ready to harvest one thing that you can look at here is your garlic which used to be Lush and green is now starting to look a little bit more dull you will see that it looks drier on the tips and more yellowing and that just means that the garlic has shifted its focus from producing these lush green leaves to producing the bulb that's completely normal and that's one of the first signs that your garlic is nearing harp now the second thing that we want to look at and this is really the key is how many leaves have actually browned sometimes as you can see here soft nut garlic will fall over I noticed that this happens more to me when my soil has a lot of compost and it's loose but what you want to do is you want to count the number of leaves that are Browning on the stem itself so what you want to look at is for about a half to even two-thirds of the leaves of the garlic to turn brown that is your signal that the garlic is ready to harvest now what happens if you harvest when not all the leaves have turned brown what happens if you harvest too early well I actually harvested a garlic bulb too early on purpose a couple of weeks ago so I'm going to show you what that looked like here here we're going to harvest garlic a little bit early and I'm going to show you why it's early and what happens when you harvest it a little bit too soon so I have a soft neck variety of garlic here the difference with soft neck and hard neck is that you don't have Escape so you kind of have to definitely go by the leaves and how many of the leaves have died back so I'm just going to count here from the top we have one two three four five six seven eight nine and then ten looks like we've had 10 leaves the optimum time to harvest is when half of the leaves have died back and as you can see only one of them has so basically we're looking at a garlic here where only one has died back these other ones are starting to but this is too early I'm going to go ahead and pull it though because even if you pull it early you can still use it but it's probably not going to be something that will store well and is not going to have the best quality when you use it so I'm going to go ahead and pull it out and you can see this one actually has a pretty good size bulb and this isn't terrible because it's developed quite a bit of a bulb right there and I could go ahead and use it and I will I'll go ahead and use this in my kitchen once I took that garlic bulb in the kitchen what I noticed when I started trying to peel it is that I had to peel over and over and over and over again to finally get to the garlic cloves themselves that's because every leaf that you see above ground corresponds to a wrapping around the garlic bulb itself so if you harvest it before you have the Browning of the lower leaves you have that many wrappers around the garlic cloves now in the case of the one that I harvested it had actually been able to bulk up quite a bit and that's why you saw a really nice sized garlic clove but that's not always going to be the case sometimes you might Harvest it too early in your garlic bulb isn't very big so that's why you don't want to harvest it too early another thing that can happen is if you harvest it too early is that yes you'll be able to eat it like I've been able to eat that garlic bulb in my kitchen right away but it's not going to store as well so that's why you really want to wait until at least half of those garlic stems have turned brown before you start to harvest we just looked at what it means to harvest garlic too early well let's take a look at what happens when we Harvest garlic too late I'm looking at this particular garlic plant it has just a little bit of green left in the leaf right here but for the most part it has dried out and so let's go ahead and harvest it see what it looks like now what you'll notice here in this garlic bulb is it actually still looks pretty good it does have a layer of wrapping that is covering all of these cloves it's still protecting it but judging from how many we have here there's probably just a layer or two and you can see that it these cloves are starting to separate a little bit the longer that these stay in the garden the more the cloves are going to separate now the reason why it's important to avoid that has to do with long-term storage any kind of garlic that you harvest you'll be able to use in the kitchen right away but if you're like me and you want to harvest your garlic to last as long as possible I like mine to hopefully last all year and soft neck garlic when it's harvested at the right time and when it's cured properly it can store nine to 12 months then you want to make sure to harvest it at the right time before these cloves start to separate now if you let life get in the way and you start harvesting some where the cloves are starting to separate just use those is first and you can cure the ones that you're able to harvest that have about half of the garlic is still green on the plant and then you're ready to go thankfully there are only a couple of garlic plants that have gone a little bit too far past what we want them to the rest of them look perfect and ready to harvest so my son's going to be helping me and we're going to get the soft knit garlic harvested today and then in a few more weeks we'll get the hard neck garlic harvested when it's ready using the same signs that we did with the soft nut so let's get to harvesting this year's garlic planting [Music] thank you [Music] so I just harvested this one right here and I thought it would be a better example of one that was already separating because I harvested it too late so you can see right here that these clothes are separated but they're clearly not wrapped in anything definitely going to need to use those quicker they're not going to cure as well but I thought that's a great that's actually a better example than the one I just gave you of how when you harvest too late the cloves are going to separate like that foreign here's another example of garlic that was harvested too late those are those clothes are definitely separated more so than what I was able to show you before these are definitely going to need to be used quickly they're not going to store they're not going to cure well and it actually as you can see there's no stem to it when I went to pick it out and harvested the stem came off which I've actually never had happen before but that shows that I definitely harvested this one to it so this is our garlic Harvest this is a really good one a good harvest in general this will last our family all year with garlic once it's properly cured and I even will have enough to be able to do some garlic powder which I dehydrate and then dry into garlic powder and this supplies this all year if you're wanting more information on when to know how to harvest garlic and also a unique tip on curing it you can check out this video right here I hope you've enjoyed this hopefully this will help you know when the best time to harvest your garlic will be and for more how-to videos make sure to like And subscribe for future ones coming up foreign [Music]

Channel: Beginner's Garden - Journey with Jill

Views: 48,595

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Id: XjmTs5dH3TY

Length: 9min 38sec (578 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 28 2023