Allotments 4 All

With this weather I'm considering putting escargot on the menu, wondering whether slugs will taste the same, garlic at the ready.

Softnecks dried and hanging, hardnecks in the bowl to use first, some really small ones drying out for next year in the greenhouse and those with the biggest cloves from both varieties, come November will be back in the soil.




Just had to put my trusty old greenhouse radio in the picture too, gosh does that aerial play havoc when I try to tune in!

Ninny

That looks fabulous, despite the damp a pretty good looking harvest.

I pulled mine yesterday in anticipation of all the roast tomatoes with garlic to come!
x sunloving

Thank you sunloving, just hope the onions can hang in there too  :)

Ninny

How comes yours looks like proper garlic.  Mine all grows without papers on the ouside but big loves.  The papers are wrapped round the smaller bulb inside

Just make sure you dry them off well then take off the first cracked skins.

They will have soft skins around each clove, these shouldn't be paper-like unless they have thrown up a hardneck seed head and split the cloves.

Maybe you have given them too many "big loves"  ;D (Sorry, but I couldn't resist it lottie).

Ninny

They look great and very clever how you have strung them up!

French plait, from doing my daughter's for many years as a littlie  ;D

Ninny

Just pulled mine up a bit earlier than I normally would for fear of much more wet weather.  They're looking nice and plump.

I only ever grow the hard necks and I have a couple of bulbs of last year's ones still in good nick for eating - I don't know why everyone says they don't keep - the odd one will go mouldy and I quickly whip those away for the compost but most stay firm for 12 months.  I keep my hard necks hanging up in bunches tied up with twine (you can't really plait them as the stalks are too hard).

I think the trick to good garlic is to plant it good and early in November or December so it gets the right amount of cold that it seems to need for good bulb formation and to pick it at exactly the right time when about half of the leaves have died back.  I definitely get bigger bulbs from soil that has had manure dug in the year before.

Cheers

Squeezy

Quote from: Ninnyscrops. on July 09, 2012, 21:20:29
Just make sure you dry them off well then take off the first cracked skins.

They will have soft skins around each clove, these shouldn't be paper-like unless they have thrown up a hardneck seed head and split the cloves.

Maybe you have given them too many "big loves"  ;D (Sorry, but I couldn't resist it lottie).

Ninny

Thats what I am trying to say, I don't have papers around the outside of the cloves, just big cloves with their "soft" skins growing around an inner bulb (with their own cloves .

A little like this lottie, I had 3 of them. Sometimes it can be a really damp patch and the outer skins just rot away.



These are all in the hardneck bowl.

Ninny

Lovely piccies but mine are like a bulb of garlic with big cloves growing round the outside.  Hardneck and softneck.  Wonder if I have leaving them in too long.  Taste lovely though and I use the big cloves round the outside for the following year's crop.  I just wondered that's all.

Hi Lottie,

I had this problem a couple of years ago too.  I think I just left it too late to harvest them that year plus it was wet at that time too.  That's probably the only difficult thing about garlic - knowing when to pick them when the bulbs are fully fat, but the skins haven't started to rot down underground.

My rule of thumb is when half the leaves have gone brown or yellow but the top ones are still green, but a bit earlier than that if it's very wet.

Your garlic will still be perfectly delicious - it just will be harder to keep it for a long time.

Cheers

Squeezy

i didn't realise that you can plait them once they've been harvested. i thought that you'd have to cure them first to do that. mine's still drying off in the shed, but as it's been so wet, the air around them is a bit humid. so i'm going to store mine at a friend's poly instead.

You can only plait soft neck garlic.

Thanks a lot Squeezy.  Only found out this year that I was supposed to harvest BEFORE all the leaves died down.  No problems regarding storage, everyone eats it as soon as poss anyway.