We have only in the last 5 years approx. started using garlic. Several years ago I started planting garlic. Last year we bought three lbs. of garlic from Edible Acres. We have harvested about 15 lbs approx. My wife who did not care much for garlic before loves it. It is the best garlic we have ever had. Thank you, Dean. Also have learned SO much from the videos.
Thanks for your experience on tops dying back. I’ve grown for a few years and never had tops grow back thisseverely. I thought I’d blown my crop. Feel empowered again. Thank you, Sean!
Thank you for sharing. Your scale is mind blowing to a tiny little home operation such as our own here in the Highlands of Scotland. We grew a small amount of garlic over autum and winter pulling it at the end of June and had a 95%+ success rate with the first variety we tried (I forget the name just now!), but we've only eaten a very small amount and intend to regrow the remained this autumn on a slightly grander scale. Keep up the inspirational work, it is magnificent to see and learn from. So very much appreciated, thank you! 👍 🏴
We just did our garlic this weekend as well. Even with it being so dry, we had a wonderful harvest. And it looks as if you did as well. Thanks fir sharing, I always learn something when you share. Be safe and stay well. Catherine
Thank you for sharing your knowledge, you are so creative with using biomass as you encounter it on the landscape, I love the garlic stalks being used as mulch, and how you emphasize the mulching of beds after harvest. I would be curious in any difference between cutting stalks of garlic and cured vs the hanging on stalk curing.
Thanks so much for your timely video! I'm only a few miles from you and have been looking at the garlic daily pondering when to harvest. With the "scheduled" rain tomorrow followed by another heatwave I was thinking this weekend. Headed out now to join you in the harvest. Due to space constraints I also cut the tops off, but instead of composing I'll lay them strategically in the garden. Thanks for another great tip!
We cropped our garlic a couple of months ago due too the temperature difference (Cyprus) as it was about to hit 30oC, but after watching this video I realised we could have waited for a while for more of a die back, ah well not to worry next year, it won’t be long before we are replanting them anyway already started preparing new beds for them, come the Autumn it will be the start of our forth growing season on this property, thank you for the videos they really are making a difference.
Possibly the rain we've had a few hundred kms north of you has helped the garlic. The variety is Music. The tallest one's went over 3'. Harvested over 8Kg of scapes. I'm guessing they need another week or so. I like your stacked box method. There's no shortage of lumber or usable bits of leftover fencing on this farm.
Fabulous information. It's been a weird year here in Scotland -temperatures were very high in spring and have been lower now for last 2 months but with minimal rain as well, and as this was my first year growing garlic (somewhat successfully) I had been confused as to when to harvest because of these strange weather fluxes. I pulled the larger looking half of my bulbs yesterday before the imminent heat wave strikes us this week, they were possibly a little smaller than what could've been if I had let the tops die/dry a little more but I worry that as you say the heat and wet weather we are due round about now would make them less likely to store well long term. I'm not hating myself for possibly being a bit eager as my intuition says the rest won't be long before they absolutely have to come out! 2 days off for sweating and then it's back to work for me 🌞🌡🔥💛😎
Seems so so important to do things based a little on information you get from the outside and some from intuition and a LOT from what you are seeing right in front of you!
Does the garlic need to be cured before you can plant it as seed garlic or can you turn around and plant it right away? Im in similar grow zone/timing as you.
Hey Ben! At this point we have to go this route because we are processing at least 3,000 bulbs, maybe quite a bit more. Our entire crop can be cured in 4 tall vertical stacks of these trays and that takes up 16 square feet...
Unfortunately our garlic was hit really hard with garlic rust. At first I think they had half dried down and then upon closer inspection I realized the die back had been from the rust. Yours looks great! What do you plan to do with so much garlic? Sell it?
Couple weeks usually. Garlic is an interesting crop it changes flavor depending on the soil, age, and environment. One can spend a lifetime studying it and all the different varieties.
We eat damaged garlic right away, already been enjoying a bunch that got knicked by shovel, etc. For storage and selling we give them good airflow for at least 2-3 weeks...
Last years garlic in my garden in NJ was dismal. So, I dug up the bulbs, and replanted them added the nutrients. I am not feeling confident about larger bulbs but Idid get some scapes...IDK what happened. Feeling sad.
