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Farm Friday, July 12th, 2024
Garlic harvest time!
This has been a weird year for trying to grow vegetables on our farm. It has rained and rained and rained some more. Our heavy, silty soil does not drain well and that has meant it has been sort of like trying to farm in a swamp.
Garlic is a crop that gets planted the previous fall and then grows until mid-July, when it needs to be pulled and cured for sale and use. The timing of the harvest is usually determined by whether and how much the plant has started to die back.
The leaves die back from the bottom up. Each plant has 8 or 9 leaves that come off the center stalk. If there are five green leaves left, it is usually time to harvest. If there are fewer green leaves, then you risk having your garlic rot in the ground or have no “wrapper” leaves for the head. If there are more than five green leaves, then the garlic was still growing and could have sized up a little more.
We had almost no snow at all last winter. The garlic started growing early in the Spring, and I thought we were going to have a bumper crop. But then the rains started and didn’t stop. And I think that affected the size of the bulbs. Too much rain and the plants can’t access nutrients.
We ended up pulling some of the garlic a week or so early, mostly because we had scheduled a big workday…
