Crop Update, July 21, 2023

Porcelains. July 19, 2023

What a fantastic year of upset expectations! For a few weeks in early summer I thought we were in for a repeat of last years drought, but the last couple of weeks have seen an exceptional turn around. With chances of rain forecasted for nearly every day, it's hard to plan anything ahead, but as you can see, the garlic is late to dry down, so there's still a chance that harvest weather will be nice after all! 

I expect I'll be releasing the Catalogue for this years crop on Monday, August 21st, so that we have a chance to get inventory trimmed and weighed.

We received several inches of rain fall in the last month, thankfully spread out enough that the puddles did not become semi-permanent lakes. Looks like the garlic stood it well, though I was going spare for a while, not being able to get out to the field to really look at it, or prepare mentally and physically for harvest. July  19th was the first time I've been able to walk out freely, on dry ground, for about two weeks.

 Early weed control - antique wheel hoes are great, although, the weeds don't stay small when it's too wet to keep at them! I find the old tools are so much more ergonomic than most of the modern ones, and actually bite into the ground, so you don't have to push down as hard in tight soil. This is what the plot looked like June 17th.

You can see a few runs where water washed across the top on the soil...thankfully I chose a good spot in the field, so nothing was under water or seriously impacted. I'm amazed how quickly the top of the soil dried off in just three rainless days...you can kinda see in this picture the thunderstorm that was coming in from the west (left side of the sky) as I rushed around and quickly snapped a document of what the garlic looked like at this stage, we got another 9 mm from that one, so not too much.

I've harvested Turbans, Asiatics and some Rocamboles so far.  Looking forward to breaking out the undercutter next week, and pulling in some big ole Porcelains and Marbled Purple Stripes! a week ago, I was joking that we were going to crave tiny paddles for them and they could just row themselves into the barn, but sunshine has an amazing restorative power on the psychie!

All the best with your respective garlic harvests!  - Julie