Garlic growing: History, Harvesting, Garlic curing rack, Designing braids, Different growing zones, Reverse Total shoulder replacement. 5/02/23

1st picture of 2022:  scapes

I try to document each step of the process of growing garlic. In 2022 the first picture of the harvest I have is of the scapes. Scapes grow on hard neck garlic. They are the flower stalk of the garlic plant and they are considered a delicacy. I had to do some research in order to figure out just exactly why that was.

Scapes

     Scapes are milder flavored than the mature garlic cloves from the bulb that grows under the ground. I found many delightful recipes for using this culinary treat in your menus. When you harvest the scapes does affect the bulb in the ground (Scroll to the bottom of link past all the recipe ideas for explanation of how to harvest. Of course, I just learned that from research in the last week. That source indicated that if you harvest it soon after the miniature bulb appears above the plant, it will allow the bulb in the ground to become more mature and probably larger. However, if you allow the scape above the ground to mature longer on the plant and then clip it off, your bulb in the ground will not have as long a storage life.

My garlic growing history

     I’ve been growing garlic since 1983 after I met, Anne Bishop, who was a member of the Kentucky Alliance of Co-ops (KAC) of which I was also a member. I represented the Cumberland Food co-op in Monticello Kentucky, and she represented a food co-op near Bradfordsville, Kentucky. We met at a KAC meeting and she explained that she grew garlic and braided it. I saw her braids and was inspired to go home and plant garlic and learn how to braid it. 

   My first attempts in 1983 were laughable. I planted the garlic that we purchased in the store to cook with (because I believed I couldn’t afford to buy seed garlic which is so much more more expensive than culinary garlic even today. Since 2013, I save my largest bulbs of each variety each year as seed for the next year’s crop.). 

   I braided my first crop even though the bulbs were very, very small, almost miniature, compared to the large, luscious bulbs that Anne grew in her field of 50 foot long beds that were 8 feet wide. (They might not really have been that big, but) that’s the size they looked when,  back in 1983, I drove onto her property and saw those two amazingly beautiful beds of garlic growing.

   Anne was kind enough to allow me to assist her that year as she processed her garlic and taught me how to clean and braid it. She marketed her braids to health food stores in Louisville and Lexington and maybe other places I’m not aware of. I’m sorry to say I’ve not been able to find Anne Bishop in recent years, though with the Internet, I’ve tried several times .

    She told me garlic is planted in the fall in September and shared with me her planting techniques. She planted each clove just under the surface of the soil — the tips showing above the soil — about 6 to 8 inches apart, equidistant throughout the bed. She told me that in the spring she side-dressed each plant with blood meal to add nitrogen to them during their growing season. And maybe other things, but that’s the only one I remember.

   One tidbit she mentioned was that if any of the garlic grew a hard neck stalk, to very quickly break it off— so before the scapes grow at the top of the stalk. From that, I knew that she was growing only soft neck garlic, and since then, that’s what I wanted to grow— soft neck.

  In 1983 I arrived to her farm with my four month old baby in a Snuggly. Anne had already harvested the garlic we worked on while I was there visiting her. She cured that garlic for at least a week, so there was still some green in the leaves. 

   It was actually only in recent years when I started growing garlic again— having in the interim moved to the Louisville area—that I learned that there are many, many types of garlic—soft neck and hard neck. I have done quite a bit of research to learn more of the distinctions between the different types of garlic. There are many soft neck garlic, and many hard neck garlic. One garlic seed source I order from (Allicins Ranch) has more than a hundred varieties.

Becoming a Garlic Grower and Braider

   So these 30 years later, when I began to grow garlic again in the Louisville area, I can’t remember exactly what year it was (maybe 2010), I began with Inchelium Red purchased from Fresh Start in Louisville, KY. Within a couple years, I added some hard necks to my crop. 

