Fall plantings for the win! This week, I harvested 23 heads of garlic from our herb garden. All of these came from individual cloves of grocery store garlic that I planted last fall. They’re finally ready – YES!!!
Since this was my first time growing garlic, I had to do some reading online about how to go about harvesting. Here are a few things I didn’t know until now that I thought might be helpful to you as well:
- Wait for the foliage to die back a bit before harvesting your garlic. The majority of the leaves should be be yellowish and bending over (similar to when your flower bulbs die back after flowering… garlic is a bulb after all!)
- Dig them out with a trowel – don’t pull them by their stems!
- Do NOT wash them after you pull them out of the ground. Just shake off as much dirt as you can.
- Let them cure in a dark, dry place for 3-4 weeks before use. I used an old window screen in our garage (vampires beware!).
- After curing, you can braid them together real fancy-like or just store them as they are in a cool, dark place.
- Go make some garlic bread!
I’ll definitely be planting garlic again this fall! What a huge success they were this year!
