Tag: garlic scapes

Success with Storing Garlic

Garlic hanging in vertical netting to cure and dry.
Photo Twin Oaks Community

I have written often about garlic, and now I am going to focus on the steps to take to ensure your garlic stores as long as possible. This assumes you have become successful at growing all you need for many months, if not most of a year, and your challenge now is keeping it in good shape.

Everything You Need to Know About Garlic June 2020 includes many, many links on all stages of garlic growing. And to sum it all up see My Garlic Slideshow

Much about garlic is to be found in my Alliums for the Month Series from 2018-2019. The April 2019 post gives links to each of them.

Here’s a sequence of tips, from choosing good varieties to storage, to maximize your chances of success with storing garlic.

Siberian hardneck garlic.
Photo by Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

Choosing good storing varieties

  • See Garlic Almanac and Phenotypic Plasticity May 2021. Includes many links. Read this post to learn which characteristics are determined by the growing conditions, including climate, and which are inherent in that variety. Don’t rush to buy a variety that does well in California if you are in New England! Size isn’t everything, but for good size, predictably colored and flavored garlic, buy seed garlic grown locally that yields well. Over time, garlic saved and regrown each year in a certain locality (particular soil type, water availability, local temperatures, latitude, altitude, cultural practices) will adapt itself to that location, and yields can improve. For example, studies have shown that varieties grown in drought-prone areas can, over years, develop more drought-tolerance. Commercial cultivars can have the highest yield under well-watered conditions, but drought will show up the adapted strains in a comparison trial.
  • Get a soil test a month or so before planting, and determine if any soil amendments will help your garlic grow big and strong.
  • Soft neck varieties generally store longer than hardneck varieties. But you don’t need to give up on hard neck varieties! We like our hardneck garlic for flavor and for the large cloves. Most soft-necks have a group of small cloves in the center of each bulb. We grow hardneck to last us 4-6 months, and softneck to use after that, for another 4-6 months or until it’s all gone.
  • According to Ira Wallace at Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, although most hardnecks store 4-6 months, Music and Chesnok Red can keep 7 months or more in central Virginia. Other hardnecks also rated by SESE as good for storage include German Extra-Hardy and Romanian Red. Softnecks such as Italian Softneck, Inchelium Red, California Early and Silverskins such as Nootka Rose and Silver Rose can store for up to 12 months under good conditions. Order in summer for delivery September to November according to your local planting date.
Garlic scallions prepared for sale. Typepad.com
  • Make your best use of garlic scallions and garlic scapes to extend the garlic season. Experiment with planting small cloves, or cull bulbs of softneck varieties, to grow scallions at various times of year to see what the range is where you are. See Alliums for November. Some growers are finding they can get a better income from garlic scallions than from bulb garlic, and so they are working to extend the garlic scallion season. We have only ever planted small cloves for garlic scallions in early November immediately after planting our maincrop garlic. By planting later, it is possible to stretch the harvest period out later. Softneck garlic varieties can make worthwhile growth for scallions even if planted after the start of January.

Planting garlic for strongest growth

  • Watch your soil temperature to determine when to plant your garlic. Ideally, the soil temp at 4″ (10 cm) deep will be 50°F (10°C) at 9 am, for a few consecutive days. If the fall is unusually warm, wait a week.  We plant in early-mid November. If you plant too early, the garlic will make too much lush leafy growth before cold weather (12°F/−11°C) and could get set back by freezing. If you plant too late, the garlic may not be able to grow enough strong roots before freezing conditions prevent growth. This will limit the size of the bulbs, and may lead to high winter-kill of the plants.
having fun popping garlic and talking about next year’s planned crops.
Photo Bell Oaks
  • Select large cloves from large bulbs, 2-2.5” (5-7.5 cm). Using large cloves from large bulbs usually gives the highest yields, and will, if repeated every year, steer your crop towards bigger bulbs. However, there is a limit: the very largest bulbs are often irregular, and have got large by growing lots of cloves, some of which are very small. As this is probably not what you want to steer towards, don’t use very large irregular bulbs as planting stock.
  • See Garlic Planting and Freeing Trapped Shoots for a summary and links to other posts.
  • See Plant Garlic (Alliums for November) for lots of info, including how much garlic to plant, popping cloves for planting, pre-plant seed treatments to reduce pests and diseases. Start your garlic off well by eliminating problems before you plant!
  • Mulch? At planting time, the soil is still warm, and the newly separated cloves are primed to start growing. If you want to roll out mulch as we do (big round bales of spoiled hay), then you need to act before fragile garlic shoots emerge from the soil. If you are using loose mulch you can blow or throw it over the beds, and a few emerged shoots are no big deal. If you don’t mulch, the soil and the garlic experiences more and wider temperature swings, including freezing conditions, which can dislodge the roots and reduce the rate of growth.
  • In areas where oats reliably winter-kill, if you have a lot of space, you can plant garlic between beds of oats, then later mow the oats and spread the straw between the rows. You do need quite widely-spaced rows of garlic to make this possible, and a bigger area in oats than in garlic.

Cultivating garlic for biggest plants

  • Free Trapped Garlic Shoots (Alliums for December). Watch your mulched garlic beds and when the shoots start to emerge, choose the moment to free any trapped shoots. Usually, most of the shoots will emerge on the same day. Work along the rows, investigating each spot where you expect a garlic plant to be, but nothing has emerged. This will help you with the goal of having a big harvest. After all, improving storability does imply having plenty!

    Garlic beds in April. Weed once a month from March. Photo Kathryn Simmons
  • Because of their vertical tubular or strap-like leaves, alliums do not compete well with broadleaf weeds and can easily become stunted in high weeds. All overwintered alliums will need weeding in March and once a month after that until harvest.
  • Mulched crops can be weeded during wet weather, if necessary, and the pulled weeds can be discarded on top of the mulch, where they stand a much better chance of dying then weeds discarded on bare soil.