   In 2018 or 2019, I started with only one type of hardneck, and that was Music — roasting garlic— because it sounded cool to me to roast garlic. I purchased from the Filaree Farms catalog: Music: very large bulbs. A starchy, sweet garlic when roasted. Hot when consumed raw. (Filaree). “One of the most popular garlic varieties. Stores into spring. Large, beautiful and well-formed porcelain garlic but with more color than most porcelains. Flavor is very rich and musky, strong and robust and sticks around for a while” (Allicins Ranch).

Then in 2021 I branched out again and purchased seed stock for Thai Fire from Allicins Ranch.

Thai Fire has a shorter growing season than the soft necks (Inchelium Red from Fresh Start in Louisville, KY and Broadleaf Czech from Seed Savers website) that I grow. Music has a longer growing season by about four weeks.

   In  April, 2023, I finished side-dressing my beds of garlic with nitrogen-rich feathermeal, organic amendments, sulphur (to keep the pH correct for garlic), a magnesium source (Epsom salts) and compost. Then I covered the soil with loose straw to keep the weeds from growing up. Garlic plants do not compete well against weeds.

   Now I wait for the first scapes to appear on the hardneck Music. But I really think the Thai Fire are probably going to put up their scapes first.

   Another detail I needed to know was how to tell exactly when the garlic is ready to dig. Until 2021, I just played it by ear and watched the garlic until most of the leaves had died and were falling over. I researched in 2022 and found the guideline that once the top four or five leaves are half green and half yellow-wilty, it’s time to dig the garlic. The plant has quit supporting its leaf growth and the bulbs have filled out.

Harvesting Garlic Bulbs

   I use a garden fork to loosen the soil and lift the bulbs toward the surface being very careful not to touch or scar the bulbs hidden under the soil. You see, the bulb hasn’t grown just under the surface where I planted the cloves—with the tip showing above the surface. 

   Once the clove begins to grow, it appears to me, its many deep roots pull the plant down under the soil. Sources mention the garlic roots can grow 8 feet into the soil. Of course, I add mulch when I plant the cloves, and I side dress the plants in the spring and add a little more compost. So I’ve deepened the soil on top of the cloves by an inch or 2. Still when I dig them, the bulbs are 4 to 5 inches below the surface of the soil.

The roots of the garlic are phenomenal. When I life a clump of soil surrounding a bulb that is 9 inches in diameter and turn it upside down, the white roots that I’ve just severed, surround the bulb like stars in a black sky. I did not have my camera with me when I was harvesting. Next year I intend to get a picture of that root system spread out in the soil.

   So once the garlic harvest is dug, I bring it in and in recent years have laid it on a table in one layer to cure with a fan blowing on it for two weeks. Through the 9 or 10 recent years that I’ve grown garlic, I’ve decided two weeks is really too long to wait to braid the garlic. I decided I want to braid the garlic while it still has some greenness in its leaves, which may not even be a whole week, certainly not more than a week, after lifting it from the ground. That is what Anne Bishop’s plants were like when she taught me how to braid it and more suppleness remains in the leaves. After braiding, I immediately hang it on the wall to continue the curing process.

Garlic drying racks 

   The biggest difference I am worked on in 2023 is finding a drying rack to hang the garlic on. I found various types of those drying racks on Pinterest when I researched there.  I selected a prototype someone else had developed and I’m thankful for his design. My husband found boards from earlier uses to transform into my curing rack. He nailed each cross board onto a central spine board to create slides for the bulbs to sit atop the boards and the leaves to hang below it.

See pics following the blog post.

Designing the braids from the crop harvested

I went to Pinterest looking for different varieties of braids that I might create. Up to now all the braids I’ve made are basically the same: three bulbs in a row with varying total number of bulbs in each braid (6,7,8). 

   Last year—2022– as I had for several years, I placed seven bulbs in every braid for sale. My braids were so different in 2013 when I was first getting back into braiding garlic, after so many years when I was not growing garlic. I created various sizes of braids. I can’t remember the thought process that led me to create braids of small bulbs, or of medium-sized bulbs, or of large bulbs. Maybe my hands were remembering braiding my very first crop in 1983. I planted garlic we had purchased at the local grocery–from medium-sized bulbs because that was what I could easily get for seed. My harvest was all pretty small bulbs. I put more bulbs in each braid and they looked rather like bunches of grapes. I cut strips of fabric and weaved them in with the braids to give them a decorative appeal. I peddled them to gift shops in Monticello but had very few sales. They were pretty pitiful braids; still it was my beginning. 

