This week on the farm, the talk has been all about our garlic harvest. Seed Savers Exchange has been busy digging, drying, cleaning and picking this year’s crop. The smell is terrific around here!
For our commercial sales, we harvested 16 varieties of garlic, totaling nearly 60,000 plants in all (we’ve already sold out of 10 varieties)!
The garlic harvest starts when a tractor pulling a modified potato digger turns over a 3-row bed of garlic. Then the garden crew pulls out the garlic by hand and shakes off the soil. This all works great as long as it hasn’t rained. If the soil is wet, it’s back to digging with a garden fork. This year, the weather cooperated for the most part.
After digging, the garlic is hauled to one of our high tunnels to dry. Fans circulate air and a shade cloth protects the seed from the hot sun. Cleaning cannot happen until the garlic is dry as it relies on its roots, outer layers, and stem to help draw the moisture away from the cloves. When the heads are dry enough we cut off their necks (not nearly as painful as it sounds) and the bulbs continue to dry.
But there’s never a break for the garden crew. Soon enough - September 15 until November 30 when the soil temperature is around 60 degrees F - it will be time to plant bulbs for next year. This means we’ll have to select our seed, looking for the biggest, disease-free, healthiest bulbs. Meanwhile, over at the Seed House they have all those garlic orders to fill for fall planting!
But wait there’s more! This isn’t the only garlic being harvested on Heritage Farm. While commercial sales focus on growing enough garlic to fill sale orders, the Seed Savers Exchange collection must focus on growing all of the different garlic varieties in the collection. Cultivated varieties of garlic are usually sterile, and are propagated from cloves. This means, unfortunately for us, they can’t be stored like other seed. That’s why we grow out more than 300 varieties of garlic in the collection every year.
All of this garlic talk has us thinking garlic thoughts: A soft neck can become a hard neck under stress, but only hard necks produce scapes, those tasty little garlic samplers that are perfect for pickling or in a stir-fry.
Below: Garlic dries in high tunnels
Below: Commercial garden crew harvesting Broadleaf Czech Garlic with modified potato digger.
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