July 21st, 2009 The Great Garlic Experiment
I make salsa. A lot of salsa. Almost 12 gallons of the stuff last summer. We grew everything except the onions and garlic. I don’t have room in the garden for onions, and they are always good quality and reasonably priced in the local grocery store.
But sometimes it’s hard to find good garlic. So we decided to grow our own.
Yesterday marked the end of the Great Garlic Experiment. It’s harvest time.
Last summer, I ordered two types of hardneck garlic—Music (from Territorial Seed Company) and German Extra Hardy (from one of my favorite seed companies – Johnny’s Selected Seeds).
Almost all supermarket garlic is a softneck variety. Softneck garlic is easier to plant mechanically, easier to grow and stores longer than hardneck garlic. But for garlic lovers, the flavor of hardneck garlic is superb.
The seed garlic was ordered last summer and arrived in mid-October. The perfect time for planting.
After impatiently tapping my foot all winter wondering what in the heck was going on down there in the dirt, in early March the first green shoots appeared. The garlic had survived! And that first bit of green was much appreciated after a long, grey winter.
By early May, they were growing nicely.
A very cool side benefit of hardneck garlic is these things—garlic scapes. The scapes are the flower stems that garlic plants produce before the bulbs mature. If you let this scape mature, the plant splits its energy between making garlic bulbs underground and trying to make flowers. So if they are removed, the plant will direct all its energy to making bigger garlic bulbs.
These scapes are an incredible delicacy. Not something you find in the local grocery store here in Podunk Junction.
As soon as the scapes start to curl (here it was mid-June), I cut them off. BBQ Bill was skeptical when I brought down a large bag of them. But one taste…
of grilled garlic scapes along with some fresh asparagus made a convert of him. Now he’s whining because it’s a whole ‘nother year before he can have more.
Mid-July. Time to pull up the plants. I wasn’t sure exactly when to harvest.
Some still had a few green leaves (bottom) and some (on the top) had totally dried.
Oops.
The plants that had totally dried separated into individual cloves and have no “wrapper” left. Well, those obviously won’t keep very long, but I’ll use them up pretty quickly (sans dirt of course).
The plants with a few green leaves left have a nice tight wrapper (ahem, like they’re supposed to), and should store nicely after they are cured.
So there are bins of bulbs for storage (and some for replanting come October) in our bedroom (the best “climate controlled” room in the house). It’s dark, relatively dry and cool—about 65 to 70°. Perfect for curing and storing garlic.
The others that I left in the ground too long are hanging in the kitchen to cure, so we remember to use those first. And if you’ve never smelled a house full of freshly dug, spicy and pungent hardneck garlic bulbs, it can be a bit…well, trust me. There are no vampires anywhere near this neck of the woods.