Preparing garlic for harvest: removing scapes and mulch

  • Garlic Scapes (Alliums for May). Pulling scapes as soon as you can get a good grip below the head of the stem helps the garlic grow bigger. Removing the scapes does not reduce the storage life, as was once thought. Removing the mulch gives the garlic good airflow and helps it dry down. We do these jobs as soon as we start to see scapes (ours arrive 3 weeks before we need to harvest the bulbs):
  • Hot weather above 91°F (33°C) ends bulb growth and starts the drying down process. Watch the garlic, not the calendar!

    Pulling garlic scapes.
    Photo Wren Vile

Harvesting garlic

  • See Harvesting Garlic, Signs of maturity (Alliums for June) and Garlic signs of maturity October 2020. Count how many fully green inner leaves there are on a dozen random sample plants. Green leaves represent intact “wrappers” on the bulb, and having at least 4 will help your bulbs store well.  Six is better, five is enough, if your garlic doesn’t have to travel to distant markets. The gold standard (Ron Engeland) is if the sixth leaf down is starting to brown on 50% of the crop, then it’s ready to harvest.
  • Another sign of maturity that we use with our hardneck garlic is to dig a few sample bulbs, and cut them in half horizontally. If there are small open air spaces between the remains of the stem and the cloves, the bulbs are ready. If the cloves have not even differentiated, and you are viewing a single mass of garlic, you are too early by quite a bit. Test once a week. If your cloves are already springing apart from each other, like an opening flower bud, you are late. Your delicious garlic will not store for long. You might need to mince and freeze it in ice cube trays, if you want to preserve some for a while.
  • See Garlic Harvest step by Step June 2016
Hanging garlic in vertical netting.
Photo Marilyn Rayne Squier
  • Harvesting Garlic June 2013. Careful harvest extends storage life. Here’s our system:
  1. If the soil is very dry, water the night before – Very hard soil can damage the bulbs.
  2. Plan equal time to dig garlic and to hang it up. It’s important not to leave garlic in airless buckets.
  3. Dig the garlic carefully. Treat the bulbs like fragile, sun-sensitive eggs. Don’t bang, throw or drop the bulbs. Bruised bulbs won’t store well
  4. Loosen them with digging forks, without stabbing them. Pulling on unloosened garlic damages necks, they won’t store well
  5. If they have a lot of soil on the roots, use curled fingers to “brush” soil out
  6. Try not to rub or pick at the skin. Bulbs need several intact skin layers to store well.
  7. Don’t wash the bulbs, no matter how dirty. They need to dry, not get wetter. Dirt will dry and drop off during curing.
  8. Get the dug garlic indoors and hung up promptly. Air above 90°F (33°C) can cook the bulbs, sun can scorch them
Hauling the harvested garlic (and a tired worker) to the barn. Photo Marilyn Rayne Squier
  • Garlic Harvest June 2012. Our hardneck variety is always ready before our softneck variety.

Drying, curing, snipping, and sorting garlic for best keeping qualities

  • Garlic drying and curing methods Feb 2020. A useful roundup of approaches.
  • Drying and Curing Garlic June 2016
  • Drying and Curing Garlic Step by Step with Vertical Netting February 2020. This post has a complete step-by-step list of all the tasks from determining curing is finished, to storing for the winter. Here I am just picking out the bits that make the most difference to how well your garlic will store.
    • We hang our curing garlic in vertical netting around the walls of a barn. Some growers use horizontal racks, others tie garlic in bunches with string and hang the bunches from the rafters.
    • Hang curing garlic with fans if the humidity is high. Don’t set fans too close to the garlic, your goal is to improve the air flow, not blast the bulbs and shrivel them up. See my book Sustainable Market Farming.
    • A sequential arrangement of hanging in order of harvesting, simplifies trimming, and makes best use of the fans, giving the garlic the best chance of drying evenly.
    • Wait 3-4 weeks, then test some bulbs for dryness by rolling the neck of the garlic between your finger and thumb. It should feel dry, papery, strawy. If many bulbs are slippery, gooey, or damp in any way, delay the trimming until at least 90% of the necks are dry.
Trimming garlic stems prior to long-term storage.
Photo by Brittany Lewis

Snipping and sorting

  • Gently remove plants from the netting. Handle the bulbs gently so as not to bruise them. We need long storage, which means no damage.
  • Set up a comfortable place to work. Being comfortable aids good quality work!
  • Some people like to mark off 2”and 2 ½” on the arm of the chair, a nearby wood structure, or their knee.
  • Cut the roots off the garlic as close as possible in one or two snips. This stops them reabsorbing water from the air, and becoming undry.
  • Cut the tops off the garlic, leaving a ¼ – ½” stub. Cutting too close reduces the storage life.
  • Do not remove any skin. We want long storage not pretty-pretty.
  • If damaged, sprung apart or mushy anywhere, put that bulb on the Farm Use rack.
  • Feel the cut neck. The remains of the stem may have a Styrofoam texture. If damp at all, put the trimmed bulb on a rack to dry further.
  • If dry, select bulbs for replanting: If it’s not springing open and it could be between 2 and 2 ½” (5-7.5 cm), and is not obviously more than 10 cloves, measure it.
  • If it’s seed size and quality, put it in a green net bag. Green for Growing. If smaller or larger, put in a red bag for eating.
  • Lay down any bags that are more than 1/3 full, as the weight of garlic in a vertical bag can damage the bulbs at the bottom.
  • Periodically weigh the tied-off bags, make neck tags from masking tape, saying type, quality and weight.
  • Snipping, Sorting and Storing Garlic July 2013. A different step-by-step list.
  • Snip and Sort Garlic (Alliums for July)
Nootka Rose Silverskin softneck garlic is one of the best for long storage. Photo Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

