Hi There,
We've got pretty much all of our garlic planting done for the fall. 20 rows (30 inches apart) and  350 feet long, for a 0.4 acre next year! We score rows and then hill them up with a tractor, aiming to get the cloves about three inches deep. I love planting in a T-shirt in the sun - the garlic likes it too, if the last 13 years of growing garlic has shown anything. Right around the Autumn Equinox always seems to be our planting time - our clay-loam soil is dry enough to work with.

I wish you guys all the best with your planting! - whenever you plan on getting it done.

I always figure Sept 20 - October 10th is about right, but you've got to do what works for you.

Also, a little note: We are sold out of seed garlic for the season. I have some garlic bulbils available yet, but that's about it. Just a small amount of eating garlic is available from the farm. We don't have store hours, but are usually home, or you can make an appointment.

The John Deere 40 is ready to hill up the garlic row. The rows to the left of the basket have been hilled up aready. It helps with spring and winter flooding to have the soil raised over the garlic row - it keeps the ice from forming a solid sheet and blocking the air from getting at the soil. It also adds depth to the top soil, which is never a bad thing, and sheds excess rain off of the row all through the growing season.

Sizing it up Before Harvest

So, this is a question I ask myself every year:
Is this variety of garlic ready to be dug?
 I ask myself this roughly one-hundred times in the last weeks of July, and all the way into August, as I have quite a few varieties. After twelve years of growing garlic to sell, I still get nervous about when to dig.
It's a ticklish thing, you want the bulb to be nice and mature, but you want it to also have keeping quality and nice layers of wrappers so that it is salable and pretty.
The fail-safe way is to count the leaves, I think. Most bulbs will have six to eight leaves, and if about three of the bottom leaves are drying down, you can be sure it's not just a drought causing that - it's ready!
40-50% of those bottom leaves, dry or yellow, that's the clue.
If you look at the whole plant, it should be more green than yellow, because the dry leaves get smaller in appearance.

Sometimes within the row there will be some variation of when the plants are ready, even if it's the same variety, (In my case, out in the field with 400 foot long row, that variance can sometimes be caused by tile drainage, as in, where the soil was nice and the garlic did better, and so is larger, greener and later) but the variance should be pretty minimal. If a few odd plants are yellow, and the rest looks green, well, that could be diseased plants that are suffering, so don't go digging up the whole row thinking they must be ready, in that case.
Always be gentle with the bulbs. They bruise if handled roughly. It may not show up right away, but cloves that are damaged might mold or dry up later.
For Pictures and a more detailed explanation of how and when to dig, as well as some calendar dates to shoot for, see the blog archive 2015  "Harvesting Garlic" July 11.

You can usually tell early on how big the harvested bulb will be, based on how thick, or big around the neck of the plant is. Although, a few varieties have odd bulb - to - plant size ratios and can have really thick necks, with puny bulbs, or vice versa. Purple Stripes come to mind, they can have large plants with smallish bulbs. Turbans on the other hand can have respectively large bulbs compared to how thin and tiny the plant looks.)
Turbans seem to keep better if they are harvested early - as in, when only one to two leaves are dry.
In some kinds of soils the wrappers of Turbans and Asiatics will also split if left in the ground as long as other garlic, so be mindful of that.
And where you put them to dry does have some importance as well. Keep them out of direct sun - that can cause the cloves - which are actually "storage leaves", to turn green, same as an onion or potato might,( they are blanched by being under ground while growing, so they are white/cream coloured and need to stay that way). Indirect or artificial lighting is fine. Direct sunlight can also "cook" them, and excessively high temperatures can also cause the cloves to deteriorate (Something called Waxy Breakdown) so try to avoid places that lock hot air into the drying area when you are choosing a spot for drying your garlic. A box fan or oscillating fan and an intake/out take are all that's needed to keep air moving in the drying shed.
I always recommend the slow way of drying garlic - with the whole stalk attached until it is cured and dry. Any home gardener can do this method, it's easy to make bundles of 8 -10 bulbs and hang them somewhere, or lay them out on racks or in open baskets. It takes about two and a half to three weeks, depending on the size of the garlic and how dry the air is, and you have a better product from it.
The flavour of fresh dug garlic is hot, juicy and simple, so it is best to wait until the whole plant is dried down anyway. Garlic tastes the best about two months after it's dug - it reaches a maturity of flavour that brings out depth and character, and then it begins to very slowly decline into the winter months, eventually tasting simple and firey again, but dry, instead of juicy.

Well, I must go out and check on a few of the early varieties again, even a day or two can make a difference in how they look. I've dug a few Turbans already, but nothing else, so I'm wondering if the harvest will be a bit late this year.

All the best with your harvest! I hope it's a good one! Julie

Scape Season - A little late, but not unusually so

It is soon time to cut your garlic scapes, if you haven't done so already. I've been getting a few emails of people wondering if their scapes should be out by now, or if they are unusually late. By now, yes, they should be out and starting to droop into their first coil, (unless you have a softneck variety which doesn't normally produce scapes). And yes, this year the scapes in my area are late. My Porcelains are finally starting to make a soft coil.

  If you also experienced a cold wet spring in your area, then things were probably slow to get going. Garlic Harvest can be as much as about two weeks later on a wet cool year, or two weeks earlier on a hot dry year, that's just how it is. Scapes seem to track the daylight patterns better (Summer Soltice being the initiation of the scape production in the plant), but they can still be a week or so later or sooner than usual.
For Porcelain type Garlic, July 6th is my benchmark for cutting scapes - note that that is for getting rid of the scape, not for eating it, as I let my scapes get a bit woody and stiff when the main focus is for bulb quality.
It looks to me like July 6th will be a good time for me to cut my eating scapes this year, so we could be about a week late...[Correction as of July 4th, Turns out scapes really do come at about the same time every year, all this heat maybe sped them up, I'm going say they are just a couple days late this year. My Porcelain scapes are ready to eat now, and a few are a tad over mature. LOL, maybe they were late to show up, but they made up for it once they got going.]

One of my favourite things to do with scapes is to use them in a beautiful Korean recipe for fermented scape sauce. As with most beautiful things, it's really simple:
2 parts Soy Sauce (no wheat soy sauce if it needs to be gluten free)
2 parts vinegar (pickling strength 5%)
1 part sugar
Fresh Garlic Scapes
Combine the first three ingredients in a sauce pan and bring to a boil. Cool.
Meanwhile, cut flower end off of the garlic scapes and chop into fine pieces (you can cut into 2 inch lengths and feed into a food processor if you like, otherwise 1/8 inch (or 3 mm) pieces).
Pack scapes into large, clean, (preferably sterile) jars. You need to make enough of the soy sauce mixture to cover however many jars you want to make.
Cap the jars loosely and let sit for 1 week, at room temp.
Strain juice off. Boil juice, cool and add back to jars.
This sauce can be consumed fresh, from the fridge for a couple weeks.
  Or, you can follow this next step for preserved sauce, and enjoy all year round (they make great gifts, then you can woo even the garlic critics and get them addicted to garlic too! Make sure you make enough to last until the next garlic scape harvest!) :
After the one week fermentation period, Empty the jars into a sauce pan or stock pot, and boil down, until the sauce begins to thicken a little.
Pack hot into sterile canning jars: like you would do with jam, leave a 1/8 inch space at the top, below the lid, and fingertip tighten the canning lids. Set jars to cool with a dish towel laid over them to prevent drafts from creating a premature seal. Make sure all jars are sealed before storing.
This stuff makes excellent sauce to use on roast meat, sandwiches, with grilling, etc.

Garlicky Regards, Julie