Garlic Harvest

27 Jul Garlic Harvest

Thanks to a wonderful crew of volunteers a few weeks ago, all of our garlic is harvested and hanging to dry. Two huge crews of CSA members spent the morning tugging the bulbs out of the ground and then tying them in bundles. Over 10,ooo bulbs were harvested over two weeks.

Volunteers harvest garlic.

Moving the garlic back to the barn to be bundled.

After about 6 weeks the garlic will be dry and ready to be cut down, and the stems and roots trimmed off. The larger bulbs will be sorted out and saved for seed for planting this fall, where it will begin it’s 9 month journey to next year’s harvest. We’ve been saving our own garlic seed for the past 5 seasons. The thought is that the seed eventually becomes adapted to your farm, and its specific growing conditions, and with the average cost of garlic seed about $13 a pound, it makes sense to save our own. We started out with a number of different varieties of garlic, but have found our stand-out favorite to be Music. Music is a Porcelain hardneck variety named after its developer, Al Music, a farmer in Ontario who switched from tobacco farming to growing garlic in the early 1980’s and developed the strain from garlic he acquired in Italy. It has a wonderful robust flavor, large easy to peel cloves, and grows consistently well year after year. If you missed the garlic harvest, don’t worry, we plan on pulling all our storage onions pretty soon, another fun harvest experience. Keep an eye out for details. We certainly do love to grow alliums here at Blooming Glen Farm!

Photos and text by Tricia Borneman, Blooming Glen farmer and co-owner.