Storing garlic for a long season of good quality

  • Garlic does not need to be refrigerated immediately after trimming. Garlic bulbs can be stored in the high temperature range of 60ºF-90°F (16ºC-32°C) if they have never been refrigerated, the same as bulb onions. We store initially in a basement. Seed garlic can stay in the high temperature range until planting time.
  • It is important to avoid the sprouting temperature range of 40-55°F (5-13°C)
  • 32-39°F (0-4.5°C) is also a good temperature range.
  • See Storing through the winter: When temperatures seem likely to drop to below 55°F in our basement, we clear the top left shelves in the walk-in cooler and move the garlic there. The low shelves near the compressor do not work well. Use the drier high shelves.
  • See Move Stored Garlic (Alliums for September).
  • Commercially, garlic is stored in the dark at about 32°F (0°C) and 65% humidity, and depending on the species and variety, it may keep six months or more. I have heard that garlic can be stored for up to nine months at 27°F (-2.7°C), but I have not tried that myself. It does not freeze until 21°F (-6°C). Do not store peeled garlic in oil, as garlic is low in acidity and the botulin toxin could grow.
  • For storage, garlic (like onions) does best with a humidity of 60%–70%. Refrigerators are usually more humid than ideal.

Workhorse Crops for May

Young bush bean plants.
Photo Pam Dawling

Workhorse Crops for May

Workhorses crops are reliable under a wide range of conditions, including weather, soil, date and other variables. Some are easy to grow, some pump out lots of food, some are “insurance crops” like chard that stand in your garden until you need to harvest them, some are especially profitable (for those growing for market).

I’ve chosen 14 crops (including two pairs) to focus on in the next 12 months, ending April 2022: Asparagus, beans, cabbage, carrots, chard, garlic, kale and collards, potatoes, sweet corn, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, watermelons, winter squash, zucchini and summer squash.

My motivation for this series is to help all who want to be more efficient, productive and profitable (if selling) as other parts of our lives expand again.

Workhorse Crops to Plant in May

May is a busy planting month here in central Virginia and probably most places in the northern hemisphere. Ten of our 14 Workhorse Crops can be planted once frosts are behind us.

Beans: We grow bush beans because we don’t like putting up trellises. In the past we had uncontrolled Mexican Bean Beetles that destroyed slower-to-mature pole beans. We found we could get crops of bush beans faster and sow them every few weeks or so to get a good supply of presentable beans every couple of days. Click this link to read about soaking bean seed, using inoculant, sowing through biodegradable plastic mulch using a jig, sowing sunflowers in our bean rows as place-markers when harvesting. See my phenology post for information on when it’s warm enough to start sowing beans (and other crops) where you are.

Carrots: I wrote a lot about carrots in the past year, when the monthly series was on root crops. See this post on preparing beds for sowing carrots, and weeding and thinning. Check out this post on flame-weeding, if you plan lots of carrot-growing!

Multicolored chard. Wren Vile

Chard: A great insurance crop – it provides leafy greens when you need them, and you can ignore it when you have plenty of other vegetables! As a biennial, chard will not bolt the first year (unless stressed by lack of water). We use chard for fresh greens in summer, when kale, collards, broccoli and cabbage from the spring have long gone. Because we don’t need chard until late May, we don’t sow until late March. We transplant in late April, into a hay mulch. This crop will be in the ground until mid-winter, and mulch will keep back most of the weeds. You could, of course, sow chard earlier if you want to eat it earlier. We also grow chard through the winter in our hoophouse, where it feeds us during the Hungry Gap.

Potatoes: I wrote a special series on potatoes last year. Click the link to access the whole series, starting with planting in April. Here we plant in March and June. You can plant at any date in between, so long as you have 80 days until your first frost. If time is a bit short, choose a fast-maturing variety (or be satisfied with small potatoes that won’t store).

Sweet corn: we make 6 sowings of sweet corn, to harvest from July 4 to mid-October. Start planting sweet corn when the leaves of the white oak are as big as squirrel’s ears. Click the link to check our planting dates, and to read about our first sowing of the year, catching raccoons and skunks, avoiding mixing types of corn and to view my slide show on succession planting. There’s a confusing aspect of hybrid corn varieties: if you plant a mixture of different genotypes, it can lead to starchy unpleasant-flavored corn. Also don’t plant Indian corn, popcorn or any kind of flint or dent corn within 600′ (180 m) of your sweet corn. For this reason we grow only sweet corn in our garden.

Our first sweet corn of the season.
Photo Pam Dawling

Sweet potatoes: I wrote about planting sweet potatoes in 2020. Modern varieties of sweet potatoes grow to a good size in as little as 90 days, so they are not just for the South! The further north you are, the longer the daylight at midsummer and the more photosynthesizing the plants can do. I have known people grow sweet potatoes in hoophouses if their climate isn’t warm enough outdoors. This can fit with winter use of the hoophouse for greens and roots. My book Sustainable Market Farming contains a whole chapter on this crop, including growing your own slips, but it’s too late to start that this year. Wait for the soil to warm before planting out your sweet potato slips. We plant ours a couple of weeks after the last frost, around the time we transplant peppers and okra.

Tomatoes: We plant out our main crop at the very beginning of May, unless the weather is too cold. To my surprise, I find I haven’t written much about transplanting tomatoes outdoors. Here’s a post about planting tomatoes in our hoophouse. We use the same techniques in the hoophouse and outdoors. We transplant one row of tomatoes down the centerline of a 4ft (1.2 m) bed, 2ft (60 cm) apart. Outdoors, once the weather has settled so that we’re confident we won’t need rowcover any more, we stake and stringweave. We install a steel T-post every two plants (4ft /1.2 m) apart and start stringweaving when the plants are about 12ins (30 cm) tall. I’ll say more about stringweaving later in the year.

