Pulling Garlic

Growing garlic always seems a bit fraught. It's a speculative enterprise, plugging the cloves into wet soil in the dying days of autumn, watching anxiously for them to poke their heads up, dashing out to hoe between the rows on the few days over winter when the soil is dry enough for the hoeing to be effective. Then later there are the hours of hand-weeding between the lanky plants, watching for signs of of blight and rust. Finally in spring, I'm like a mother hen, checking every few days to see if the plants are beginning to bulb up, and when they do there's a constant refrain in my head....are they as good as last year? Will the harvest prove worth the eight months of effort?...and on the other hand, can I sell them all...did I plant too much?

This year the anxiety was compounded because I planted the garlic much later than usual. In previous years the crop was planted in March or April, but this year, due to one thing and another, I didn't sow the cloves until late May, and so I was expecting a late harvest of smaller bulbs this year.

But to my surprise, I am beginning to pull the garlic a month earlier than last year, and the bulbs, for the most part, are of good size. The reasons for this bounty are unclear to me, but I'm not complaining! 

I did notice, though, as I worked down the rows, that there was a noticeable difference in the average head size from bed to bed. The garlic was planted in three tiers of beds; the top tier are the oldest beds (head at left, above), the middle tier of beds are a few years younger (middle head) and the lower tier of beds have only been cultivated for 18 months (head at right).

Happily, this result is telling me that I am on the right track...the larger yields from the older beds mean that soil health and fertility are growing over time.

Once the garlic is pulled, I load it into the tractor bucket and ferry it up to the shed, where it is laid out over old bed frames to dry and cure.

Last year I had some rust issues in the wet late spring, so I removed the stems at harvest to cure the garlic faster; this year I am leaving the stems on with the intention of making plaits and rosettes from the cured crop, hopefully in time for Christmas.

And looking forward, I will again be saving the biggest and best 250 heads of garlic for next year's seed. I think I'll plant the 2015 garlic through the silage mulch in the tomato beds, which should save hours of hoeing and weeding through winter. I have thought this would be a good idea in the past, but as the tomatoes only die back in mid-May, I thought it would be too late to plant the garlic then; now I know better....live and learn, eh?