Jen finally gave up waiting on me to start harvesting the garlic, so she started pulling it on Saturday. Last fall, I planted a few dozen Armenian and Bogatyr, both of which are hot and spicy hardneck varieties, up in the kitchen garden. I wasn’t going to plant any garlic up there at all, but Jen likes the way the plant looks when it is growing. I planted the rest of the garlic, about 350 heads of a mix of German Red and German White, in the lower garden. German Red and German White are moderately hot hardneck varieties.
When I planted the garlic last fall, I was feeling very gung ho about the garden, so I took the time to prepare the soil by working it up and adding a good bit of compost, and I got the garlic into the ground at a reasonable time (toward the end of October), so in spite of the fact that I abandoned both gardens this year because I wasn’t feeling well, the garlic turned out to be a nice size, especially the heads from the upper garden, which Jen has been weeding.
I got excited about the garlic once I saw how well it did in the upper garden, so I went down and pulled about a third of the bed in the lower jungle garden. I wasn’t expecting good results down there because there were six foot tall weeds –chicory, burdock, rag weed, pig weed, lambs quarter, you name it — completely shading out the garlic from outside the bed. However, there were very few weeds in the bed because of the straw mulch, so except for the garlic along the edges, there was very little competition for nutrients from the weeds. Apparently, garlic doesn’t need a whole lot of sun once it is growing because to my surprise, the heads were a nice size down there as well.
We had gotten a lot of rain the night before Jen pulled the garlic from the kitchen garden and there was a lot of wet soil clinging to the heads, so we spent an hour or so Saturday night cleaning them up and hanging them in bunches from the rafters in the garage in front of a fan. I would prefer to dry the garlic without the use of electricity, but if the soil clinging to the garlic is damp, there is a high risk that the skins will mold, ruining the garlic, without the added air flow. By Sunday morning, the surface of the skins was well on its way to drying.
I pulled 125 heads from the lower garden just before lunch on Sunday and laid them out in the driveway to dry a bit until I was ready to start cleaning them up after I ate and fed the animals. Just as I was finishing lunch, my friends Zach and Megan showed up for a visit. “Hey, you’re just in time!” I said. “Guess what we’re doing this afternoon? Cleaning garlic!” “That’s great!” Zach said sarcastically. They are in the middle of the garlic harvest at the vegetable farm (both they and I should have done it two to three weeks ago) and I knew that Zach had cleaned garlic for four or five hours straight on Saturday because it had rained so much they couldn’t get down to the fields. He was, actually, happy to help. He and I have often talked about farming together, which is funny, because when we worked in the field together we were at each other’s throats half the time (we almost got into a fist fight while picking up potatoes on a particularly cranky day for both of us), but our friendship, which is a very strong friendship, was formed in the field, under adverse circumstances, so all of that tension actually just served to deepen our friendship. (About two thirds of the way through the first season that we worked together, just before the busy fall harvest, the entire field crew but Zach and I quit for various reasons, so the two of us were trying to do the work of six people, and on top of it it had been the rainiest summer in decades, so we were constantly wet and cold, and everything was rotten, so doing things like picking tomatoes was miserable because only one out of ten tomatoes was marketable because they were all either cracked or had blossom end rot. Then when the harvest started, Zach and I would need to pick up a hundred bags of potatoes or an eight hundred foot row of carrots by ourselves because the carrot tops were so weak from being constantly wet that the harvester would just rip the tops off, leaving the carrots in the ground, so we hand pulled them. Anyway, it was a rough season, and the fact that we didn’t come to blows over the frustration of picking up 6,000 pounds of potatoes by ourselves yet again says a lot about how much we like each other.) Megan is about five months pregnant, so I got her a chair, and then the three of us sat beneath the big pine tree outside the house and cleaned the garlic over a long rambling conversation.
When we were finished cleaning it, we set the garlic out to dry in the garage and then Zach and Megan left so that I could run an errand down in town. The weather forecast is for nice weather today and tomorrow, so I’ll get the rest of the garlic out of the ground before it rains again, although it is unlikely that it will be today because I need to fix the tractor after work today, which has a hydraulic leak.
The garlic is for sale, of course: $1.50 per head, or $10.00 for a bunch of ten.