Watermelon transplants in a Winstrip plug flat. Watermelons give earlier harvests from transplants, and plants in plug flats transplant easier then from open flats.
Photo Pam Dawling

Watermelons: Watermelon growing isn’t easy, but the rewards are so wonderful, that I gave watermelon a “Circus Pony” place among the workhorses! We transplant our watermelons, to get ripe ones as early as possible. Melons are tricky to transplant, as the roots don’t do well if disturbed. We have successfully used soil blocks, and these days we use Winstrip 50-cell trays. Watermelons grow very well on black plastic mulch, which warms the soil as well as keeping weeds at bay. The first year we switched from using hay mulch to biodegradable plastic mulch, we were astounded to get ripe melons a full month earlier!

It’s important to keep the little seedlings in the greenhouse warm and in very good light, and away from drafts. Be careful not to overwater. They can keel over very quickly and once the stem collapses, remove that seedling before others die too. The goal is short stems!

When you transplant, get the start out of the flat and into the ground as quickly as possible with as little root damage as you can manage. This is not a crop where one person plops the plants out down the bed and someone follows planting them! Make the hole in the soil (through the plastic if you’re using that), by wiggling the trowel from side to side. Don’t dig a hole as if you are in a sand box, with a spoil heap at the side. Just form a space the right depth to get the whole of the stem in the ground.

Next gently pop the transplant out of the flat, perhaps using a table knife down the side of the cell. Push up from underneath. If all goes well, you’ll have the plant in a little block of soil (yes, like a soil block). Slide the transplant into the hole. You want all the leaves above ground, all the roots and stem in the ground. If the hole is too deep, lift the transplant carefully and scrape some soil into the hole. You don’t want to end up with the plant in a dip, as this can rot the stem. If the hole is not deep enough, you can to some extent hill up soil around the stem to protect it. You don’t want any of that fragile stem visible!

Water the day before, and one hour before transplanting, to help the soil hold together, and so that the plant has some reserves of water to see it through the initial shock of being set out. As you are transplanting, pause and water newly set plants every 20 minutes or so. Afterwards, water the whole planting and repeat on the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 7th days and once a week after that.

Winter squash: By contrast, winter squash are very easy, and they store for months at room temperature. A true workhorse. We direct sow at the end of May, with the goal of harvesting in September and October, the last ones making Halloween lanterns. Soil should be at least 60°F (15.5°C), and all danger of frost should be past.

Young squash plant.
Pam Dawling

We have grown about 400ft (120 m) for 100 people, and mostly focus on Butternuts, Moschata types that grow best where we are and store longest. This is the type to focus on if you want trouble-free squash, with no damage from borers or cucumber beetles. The tougher stems are better able to repel invaders. They need warm growing temperatures above 60°F (16°C). As well as Waltham Butternuts, we include the large Cheese pumpkin, the long-storing Seminole, and the gigantic Tahitian Butternut. We also grow a couple of Maxima squashes which store quite well:  Cha-cha kabocha, and the large blue Jarrahdale, which have relatively high resistance to squash bugs compared to others in this group. Red Kuri, Festival (sweet dumpling type) and the New England Pie pumpkin are Pepo squashes, suitable for storing a few weeks only. (Pumpkins are squashes.) We grow some of these because they are sooner to harvest. Really they are more of a fall squash than a winter squash.

Winter squash do need a lot of space for each plant. This can mean a lot of hoeing until the vines spread, or mulch. Some can take 90-120 days to reach maturity, so plan carefully to be sure of getting a harvest. For dryland farming, without irrigation, it is important not to move the vines to new positions: the dew and rain drips from the leaf edges encourage root growth directly below the vines (where they get the most water and shade).

Sow 0.5”-1” (1-2 cm) deep. Either “station sow” 2 or 3 seeds at the desired final spacing, or make a drill and sow seeds 6” (15 cm) apart. There are various stick planters and jab planters that can be used for this kind of station sowing. Thin later. Rows will need to be 6’ (1.8 m) apart, or more. 9’ (2.7 m) between rows for the vining ones. Some growers plant in a square pattern so that spaces between rows can be mechanically cultivated in both directions. Bush varieties take less space than the vining types, and rows can be 4’ (1.2 m) apart.

You can transplant winter squash if you need to. We did this one year after our fields flooded. We started seeds in cell packs a week before our usual sowing date of 5/25. It worked just fine.

Summer squash plants under insect netting.
Pam Dawling

Zucchini (courgettes) and summer squash: Zucchini is a subset of summer squash. These are easy to grow, fast to produce warm weather crops. We make a succession of five or six plantings each year, so that we can harvest every day. Each sowing is half a yellow squash (Zephyr, Gentry) and half a zucchini (TenderGrey, Noche, Golden Glory). We grow our earliest squash in the hoophouse, setting out transplants at the beginning of April. Our first outdoor crop is also from transplants. After that, the soil is warm enough to direct sow – 60°F (15.5°C).

After transplanting or sowing, we hoop and cover the row with insect netting (rowcover also works if it has no big holes). We have many bugs that like these plants, especially the striped cucumber beetles, so we keep the rows covered until female flowers appear. At that point we need the service of the pollinators, unless the squash is parthenocarpic (sets fruit without pollination). At that point we pack away the covers, hoe and thin the squash to 24” (60 cm). it would be better to thin sooner, but we rarely find the time.

Zucchini and summer squash are another crop type that we succession sow, to get a continuous supply. More about succession planting another time. The time from sowing to harvest is only around 50 days.

Workhorse Crops to Harvest in May

Asparagus photo by Kathryn Simmons

Asparagus can be harvested if you have a patch. If not start to prepare a patch to plant out one-year crowns next early spring. Remove all perennial weeds while growing a series of cover crops. If you have asparagus, you probably know to snap off at ground level all the spears above a certain length. We chose 7” (18 cm). Do this every day for the 8-week harvest period. Daily harvest will also remove asparagus beetle eggs, controlling the pest level.