It seems important to keep trying and learning. You have to plant in later fall, just FYI... Deep mulch with compost underneath, around 6" of space between cloves and lots of sun generally translates into nice garlic. Hoping next year is bountiful
My garlic this year for some reason made smaller bulbs underground than I'd like but also alot of them made a small clove just right above ground also. Idk what caused it..?? They didn't look all that well this yr I tried them in a different spot than I have before
If you are growing softneck types of garlic it is very common to get small extra bulb sets just above the soil line. Hope you try planting again. Focus on making sure you have around 6" of space between cloves, they are planted in healthy soil with ample ccompost on top and nice deep mulch
@@edibleacres ahhh thank you. O ya I am definitely going to try again one fail won't discouraged me.. maybe the soil was to compact I should have added compost to it
That makes a lot of sense. We plan to move 100% of this crop to another field for next season and not return for a few years so it seems like a reasonable move (in this case) but certainly sound advice
Besides the ways you mentioned, I recently learned other ways you can tell garlic is ready for harvesting include when the scapes (that you haven't eaten when they were younger and bent over) point straight up to the sky, it is ready to harvest. Or garlic is generally ready two to three weeks after you have eaten the scapes. As Pamela remme alludes to, curing is a whole other learning curve people need to go thru. Some of my garlic turned mushy after my first harvest fall of 2020 in Zone 8a because I didn't do some of my bulbs right and left the leaves (and dirt) on for too long and didn't have a fan directly on them. This year is going to be different. My harvest of 110 bulbs is aging in a dark cool room (relatively speaking since it is 90's or 100 degrees F outside and I keep the A/C in the low 80s) with a circulating fan and I "cleaned" it removing residual dirt, outer skin and trimmed the stalks and bulb roots after the recommended period of drying times. Now they are in baskets. Earlier, before I cut the leaves mostly off, I had them hanging and inch or so apart from each other from a 7 foot by 3 foot plastic mesh "chicken wire" panel/trellis I hung up six inches from the wall of my dining room and attached each bulb to the mesh by either weaving the stalk/leaves thru the mesh or clipping it/them on with a clothes pin and directed the fan at them. This way they had air circulation from all sides. The way you can tell when it is ok to remove the top of the garlic is by cutting the upper end and examining it to see if there is moisture in the center or not. If there is liquid in the center, don't cut it any further until it has had more time to dry. Now they are in straw baskets with the fan still going.
Curing garlic in hanging bundles will eventually bite you in the butt as you risk molding if the weather turns humid. (ask me how I know this). Never let two heads of garlic touch each other when curing. I have 25 years of garlic growing experience. Garlic is a very easy crop to grow, but if you fail, it bites you hard. Climate and geography makes a big impact on how you should grow your garlic. What works for one person might not work for another. The type of garlic also makes a difference. Lastly, IMO, once scape formation begins, head growth stops. Time to plan your harvest based on weather. It's better to harvest 2 weeks early than 2 weeks late.
The brutal heat; what I learned from farmers in the Southwest and Mexico: Wake up at 3am to get into the fields by 4am. Use LED rechargeable headlamps for light. It is cool and fresh in the early morning. By noon you are done working for the day. Eat breakfast and drink some beer to replenish, then take a long siesta in the shade during the hot afternoon. Climate change is reality now and it is going to get worse. The sooner we adapt by changing our lifestyle, the less we will suffer. Drip irrigation systems will be the new normal for anyone wanting to keep production up.
I take it you don't like garlic 'scapes.' I live to far south for hard neck garlic, but I keep hearing northerns say that they are a delicacy. From the camera angle it looked like you not only didn't harvest the scapes, but some had even flowered. I thought flowered garlic was supposed to be sub-par?
We actually harvested nearly all scapes from this field. A few snuck by us, but we love scapes and work with them extensively. The purple flowers are Elephant garlics. We are letting 1/4 or so make true flowers so we can harvest and collect seed
Never cut the tops of your garlic off. It prevents them from drying properly. The left over nutrients go back into the bulb as the bulb is drying. Wrong way to do this folks. When cutting it you are shortening your shelf life. I am still eating garlic from last year and I just pulled my garlic yesterday.
