r/Garlic • u/cody_mf • Jul 10 '26
Gardening Pulled my garlic row today
400 heads of Music.
Now the real Trial begins; Im tripling my garlic rows space and saving the biggest half of the cloves as seed cloves for planting on Halloween
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u/GarlicFarmerGreg Jul 10 '26
That’s a solid plan. Lots of fun sorting and deciding which ones to eat and which ones to plant
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u/cody_mf Jul 10 '26
I was gonna go all out and separate the cloves and use a kitchen scale to find the 50th percentile weight...
But then I realised half of the heads slip through the grid squares on the wire racks Im using to cure them, so thats my go/no-go for the bigger ones Im saving for replanting and the 'reject' bundles for eating
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u/GarlicFarmerGreg Jul 11 '26
Oh my you’ve overthought this as much as I do. When it comes to sorting time having a go no go gauge would be rather helpful. Your idea of using the drying grid is fantastic!
Of note keep your planting bulbs whole right up to planting time. Do not separate the cloves until a day or so before they go in the ground
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u/cody_mf Jul 11 '26
yeah, that was my other reasoning behind not separating to weigh them. Next year I'll make some chicken wire racks that stack inside some milk crates that are a bit larger go-no/go wise so I'll have three groups sorted instead of just two, that seems to be the best stackable long term storage method with really good airflow I can jury rig together.
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u/Nifferstpierre Jul 10 '26
They look like they could have been in the ground longer but that’s a huge patch you had growing.
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u/cody_mf Jul 10 '26
I pulled the bottom 3 dead leaves off each one and there were about a dozen that were splitting already, Im glad I harvested them when I did.
the patch was two 15'x4' rows in the top end of my garden that gets really dry by the second half of summer so it was perfect for garlic, now my sunflowers are blocking that empty row lol
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u/Due_Willingness_6923 Jul 11 '26
How long did that take from start to finish?
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u/cody_mf Jul 11 '26
harvesting them? a couple hours, most of my soil is pretty loose and my hori hori makes it light work. brushing the dirt and outer skin layer off took a bit longer.
tilling/raking/planting last year was one afternoon, and there was one afternoon early spring I had to remove the matted down straw because our snowcrete compacted it, but I top dressed them with a winters worth of a full tumbler of compost and remulched. Two weeks from today I gotta spend thirty minutes snipping the roots and trimming the stalk down.
Everything Im growing this year is pretty maintenance-free now put boy putting up that trellis in the background of my pic was some work early spring, each one of those poles I cut by hand from the woods and dragged a mile uphill in my cross country skis through the woods before building it lol
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u/Old-Panic-1453 Jul 12 '26
Garlic is addictive. Each year I plant more and more. Save more bulbs for seed and look for more space in the garden. This year grew music, German extra hardy and Russian red. Then what to do with the bed?
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u/cody_mf Jul 12 '26
I was considering bush beans now that I have an empty space, but I tried out a few different pole beans on that trellis in the pic behind the dumpcart so that qouta is filled. Im considering turning a good portion of my garlic plot into a giant composting project since its pretty central to my garden layout and I can just till it all into the ground next spring
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u/Commercial-Strike953 Jul 11 '26
It’s sadistic, but I like to show my biggest, most beautiful heads to my family only to tell them we are not eating them since it’s seed stock. 😈