Yesterday was the day we had been waiting for. Our garlic was ready for harvest. The leaves were pretty dry and the stalks were starting to fall over. We bought our seed bulbs from Tasmanian Gourmet Garlic as well as their complete planting kit which contained fertilizers, microbes and bio-stimulants. The bulbs we chose were Marbled Blush and Kapow (Creole). We unfortunately didn’t get any pictures but we soaked them in liquid fertilizer prior to planting.
We planted the Marbled Blush along the fence line and the Kapow’s on the inner bed. The Marbled Blush has been suffering in the heat and didn’t get as much water as the Kapows which get off spray off the hugelkulturs. We think due to this they dried out quicker, the bulbs were a lot smaller and the stalks broke off really easily when we were trying to remove them. We carefully used a small hand fork to loosen the soil and dig them up but had to dig through the Marbled Blush length to make sure none were missed.
We were really impressed with our haul, especially the Kapow bulbs. They were dramatically bigger than the Marbled Blush and looked much healthier.
So after the harvest we brought them in to cure. Hubby set up some fly-screen on the air-horse to put the Marbled Blush on as most of the stalks were too short to hang or braid. I looked up how to braid the garlic for curing and after watching several different one I gave it a go. They are a bit messy but they will do the job, I just need to find a spot to hang them. For now they are laying across the bottom racks of the air-horse.
We use A LOT of garlic in our household so most of this will be used in cooking and preserving and we will save some of the larger bulbs for replanting into the garden. That’s it for our garlic adventure for now. I can’t wait to show you what we making using our homegrown garlic.