  So in 2013, for whatever reason, I grouped all the same size bulbs into a braid. So some braids were full of large bulbs and had 12-15 bulbs. But I found that the long braids— the biggest braids—did not sell well. People that I was offering them to, obviously, didn’t use that much garlic in their cooking. Or maybe they didn’t want to pay for a larger braid which costs more. And the braids full of the smallest bulbs were drastically smaller, and though they sold more easily, I realized that wasn’t a good system. No cook I know wants to peel the papers from many small cloves for one recipe. Soooo pretty quickly, I realized I needed to create each braid with a variety of bulb sizes. 

      I also learned within that first year, that the only thing I wanted to plant were cloves from the very largest bulbs of my harvest because the large cloves grow giant bulbs and little cloves grow small bulbs. Large bulbs look much better in a garlic braid. Actually, every year I’ve grown garlic, I  always saved all the largest bulbs for seed for the next year.

   In these most recent years, I designed the braids with 3 of the largest bulbs down the center of the braid. In the bottom row, I selected 2 of the smallest bulbs to situate and support that largest bulb against the wall. In the second row from the bottom I chose 2 of the smaller medium-sized bulbs and in the top row, 2 larger medium-sized bulbs. In this way, I try to create all the braids of one type of garlic with equal amounts of garlic as each of  the other braids. All braids contain a variety of bulb sizes.

   I decided in 2023 to make 10 bulb braids. And when I looked at that first 10 bulb braid, I realized that’s what my mentor Anne Bishop braided—10 bulb braids, to the best of my memory.  All of her bulbs were more uniform in size. I don’t know what type of softneck garlic she grew.

   And by saving the largest bulbs which contain the largest cloves for seed for the next year, the size of the bulbs in each successive crop increased every year. I don’t mean I’ve grown more garlic, though I have, but I mean, the cloves I’ve grown have grown larger bulbs. The small bulbs don’t go to waste either. We use them at home, or I give them away as gifts to people.

Different growing zones

   Another aspect of my garlic production is that we have a property in Wayne county Kentucky, where I can also grow garlic since it is a crop that you don’t have to tend all the time—every day or every week even —as long as it’s getting enough rain and sun for it to grow well. So for the past three years, I’ve grown close to half my crop in Wayne County and the other half in Jefferson County, Kentucky. 

   There are some differences because Wayne county is three hours south of Jefferson County—150 miles,—and therefore gets warmer weather earlier in the spring, and is still warmer in the fall when I’m planting the garlic, so it may well be that the garlic can grow larger in Wayne County just because it’s two or three weeks earlier in the spring even though it’s also in growing zone 6.

The garlic plants have a longer growing season when I plant them in Wayne County. If you’re thinking about growing garlic, be sure to check what growing zone you live in and adjust planting times to your zone. Also, you should do a soil test to determine what nutrients your soil might need that would benefit garlic. I’ve done some research about that and recommend you do the same.

   The other difference between my two growing areas besides the weather, is the soil. In Jefferson county we grow in Shelby Park Community Garden, which is in the area that, decades ago, would have been part of the Ohio river floodplain, and it contains really rich black soil.

   In Wayne County, only about 20 minutes away from what was the Cumberland River but is now Lake Cumberland Reservoir, the soil is much more rocky, and has a lot of red clay in it as well as limestone from those rocks. Consequently, I felt it would be helpful to the garlic, to have less competition from the rocks.

   I’m very grateful that my son was willing to help me sift all the soil from the two beds before I planted garlic in 2022 in order to remove all the little rocks—”sheep skulls” they call them in Wayne County. We used 1 inch mesh metal in a frame to sift through all the soil. 