A bed of Early Jersey Wakefield cabbage in mid-May.
Photo Pam Dawling

Cabbage can be ready from late May, if you made an early sowing of fast-maturing varieties. Farao or Early Jersey Wakefield can take only 60 days.

Carrots can be ready from late May, if you sowed some in mid-late February

Chard is ready for harvest from late May (earlier if sown earlier), see above.

Harvesting garlic scapes in May
Photo by Wren Vile

Garlic scapes appear in hardneck garlic plants. Here it is also an indicator that our garlic will be ready to harvest in three weeks.

Kale and collards can be harvested until they are bolting, as long as the flavor is acceptable. Read more about bolting here.

Zucchini and summer squash from mid-May,

From storage: carrots, potatoes, sweet potatoes, winter squash

Workhorse Crops Special Topic: Deciding Which Vegetable Crops to Grow

Here’s a slideshow to help you decide which crops to grow. Some of the points are for commercial growers, some apply to anyone growing vegetable crops.

Deciding Which Vegetable Crops to Grow, Pam Dawling

Everything You Need to Know About Garlic; Money and More

 

Softneck garlic ready to harvest
Photo Pam Dawling

We started harvesting our hardneck garlic on May 26 this year. One of the earliest harvests we have on record.

I’ve written lots on garlic in this blog, it’s one of the most sought-out topics. To cut to the chase, here’s my Garlic Recap.

Many of these are posts in my Alliums for the Month Series:

Harvesting garlic scapes
Photo Wren Vile

For a second opinion, see Margaret Roach (who grows in Massachusetts) in A Way to Garden

Music garlic cut open showing gaps around stem – a sign of maturity.
Photo Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

Of the many other posts I’ve written on garlic, that are not mentioned already, starting with harvest and moving round the calendar, there are:

Harvest

Garlic Harvest step by Step

Harvesting Garlic

Garlic Harvest

Garlic harvest, Intercropping, Summer lettuce,

Garlic harvest finished, fall crop planning, tomato bug heads-up

In September 2020, a reader asked:

In this blogpost https://www.sustainablemarketfarming.com/2013/07/05/snipping-sorting-and-storing-garlic/ you discuss that if a garlic bulb is larger or smaller than 2-2.5″, it should not be used for planting.  I’m wondering if you could discuss this in a blogpost perhaps.  I grow Polish White softneck and Turban hardneck, and I’ve been using the largest bulbs I can find for planting both.    I sort the Polish first though, and use only the biggest cloves from each softneck bulb (culls I dry or pickle).  I feel that with the Polish, over time I’ve been increasing my size, and people really like that to purchase.  I would be so very interested to read your reasons for the sizing.  I’m currently sorting for fall planting and was mulling this today and thought I would just ask to see if you might enlighten your readers.  Thanks.

My reply is:

Ah, the hazards of writing a brief article! You can plant any size garlic! Using large cloves from large bulbs usually gives the highest yields, and will, if repeated every year, steer your crop towards bigger bulbs. However, there is a limit: the very largest bulbs are often irregular, and have got large by growing lots of cloves, some of which are very small. As this is probably not what you want to steer towards, don’t use very large irregular bulbs as planting stock.
Yes, I totally agree that if your bulbs are now generally 2.5″ or larger, you are doing the right thing.
Garlic hanging in netting to dry and cure.
Photo Marilyn Rayne Squier

Drying and Curing, Snipping, Sorting and Storing

Garlic drying and curing methods

Snipping, Sorting and Storing Garlic 

Planting garlic

Sustainable Farming Practices slideshow, garlic planting, annual crop review

Garlic Planting and Freeing Trapped Shoots

Winter radishes, planting garlic.

Garlic scallions in March
Photo Pam Dawling

Garlic scallions

Harbinger weeds of spring, and early garlic scallions

Garlic scapes

Garlic scapes! Three weeks to bulb harvest!

Too much rain! But garlic scapes to cheer us up.

Garlic scapes

Garlic scapes, upcoming events, hoophouse seed crops

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My DONATE button

I’ve added a donate button, for those who’d like to use it (via PayPal or credit card). We’re all staying home, not going to conferences or fairs. This is reducing my opportunities to collect speaker fees or sell books face to face.

More people are reading my blog (thank you!). There are thousands of new or returning gardeners across the country, aiming to get fresh air and exercise while usefully putting their time into providing food for their households. There are experienced professional growers trying hard to make their farming more efficient, and pivot to find ways to still earn a living and not lose the farm, due to loss of markets.

I put a lot of energy into providing useful info and practical details, and so if you are finding my posts helpful, and you can afford to, please consider clicking the pay-what-you-can button.

Together we’ll get through this difficult time and reach better days again.

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Birth of Assassin Bugs

Debbie Roos, an Agricultural Extension Agent at Chatham County Center, North Carolina Cooperative Extension and the founder of www.growingsmallfarms.org is a wonderful photographer,. She recently reposted this.

A couple of years ago I posted a series of photos on my Growing Small Farms website showing assassin bug nymphs emerging from their eggs. It was an amazing thing to witness and not something you see every day. Folks really enjoyed seeing the photos back then and since it’s spring and time for more to emerge I thought it would be fun to share the photos again now that so many people are spending so much time at home!

Adult wheel bug feeding on a Japanese beetle. Photo by Debbie Roos. Click here to visit NC Cooperative Extension’s Growing Small Farms website to view the photos.

Be on the lookout for these egg clusters on your property and you may even get lucky and witness the birth of an assassin!

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Quick-Growing Vegetable Crops

Steve Albert has an informative website, Harvest to Table, and this post on quick-growing vegetables includes some warm weather crops like bush green beans and sweet corn. It includes names of fast-maturing varieties.