@@pamelaremme38 Nothing to do with that, i just dont think its posssible to keep the top if you actually have a decent amount of garlic to process cause of the space and humidity it will keep, its a very good way to have rot or unwanted fungus to bloom. The nutrient part is completly false. Maybe you should learn how plants actually fonction before you say things like that. I dry my garlic in a forced air dryer for about a week to 15 days and cutting the top actually help the curing process, takes less space. The important part for the shelf life is to dry it properly and to keep your garlic over 20'c and under 25'c so it is in a dormant state. (if you go under 20 it will actually start germinating) I keep my garlic for over 12 months withtout any issue. edit: the real way to tell if your garlic is dry is when the dry garlic doesnt loose more than 0.2% of its weight while drying for 48 hours(that might be a little complicated for you)
@@MrBazz420 I planted 303 cloves. I have room in my garage. The garlic farms around here have grated shelves that they dry their garlic in very large quantities. You say "complicated for me" when you can't even spell LOSE right. GTFOH.
I grow mine in a wine barrel for the two of us. It was unbelievably hot in Northern California this year. The garlic went over in June! @aquarteracrenomule
I could imagine garlic in a container being pretty unhappy in the heat. Maybe consider later fall planting some in rich soil with deep mulch as well for next year to see what the difference might be...
We have only in the last 5 years approx. started using garlic. Several years ago I started planting garlic. Last year we bought three lbs. of garlic from Edible Acres. We have harvested about 15 lbs approx. My wife who did not care much for garlic before loves it. It is the best garlic we have ever had. Thank you, Dean. Also have learned SO much from the videos.
Thanks for your experience on tops dying back. I’ve grown for a few years and never had tops grow back thisseverely. I thought I’d blown my crop. Feel empowered again. Thank you, Sean!
Pleasure to share
Thank you for sharing. Your scale is mind blowing to a tiny little home operation such as our own here in the Highlands of Scotland. We grew a small amount of garlic over autum and winter pulling it at the end of June and had a 95%+ success rate with the first variety we tried (I forget the name just now!), but we've only eaten a very small amount and intend to regrow the remained this autumn on a slightly grander scale. Keep up the inspirational work, it is magnificent to see and learn from. So very much appreciated, thank you! 👍 🏴
So happy to share and happy expanding!
Thanks for this explanation. Answers several questions I’ve had for the six years I’ve been growing garlic.
So glad you found value in it. Of course it's just what we're learning as we go, so take it all with a grain of salt.
We just did our garlic this weekend as well. Even with it being so dry, we had a wonderful harvest. And it looks as if you did as well. Thanks fir sharing, I always learn something when you share. Be safe and stay well. Catherine
So glad the harvest went well for you!
Thank you for sharing all you do with us! You have inspired me! I just started my duck weed pond and black soldier fly enclosures this morning!
Good luck!
🙌 Would LOVE any and all info on the elephant garlic! I'm wondering how the curing of the ones you cut will turn out too. God bless! 🙏💗
Thank you for sharing your knowledge, you are so creative with using biomass as you encounter it on the landscape, I love the garlic stalks being used as mulch, and how you emphasize the mulching of beds after harvest. I would be curious in any difference between cutting stalks of garlic and cured vs the hanging on stalk curing.
We haven't seen any negative effects in cutting the stalks prior to curing, but that has been jjust our experience.
Thanks so much for your timely video! I'm only a few miles from you and have been looking at the garlic daily pondering when to harvest. With the "scheduled" rain tomorrow followed by another heatwave I was thinking this weekend. Headed out now to join you in the harvest. Due to space constraints I also cut the tops off, but instead of composing I'll lay them strategically in the garden. Thanks for another great tip!
Howdy neighbor :). Hope the harvest went well
I will be keeping my eyes peeled for when you upload available garlic for sale :)
Great! We have to finish the harvest and know it is curing properly and then we'll open things up.
The garden is looking great 👍
We cropped our garlic a couple of months ago due too the temperature difference (Cyprus) as it was about to hit 30oC, but after watching this video I realised we could have waited for a while for more of a die back, ah well not to worry next year, it won’t be long before we are replanting them anyway already started preparing new beds for them, come the Autumn it will be the start of our forth growing season on this property, thank you for the videos they really are making a difference.
Always happy to share!
great info. i would love to see your elephant garlic harvest! thank you!
We started on the harvest but have a bunch more to do.
Garlic season soon here. Hot summer for this area, but rain has been plentiful. Should be a good year.
I hope it lines up to be a tremendous season overall for ya!
Green Garlic leaves are very good when chopped up and pan-fried with fatty cuts of meat, one of the best meals I know of.
Sounds nice
Possibly the rain we've had a few hundred kms north of you has helped the garlic. The variety is Music. The tallest one's went over 3'. Harvested over 8Kg of scapes. I'm guessing they need another week or so. I like your stacked box method. There's no shortage of lumber or usable bits of leftover fencing on this farm.
