I haven’t been paying attention to the garlic. I was waiting for scapes. When the scapes shoot out, we know it’s getting close to time for the garlic to be harvested. This year, it totally didn’t produce any scapes! I’ve never had garlic do that before. Last night Vince looked at it and said “This garlic looks like it’s dying.” He pulled one up and it’s a good ways past time to harvest it.
Vince came in and googled to see why there were no scapes and we found that a late cold snap or an early heat wave can mess up the scape formation. Honestly, I like the scapes as much as I like the garlic. I’m really kinda sad about not getting any.
I came in the house, looked on the blog to see when we harvested the garlic last year and it was the first and second week of April. We’re way late getting this out of the ground!
We pulled up enough to get a load going in one of the black garlic pots. There’s also an onion that he pulled up to test and they’re ready to be pulled too. I asked him to go ahead and and get the garlic pulled up. I’m going to make black garlic probably from all of it. It keeps so well in the fridge. We still have two gallon size zipper bags in the fridge from last year.
I want to freeze dry the onions so I asked Vince to leave the onions in the ground for another week. I’ll do one more load of strawberries in the freeze dryer, then I’ll run it all week next week with peaches. Whatever peaches don’t get freeze dried, I’ll either can or freeze or make jam. The next week I’ll start freeze drying the onions. I think I’m going to be busy for a few weeks!
Dottie says
You’re DEFINITELY going to be busy for awhile. BUT, so many wonderful goodies to have. YUM!
Rebecca in SoCal says
You’re harvesting your peaches already? Wow!
I read, the other day, that garlic leaves are edible. The blogger showed a picture of her husband gathering wild garlic leaves, but they didn’t look at all like what’s in that picture above. They were huge! And broad. Maybe Canada’s garlic is different? Unless those are your onions. Hard to tell.
Judy Laquidara says
We have five trees and only one gets ripe this early. We picked 25 gallons tonight.The next tree will be ripe in probably two weeks. The pictures are my garlic.
Heidi Naber says
We live in WA state and plant garlic late in October to harvest in July. I have read the hardneck varieties produce scapes and softneck varieties don’t. Soft necked varieties are said to grow best in the South and are the ones that can be braided. Have you discovered which variety grows best for you?