Garlic Harvest Continues

      There is a storm system traveling up the coast that could give us a lot of rain tomorrow.  With many of the garlic leaves turning yellow, I harvested more garlic this morning to avoid it getting waterlogged.  This patch had a lot of plants that had fallen over:

And the rest of the bed:

Cleaning out the whole bed resulted in a nice harvest:

      I must have missed this clump from my harvest last year.  A single clove grew to be a small bulb with six cloves.  Once the leaves die back in late July, the garlic is completely hidden underground.  It overwintered, then sent up six plants.  Two of the bulbs are big enough to make it to the harvest tray.  The rest will be divided into cloves to be replanted in October.

Garlic Scapes,  June 11, 2012

      These scapes are an added bonus.  Hopefully we will try to use these before they go soft.

      The above shot is the total harvest so far this season.  In the left tray are bulbs that will get divided into cloves for replanting.  The middle tray could be for seed cloves or for consumption.  The right hand tray contains nice bulbs, and the tray at the top contains the largest bulbs I have ever grown.  There are a few more of the big bulbs still in the ground, as well as some plants that will probably have decent sized bulbs.  The first year garlic started from bulbils last year is still to be harvested, but they definitely will need to be separated and replanted for another growing season.
      So we are ready to start eating the new crop.  I still have about eight bulbs from last summer's harvest, but they just shriveled quite quickly from the heat on the porch.  Those bulbs have been put into the replant tray to see if any of the cloves have a little bit of life left in them.  So let it rain tomorrow, I have a bumper crop set aside already.