I wrote Fast Growing Vegetables in March, focusing on early spring crops. If you are still racing to catch up, or in need of more crops that yield quickly, see Harvest to Table.

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How to Fight Hornworms

On the Mother Earth News blog, my post How to Fight Hornworms has been very popular, and has led me to make an article for the Mother Earth Gardener magazine

This magazine is “a quarterly publication committed to giving you in-depth expertise to bolster your organic garden each and every season. Roll up your sleeves and learn soil-boosting strategies, permaculture practices, and more! Formerly known as Heirloom Gardener.”

Tobacco hornworm on tomato leaf
Photo Pam Dawling

16 things I know about growing tomatoes

From Margaret Roach at A WAY TO GARDEN

Margaret writes about home-grown seedlings, finding flavor, choosing between hybrids and open-pollinated varieties, saving seed, good tomato-hygiene, monitoring for pests and diseases, pruning, staking or otherwise supporting the plants, and dealing with the weather.

Jubilee tomato in our hoophouse.
Photo Pam Dawling

 

Hoophouse video interview, plus 2019 Round up of favorite topics and posts you missed

No-Till Growers and Josh Sattin collaborated to post this Hoophouse Tips video interview of me talking about our hoophouse:

 

After a Best Ever day on November 7, 2019, when 876 people viewed my website (4,855 that week), December has been quiet. It’s not a big gardening month for most of us, and the month is full of holidays. And then there’s the urge to hibernate.

Nonetheless, I have been reliably posting every week, and you might have accidentally missed something, while entertaining the visiting aunts and uncles, or rushing to get the carrots harvested, or something involving food and drink. Here’s a chance to  find the lost treasures!

December 24, I posted a Book Review: Grow Your Soil! by Diane Miessler

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Three potato forks to the left, four digging forks to the right.
Pam Dawling

On December 18, I posted Making Use of Greenhouse Space in Winter and Getting the Right Fork

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Purple ube grown in North Carolina by Yanna Fishman

December 10, did you miss Yanna Fisher’s splendid purple ube?

And Josh Sattin’s video interview with me? Legendary Farmer on a Legendary Commune  https://youtu.be/vLzFd4YP9dI

And Jesse Frost’s interview with me on his podcast No-Till Growers ?  You can listen to it here and it’s also on You Tube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p75gRIl0Hzs

Reflect spinach in the open got damaged but not killed at -9F.
Photo Pam Dawling

On December 3, I posted Cooking Greens in December

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On November 26, I offered you a Book Review: Will Bonsall’s Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening

My Top Six. no Seven,  posts of all time:

Winter-kill Temperatures  of Winter-hardy Vegetables 2016 with 23,776 views, peaking in November. Clearly lots of people want to know which crops will survive and which to hurry and harvest, or protect with rowcover.

Garlic scapes with 11,202 views. Garlic and sweet potatoes are the favorite crops on this site. Garlic scapes used to be under-appreciated and under-used. Not now!

Winter-kill Temperatures of Cold-Hardy Vegetables 2018 with 9,979, also peaking in November. My list gets updated each year as I learn new information. But the older ones come higher on internet searches.

Soil Tests and High Phosphorus Levels close behind at 9,503. High phosphorus is a worry for organic growers, especially those using lots of compost, as it can build up each year.

How to Deal with Green Potatoes at 8,613, with sustained interest through August, September and November. Obviously we are not the only growers with this problem, caused by light getting to the tubers.

Tokyo Bekana at 2,199 (who knew that was so popular?)

In 2019 other popular posts included Hunting Hornworms and the newer Winter-Kill Temperatures of Cold-Hardy Vegetables 2019. It takes a while for newer posts to gain on the older favorites.

Lettuce slideshow, Mother Earth News Fair, FaceBook Live, Top summer blogposts, upcoming events

We drove home seven hours from the Pennsylvania Mother Earth News Fair yesterday through the rain. The remnants of Hurricane Florence. We were among the lucky people. Earlier forecasts for Florence had the hurricane raging across central Virginia.

At the Fair, I gave two workshops: Fall and Winter Hoophouses and my new Lettuce Year Round, which you can view right here. Click the diagonal arrows icon to get a full screen view.

I had a bit too much material for a one-hour time-slot, so those of you who were there and felt disappointed at what I had to leave out, you can see it here.

While I as at the Fair I did a FaceBook Live Interview about gardening in hoophouses, with another author, Deborah Niemann. Look on Facebook for Deborah Niemann-Boehle or click the topic link above. She has several books: Raising Goats Naturally, Homegrown & Handmade, and Ecothrifty.

Shade cloth on a bed of lettuce in summer.
Photo Nina Gentle

Meanwhile, Mother Earth News tells me that my post 20 Tips for Success in Germinating Seeds in Hot Weather is in third place for most popular posts this summer.

The winner  An Effective and Non-Toxic Solution for Getting Rid of Yellow Jackets’ Nests by Miriam Landman got 43,328 views in 3 months!

Weeding rowcovered spinach in winter.
Photo Wren Vile

Looking at my own website statistics, I find that for this week, the most popular posts are

  1. Winter Kill Temperatures of Winter-Hardy Vegetables 2016
  2. Soil tests and high phosphorus levels
  3. How to deal with green potatoes
  4. .Winter-Kill Temperatures of Cold-Hardy Vegetables 2018
  5. Alliums for September

For all-time, the bias is naturally on posts that have been around longest,

  1. Garlic scapes! Three weeks to bulb harvest! Is most popular, followed closely by
  2. Winter Kill Temperatures of Winter-Hardy Vegetables 2016.
  3. How to deal with green potatoes is still #3.
  4.  The Complete Twin Oaks Garden Task List Month-by-Month,
  5. Harvesting Melons
  6. Book Review, Epic Tomatoes by Craig LeHoullier
  7. Wnter Hardiness
  8. Book Review: The Lean Farm by Ben Hartman and
  9. Setting out biodegradable plastic mulch by hand
Rolling biodegradable plastic mulch by hand
Photo Wren Vile

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I’ve updated my Events page again, now that the September- April  “Events Season” has hotted up. I’ve added in a couple of new ones and updated some others. Click the Events tab to find conferences and fairs near you, and be sure to come and introduce yourself!

