Mark dug the rest of the garlic on Monday and hung it under the eaves to dry.  I can honestly tell you that there's more garlic beside our front door than I've ever seen in one spot in my life!

Learning from last year's drying fiasco, we hung up the garlic in small clumps immediately after digging.  This photo shows some of last week's garlic --- notice how it's already drying up nicely due to the air movement around the exposed bulbs and leaves.  If we had room indoors, we could also have spread the plants out in a single layer on screens to dry.

Either way, the bulbs will be thoroughly cured and ready to move to storage two weeks after harvest.  At that point, the garlic will have sucked all of the nutrients out of the leaves and roots, so it's safe to cut off the excess plant material.  We store our garlic in mesh bags we save from buying winter oranges.

Last year's garlic is still lingering on our kitchen shelf, proving that it is quite possible to eat your own garlic for an entire year without any special storage area.  The trick for preventing your garlic from sprouting is counter-intuitive --- keep it warm.  Once garlic has been cooled and then re-warmed, the plant thinks it has survived a winter and starts to grow.  Keep the heads warm (but not hot) and they'll linger in an eternal summer.

One last note on garlic curing and storing --- be sure to pull out the biggest heads for next year's planting.  I'm pretty sure that the few small heads mixed in with our many large heads were due to me not being vigilant enough about planting only the biggest cloves from the biggest heads last fall.  Even though you might want to brag by giving away those beautiful big heads to your friends and family, just think how much more you'll get to brag next year when every one of your garlic heads is that size!

Want more in-depth information? Browse through our books.

Or explore more posts by date or by subject.

About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.

Powered by Branchable Wiki Hosting.