Produce > Edible Plants
garlic
Paulh:
One for the experts. The drivers for me are to get it up before rust and white rot set in and to clear space for the succession planting!
But given where you are, I'd have thought you could get it up as soon as it starts dying back because the bulbs aren't going to do any more and you have the weather to dry them off?
Obelixx:
Thanks but today has been the first warm, dry shorts day of the year and this is a brand new veg plot on former pasture so no rust or white rot - yet.
Last year's early heat and drought meant the garlic and onion harvest were poor and didn't store well. I'd quite like fatter bulbs this year.
Paulh:
Won't it be the rain that you've had that has been helping the bulbs swell, but if the foliage is now dying off, they are not going to do much more? But you are not going to lose anything by leaving them where they are if disease is not an issue?
Obelixx:
Dunno. I'm a novice at garlic cos in my last garden - rural central Belgium - it was always frozen to a mush in hard winters and I gave up.
The first year I grew it here it was wonderful. The next year was last year and it and the onion crop were hit by that early heat and drought so I really have no sensible comparisons.
JanG:
I’ve been looking into this too, and advice seems to vary somewhat. It seems to be a question of how many bottom leaves die off. I’ve seen suggestions that it could be up to half, with five or six having gone brown and five or six at the top still remaining green. Other sources say that it’s best to let only two bottom leaves die and pick when the third is dying down.
I don’t know what to make of foliage going brown at the top, as advice seems to concentrate on lower leaves dying, as these correspond with the bulb wrappers below ground.
With hardneck garlic I believe the idea is to harvest about a month after the scapes appear but I assume this is softneck garlic you’re wondering about.
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