Ira Wallace of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, at the Heritage Harvest Festival Tomato Tasting.
Photo courtesy of Monticello

The Heritage Harvest Festival  is September 21-22 Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia

I’m giving a Premium Workshop on Friday Sept 21, 3-4 pm Classroom 7. Click the link HERE to book for that.

Feeding the Soil

In this workshop I will introduce ways to grow and maintain healthy soils: how to develop a permanent crop rotation in seven steps, and why your soil will benefit from this; how to choose appropriate cover crops; how to make compost and how to benefit from using organic mulches to feed the soil. Handouts.

Book-signing Friday 4.15 – 4.45 pm.

On Saturday there are events all day from 10am to 5pm. $26 general admission.

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Saturday September 29, 2018  Allegheny Mountain Institute Farm at Augusta Health,  Fishersville, VA 22939. 9 am – noon

I’m giving a two-hour Class on Season Extension, followed by one-hour Q&A teaching tour of the hoophouse and greenhouse.

Alliums for May: harvesting garlic scapes, scallions and fall-planted potato onions

Pickled garlic scapes, okra and beets.
Photo Bridget Aleshire

This is the first of a new monthly series of blog-posts on Alliums for the Month, which, like my previous series on lettuce and Asian greens, I plan to run for a year. Alliums are the onion family. With this series, I’m going to talk about which alliums to harvest each month, which to plant, and which need other kinds of attention.

Weeding alliums

I haven’t thought of any alliums to plant in May (at least, not here in central Virginia), but there’s plenty to harvest, and don’t forget to weed! Because alliums don’t have big spreading leaves, they are not good at shading out weeds, so we have to take care of the weeds for them! Particularly bulb onions and garlic this month, as they are only a few weeks away from harvest and will benefit from removing weeds and mulch to let in fresh air to help the bulbs dry down (rather than get fungal diseases!)

Harvesting garlic scapes

Starting any day now, we will begin harvesting garlic scapes (the firm, edible flower stems of hardneck garlic). My previous posts about scapes are some of my most popular ones.

Pulling garlic scapes.
Photo Wren Vile

See last year’s Garlic scapes, upcoming events, hoophouse seed crops, posted on May 2, 2017. There I noted that in 2017, scapes came early, as did Tulip Poplar flowers, at the end of April. We harvest scapes two or three times a week for about three weeks, until no more appear. Garlic scapes are one of the first outdoor crops of the year, apart from rhubarb and asparagus, and their flavor is refreshingly different from leafy greens (the staple hoophouse crops of early spring) and stored winter roots.

I posted Garlic scapes! Three weeks to bulb harvest on May 11, 2015. That year scapes were later than average. This post is a very popular one, and I’m still wondering if I was over-confident in predicting 3 weeks to bulb harvest everywhere in the US! Please do leave a comment if you have records for how long you get between scapes and garlic bulb harvest.

I’ve done some research into what triggers flowering in garlic, but haven’t found much solid info yet.  In general, plant flowering is triggered by some combination of enough vernalization (chilling hours during the winter and early spring – maybe 10 weeks below 40F), plant maturity, temperature and photo-period (the relative length of day and night). In cold weather the plants suppress the flowering signal. The leaves perceive the amount of daylight, and when the temperature is also right, they trigger flowering by sending a signal (called Florigen) to the shoot tips. Florigen may be an actual compound, or may be some combination or ratio of several plant hormones, produced by one or more genes in the plant. Almost all these factors are outside our control, once the plant is in the ground, so the best we can do is pay attention and be ready to act.

There is a bit more information about the triggers for bulb initiation and for drying down. Garlic bulb initiation (and the end of leaf growth) is triggered by daylight increasing above13 hours in length (April 10 here at 38°N). Soil temperatures over 60°F (15.5°C) and air temperatures above 68°F (20°C) are secondary triggers. When I was in Jamaica last May, I researched growing garlic in the tropics, and it may be that temperature is a bigger trigger and daylength is less important in tropical latitudes where daylength does not vary much. Certainly some growers had produced garlic when I didn’t expect it to be possible.

Hot weather above 91°F (33°C) ends bulb growth and starts the drying down process. I don’t yet know how many hours over that temperature the garlic needs before drying down is triggered. We had a few very hot days last week.

It is important to get plenty of good rapid growth before conditions prevent any more growth. Garlic can double in size in its last month of growth, and removing the scapes (the hard central stem) of hardneck garlic can increase the bulb size 25%.

In the 2015 post I described how we pull our garlic scapes, to get the most out–we love this crop! We also appreciate a late-morning task that’s done standing up! In that post I described the value of mulch and when to remove it.

Garlic scapes to cheer us up posted on May 10, 2013 has been reread a lot–whether that’s because readers love garlic scapes, or seek cheering up, I can’t say.

Pulling garlic scapes – the long view.
Photo Wren Vile

Our harvest process

Here’s the short version. Those looking for more detail can go to my 2015 post.

  1. When scapes arrive, plan some late morning or early afternoon time two or three times a week to harvest them.
  2. As soon as the pointed cap of the scape has emerged above the plant center, firmly grasp the stem just below the cap and pull slowly and steadily straight up. The scape pops as it leaves the plant and you have the whole length of the scape, including the tender lower part.
  3. Gather them into buckets, with the scapes upright, so they are easy to bunch or cut up.
  4. Put a little water in the bucket.
  5. They store well in a refrigerator for months if you don’t use them sooner.
  6. In a few days, more scapes will have grown tall enough to pull, and you can have a second chance on any that broke at your earlier attempt.