The boxes have been great for us with our very very limited space. Glad yhour crops are growing well!
Wow that’s a lot of garlic! Good job! We are supposed to get rain here in Michigan. Hopefully it will head your way next.
I always underestimate how much production you guys have :D
It feels like a lot sometimes!
Fabulous information. It's been a weird year here in Scotland -temperatures were very high in spring and have been lower now for last 2 months but with minimal rain as well, and as this was my first year growing garlic (somewhat successfully) I had been confused as to when to harvest because of these strange weather fluxes. I pulled the larger looking half of my bulbs yesterday before the imminent heat wave strikes us this week, they were possibly a little smaller than what could've been if I had let the tops die/dry a little more but I worry that as you say the heat and wet weather we are due round about now would make them less likely to store well long term. I'm not hating myself for possibly being a bit eager as my intuition says the rest won't be long before they absolutely have to come out! 2 days off for sweating and then it's back to work for me 🌞🌡🔥💛😎
Seems so so important to do things based a little on information you get from the outside and some from intuition and a LOT from what you are seeing right in front of you!
Does the garlic need to be cured before you can plant it as seed garlic or can you turn around and plant it right away? Im in similar grow zone/timing as you.
We don't plant again until later fall. Earliest is mid-September, sweet spot is end of October, latest is end of December. Wide range!
Hey buddy, ya ever just try hanging between stickers? Easy and fast, does take up some horizontal space tho
Hey Ben! At this point we have to go this route because we are processing at least 3,000 bulbs, maybe quite a bit more. Our entire crop can be cured in 4 tall vertical stacks of these trays and that takes up 16 square feet...
@@edibleacres wow, that’s a lot and a tidy space! Nice one.
Do you plant a cover crop after harvesting garlic and before planting again in the fall? If so what cover crop do you use?
We try to establish beets, parsnips, carrots, radish and other plants right after garlic when the stars align for it to happen!
@@edibleacres so no covercrops to use as a green manure or to fix nitrogen? Just cash crops to sell?
Unfortunately our garlic was hit really hard with garlic rust. At first I think they had half dried down and then upon closer inspection I realized the die back had been from the rust. Yours looks great! What do you plan to do with so much garlic? Sell it?
We sell seed garlic. Yikes, that is a scary thing to get hit with garlic rust. I hope you don't have that again.
How long do you let them cure before using/selling?
Couple weeks usually. Garlic is an interesting crop it changes flavor depending on the soil, age, and environment. One can spend a lifetime studying it and all the different varieties.
We eat damaged garlic right away, already been enjoying a bunch that got knicked by shovel, etc. For storage and selling we give them good airflow for at least 2-3 weeks...
Last years garlic in my garden in NJ was dismal. So, I dug up the bulbs, and replanted them added the nutrients. I am not feeling confident about larger bulbs but Idid get some scapes...IDK what happened. Feeling sad.
It seems important to keep trying and learning. You have to plant in later fall, just FYI... Deep mulch with compost underneath, around 6" of space between cloves and lots of sun generally translates into nice garlic. Hoping next year is bountiful
My garlic this year for some reason made smaller bulbs underground than I'd like but also alot of them made a small clove just right above ground also. Idk what caused it..?? They didn't look all that well this yr I tried them in a different spot than I have before
If you are growing softneck types of garlic it is very common to get small extra bulb sets just above the soil line. Hope you try planting again. Focus on making sure you have around 6" of space between cloves, they are planted in healthy soil with ample ccompost on top and nice deep mulch
@@edibleacres ahhh thank you. O ya I am definitely going to try again one fail won't discouraged me.. maybe the soil was to compact I should have added compost to it
Good year for garlic :)
I remove all garlic fodder from the growing area. To prevent the spread of disease. I also rotate my garlic crops.
That makes a lot of sense. We plan to move 100% of this crop to another field for next season and not return for a few years so it seems like a reasonable move (in this case) but certainly sound advice
Besides the ways you mentioned, I recently learned other ways you can tell garlic is ready for harvesting include when the scapes (that you haven't eaten when they were younger and bent over) point straight up to the sky, it is ready to harvest. Or garlic is generally ready two to three weeks after you have eaten the scapes.