   In addition, one of the beds in Wayne county in the southern part of Kentucky, had a lot more clay in it than the other one, so we dug down 2 feet in that bed, dug out the clay and put 4 to 6 inches of sand down there where that clay was so that the soil would drain better. 

   I did that because the last year I planted garlic in that bed, the soil stayed wet all that rainy season. It was a very wet summer. The bed didn’t dry out well, and the garlic didn’t do as well because it was in that wet soil too much–garlic prefers well-drained soil.  I wasn’t there often to pay enough attention to it. 

   So we tried to remedy that. Based on a soil test that we had done at the Wayne County extension office, we selected amendments to the soil to help it be richer for the garlic.

 We dug out the soil, put sand in the bottom, and added more compost that we had purchased. 

Soil Amendments 

   Another difference in growing in these two different areas of the state is what’s available for me to use to amend the soil in Wayne county compared to what’s available in Jefferson county. 

   In Jefferson county I have Fresh Start, which is a business that carries all kinds of organic amendments for farmers and urban farmers, as well, so they have recommended certain products that are good for garlic, again based on a soil test from the Jefferson County extension agency that sent our soil away to be tested so that we could amend it appropriately. 

   The first thing Fresh Start recommended was a product called BLUEN which looks like it has chicken manure and sulfur in it and I’m sure other things, as well. We used that a few years back. 

   Then doing more research, we discovered that feather meal is a good nitrogen source that releases over time—slow release. So since 2022, we used feathermeal in the Louisville beds.   

   Spring 2023 in Jefferson County we side dressed with feather meal and then compost from Earth First, which is in Indiana across the Ohio river.  There we purchased a compost mixture: 60% topsoil, 30% compost and 10% sand. Because I had a couple of beds that didn’t have much depth of soil, I added that to those beds to give the garlic a nice depth to grow in. 

   Unfortunately, when I went to Monticello to side-dress the garlic this spring, I wasn’t able to find any feathermeal, so we searched the local retail stores and were able to find bloodmeal at the Country Farm and Home store. Blood meal is also high in nitrogen and slow releases over time. Maybe not as long a release as feathermeal, but would provide the nitrogen necessary for the growing time for the garlic when they are heavy feeders. So the Wayne County garlic got bloodmeal, and the Jefferson County garlic got feathermeal. We’ll watch the growth and take pictures of the growth and keep a record of how they do.

   In Wayne County, we produce our own compost, and that was available in the fall of 2022 to prepare those beds after we had sifted out all the rocks. Our homemade compost went into those beds. Then, when I side-address with the blood meal this spring, I didn’t add more Compost. Nor did I put any magnesium (Epsom salts) in those beds because the soil test revealed they had plenty of magnesium and phosphorus. The agent, a good friend of ours, Danny Adams indicated that the kitchen scraps contain higher amounts of some nutrients that plants need that are not dangerous because they’re not chemical sources.

   When I researched after that, I found that avocados are very high in phosphorus. We cut up the avocado skins and chop the avocado pits from our nightly salads, and put all of that into our compost. I was pleased to have this logical reason why our soil in Wayne County was high in phosphorus.

Reverse Total Shoulder Replacement- March 15, 2023

   Another element in tending to my garlic crop in 2023 is that I had a reverse total shoulder replacement on March 15. That left me bedridden for a couple of weeks and, after that when I was able to get out and do something, I could only work the beds with my left arm. That has slowed me down and moderated the usual amount of time that I would spend tending the garlic beds. You just never know what is life will present you.

    I asked the surgeon how soon I’d be able to braid garlic along with the other things that I do. How soon will I be able to use a mouse and do my computer job? How soon will I be able to get back to yoga and Pilates and kettlebells, and how soon will I be able to drive? All those things are pretty important to me and Dr. Harreld was able to schedule the surgery early enough so I’d be able to do the critical things we had already planned on certain dates: dig garlic, braid garlic, and even more importantly, be able to drive to Arizona to see our granddaughter and our sons in May, before the garlic is ready to be harvested.