23 Heads of Garlic

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:

  1. 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!)
  2. Dig them out with a trowel – don’t pull them by their stems!
  3. Do NOT wash them after you pull them out of the ground. Just shake off as much dirt as you can.
  4. 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!).
  5. After curing, you can braid them together real fancy-like or just store them as they are in a cool, dark place. 
  6. Go make some garlic bread!

I’ll definitely be planting garlic again this fall! What a huge success they were this year!

 

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