As Pamela remme alludes to, curing is a whole other learning curve people need to go thru. Some of my garlic turned mushy after my first harvest fall of 2020 in Zone 8a because I didn't do some of my bulbs right and left the leaves (and dirt) on for too long and didn't have a fan directly on them.
This year is going to be different. My harvest of 110 bulbs is aging in a dark cool room (relatively speaking since it is 90's or 100 degrees F outside and I keep the A/C in the low 80s) with a circulating fan and I "cleaned" it removing residual dirt, outer skin and trimmed the stalks and bulb roots after the recommended period of drying times. Now they are in baskets. Earlier, before I cut the leaves mostly off, I had them hanging and inch or so apart from each other from a 7 foot by 3 foot plastic mesh "chicken wire" panel/trellis I hung up six inches from the wall of my dining room and attached each bulb to the mesh by either weaving the stalk/leaves thru the mesh or clipping it/them on with a clothes pin and directed the fan at them. This way they had air circulation from all sides.
The way you can tell when it is ok to remove the top of the garlic is by cutting the upper end and examining it to see if there is moisture in the center or not. If there is liquid in the center, don't cut it any further until it has had more time to dry. Now they are in straw baskets with the fan still going.
Really great notes, thank you!
Curing garlic in hanging bundles will eventually bite you in the butt as you risk molding if the weather turns humid. (ask me how I know this). Never let two heads of garlic touch each other when curing. I have 25 years of garlic growing experience. Garlic is a very easy crop to grow, but if you fail, it bites you hard. Climate and geography makes a big impact on how you should grow your garlic. What works for one person might not work for another. The type of garlic also makes a difference. Lastly, IMO, once scape formation begins, head growth stops. Time to plan your harvest based on weather. It's better to harvest 2 weeks early than 2 weeks late.
Great notes here thank you kindly!
The brutal heat; what I learned from farmers in the Southwest and Mexico: Wake up at 3am to get into the fields by 4am. Use LED rechargeable headlamps for light. It is cool and fresh in the early morning. By noon you are done working for the day. Eat breakfast and drink some beer to replenish, then take a long siesta in the shade during the hot afternoon.
Climate change is reality now and it is going to get worse. The sooner we adapt by changing our lifestyle, the less we will suffer.
Drip irrigation systems will be the new normal for anyone wanting to keep production up.
Adaptation!
I take it you don't like garlic 'scapes.' I live to far south for hard neck garlic, but I keep hearing northerns say that they are a delicacy. From the camera angle it looked like you not only didn't harvest the scapes, but some had even flowered. I thought flowered garlic was supposed to be sub-par?
We actually harvested nearly all scapes from this field. A few snuck by us, but we love scapes and work with them extensively. The purple flowers are Elephant garlics. We are letting 1/4 or so make true flowers so we can harvest and collect seed
There’ll be no vampires at your home!
Never cut the tops of your garlic off. It prevents them from drying properly. The left over nutrients go back into the bulb as the bulb is drying. Wrong way to do this folks. When cutting it you are shortening your shelf life. I am still eating garlic from last year and I just pulled my garlic yesterday.
One more note: by leaving all the greens on while drying it is easier to tell when the garlic is fully dried.
sure...
@@MrBazz420 Jealous much?
@@pamelaremme38 Nothing to do with that, i just dont think its posssible to keep the top if you actually have a decent amount of garlic to process cause of the space and humidity it will keep, its a very good way to have rot or unwanted fungus to bloom. The nutrient part is completly false. Maybe you should learn how plants actually fonction before you say things like that. I dry my garlic in a forced air dryer for about a week to 15 days and cutting the top actually help the curing process, takes less space. The important part for the shelf life is to dry it properly and to keep your garlic over 20'c and under 25'c so it is in a dormant state. (if you go under 20 it will actually start germinating) I keep my garlic for over 12 months withtout any issue. edit: the real way to tell if your garlic is dry is when the dry garlic doesnt loose more than 0.2% of its weight while drying for 48 hours(that might be a little complicated for you)
@@MrBazz420 I planted 303 cloves. I have room in my garage. The garlic farms around here have grated shelves that they dry their garlic in very large quantities. You say "complicated for me" when you can't even spell LOSE right. GTFOH.
I grow mine in a wine barrel for the two of us. It was unbelievably hot in Northern California this year. The garlic went over in June! @aquarteracrenomule
I could imagine garlic in a container being pretty unhappy in the heat. Maybe consider later fall planting some in rich soil with deep mulch as well for next year to see what the difference might be...