When to Harvest Hardneck Garlic
Channel: Ross Raddi
Date: 01/12/2020

I always get accused of harvesting my garlic too soon. I find that it's best to harvest a bit early to avoid rot and to ensure optimal storage quality. In fact, the proof is in the pudding because I still have last year's garlic in the fridge looking great. Each green leaf on garlic represents a layer of paper around the bulb. The more paper, the better your garlic keeps. Ron Engeland in his book "growing great garlic" mentions that 6 green leaves is optimal for storage. I've been following that advice and it seems to work well. What people don't realize is that the bulbs size up further during curing, so what may seem small at first looks pretty decent at the end of the day. I'd say this year was my best garlic harvest in terms of a consistently larger size. About half is of a respectable size and the other half still needs a bit of work. Having said all this... we got hit with some sort of pest in the soil. After a quick search, I couldn't find it, but I know it's not good. It basically drilled it's way into some of the bulbs and into the stems. That combined with not having uniform bulbs means I've got maybe 10-15 bulbs that can go the distance in storage this year. Kind of disappointing, but overall I am happy.

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