Garlic Harvest

The garlic was ready for harvesting on Saturday, July 17th this year. All that was needed was my trusty mini-shovel to gently pry-up the earth around each plant. All 46 cloves that were planted last October came-up this spring (note that 3 of them took a month longer than the rest) for 100% success. Garlic is the ONLY garden crop that does not get attacked by ground hogs, raccoons or insects making it the easiest thing to grow.

It may not look like a lot of garlic but there're 46 bulbs along the row which have been freshly dug out of the earth.

I set the garlic bulbs on the garden work table to be lightly washed with the hose before hanging to dry.

I tie 3 bulbs together with garden suet string and let them hang to dry until it is time to re-plant in October.

If you go back to my October, 2008 blog entry, you'll see how I began with only 5 bulbs from Seed Savers. Then in July 2009, I harvested 10 garlic bulbs which yielded 47 cloves.

In October of 2009, I planted 46 cloves... And now we wait until October, 2010.

I won't know how many cloves this harvest will yield until the day of planting (you're not supposed to break-up the bulbs until planting day) but I'm guessing that it will be in the neighborhood of 216 cloves.

This is what fascinates me about gardening; I start with a small number of plants and it builds-up exponentially over only a few years.

:)