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Clumps of scallion transplants in a Speedling flat, ready to transplant earlier in spring.
Photo Pam Dawling

Harvesting scallions

In May our outdoor planted scallions start. For outdoors, we use transplants, started in January and February, and transplanted in March and April. We sow in Speedling plug flats, a small pinch of seed in each cell, and transplant the undivided clump/plug. We can get a lot of scallions in a small space. Around May 10, the first ones are big enough to harvest (just as the hoophouse ones finish up – what planning!)

To harvest, we loosen the soil with a digging fork, then lift out a clump. We shake the plants, keeping them in a cluster, and trim off the roots and the ragged tops. Holding the bunch in one hand, we pass the scallions one at a time to the other hand, pulling off a single outer leaf and giving the base of the plant a wipe with our spare hand. Next we set the scallions in a small bucket in water. When the bucket is full enough, we dunk the scallions up and down, and transfer them to a clean bucket with a small amount of water to keep them fresh.

Scallions planted in bunches, ready-to-harvest.
Photo Pam Dawling

It’s good to develop an efficient method with little scallions or the harvest takes way too long. Deal with scallions in bunches as much as possible (digging up, trimming), rather than one at a time. Pass them from hand to hand when cleaning rather than set them down on the ground and pick them up again one at a time. Set them into water so they are cleaning themselves while you work on the rest. Don’t fuss with them too much – pull off a single outer leaf, not more. Don’t pick at little bits of skin, unless quite gross. If you are going to band them, start out with a bunch of rubber bands around three fingers on the hand that holds the bunches (leaving the forefinger free for tasks demanding dexterity). When you’re ready to band them, use the other hand to pull a rubber band into position.

Roxbury Farm in New York State has a wonderful Harvest Manual. Page 45 on scallions says they harvest 50 bunches an hour, including trimming tops as needed, but not roots. They wash 100 bunches an hour on a bench, in bunches, with a power spray.

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A potato onion plant in early spring, showing the cluster that has developed.
Photo Kathryn Simmons

Harvesting fall-planted potato onions

Potato onions (Allium cepa var. aggregatum) are a type of hardy, perennial multiplier onion–once you have them you are self-sufficient. You don’t need to buy seed each year, but select the best bulbs from the ones you grew to replant for the next crop. Also known as Hill Onions, Mother Onions and Pregnant Onions, they produce a cluster of tasty (but not too pungent) bulbs from a single planted bulb, or a large bulb from a small one.

Potato onions have good drought resistance, pink root resistance, onion fly resistance and are widely adapted for different growing regions (not Florida or southern Texas). When properly planted they can withstand sub-freezing temperatures in every area of the continental U.S.

You can order potato onions from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and other suppliers to be shipped in the fall. See SESE’s Perennial Onion Growing Guide and Garlic and Perennial Onion Growing Guide for growing information.

Yellow potato onions.
Photo Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

The potato onions which were planted earliest (September for us) will be ready to harvest first, at the end of May or early in June in our central Virginia climate. Once you see the tops start to fall over, stop watering the onions and let them dry down.

Potato onions are ready to harvest when the tops die. Not all will be ready the same day. Because onions easily get sunscald if left exposed after they are mature, it’s best to harvest the mature ones every few days. Don’t break over the tops in hopes of a single harvest–it really reduces the storage life. The potato onions sit on the surface and are easily picked up without tools. Handle them gently, to prevent bruising and scratching. Put them into crates or buckets, without pulling off any leaves.

The September planted potato onions were the largest bulbs when planted, and they will usually have divided and produced clusters of small onions. Do not break up the clusters as you harvest, because this triggers sprouting. Set the clusters in a barn or shed, on an airy bench or horizontal rack. The tops break easily, so you cannot hang them as you might hang garlic. Potato onions need good ventilation: we use box fans continuously.

If you find any bulbs larger than 2.5″ (about 6 cm), go ahead and eat those. The giants do not store well. Alternatively, refrigerate them till September and replant. The small and medium-sized bulbs keep 8-12 months under good conditions, and are the best to replant to grow more onions.

Potato onions need sorting about once a month to remove any that are rotting. We plant our large ones in September or early October, our medium-sized ones in late November and our small ones in late January. I’ll tell you more about those when the time comes.

Two beds of potato onions in spring, of different planting dates.
Photo Kathryn Simmons

Saving watermelon seed, rainy day reading, Heritage Harvest Festival

Scooping watermelon seed.
Photo Pam Dawling

I wrote recently about saving tomato seed, and here I’ll write about extracting watermelon seed. We grow Crimson Sweet Virginia Select, which we sell to Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. I walk through the patch with a grease pencil (china marker) in July when the melons are forming and write numbers on 40 nice-looking big melons. I’m selecting for earliness, size, disease resistance and flavor.

Selected watermelon with an identifying number.
Photo Nina Gentle

Once the melons start to ripen, I go out to the plot once a week with my trusty garden cart and a collection of clean buckets, a notebook and pen, a big knife, a large slotted spoon, a couple of damp rags, a bottle of water and a big straw hat. I start testing the numbered ones for ripeness. If they are ripe I decide if they are seed-worthy, demoting any with dead vines (not disease-resistant!) or too small. I find promising replacements for any I decide not to save seed from, and number those.

Garden cart with supplies for watermelon seed collection.
Photo Pam Dawling

When I have a good one, I cut it in half and scoop the heart out into a very clean bucket. I taste a piece (that’s the “good flavor” test). These days they all seem to taste good, but the first few years of seed selection, I had some I didn’t like much, so I didn’t save seed from those. See the first photo for the scooping task. Once the heart is scooped out, there is a layer of flesh with seeds in, which I scoop out into a moderately clean bucket. Then a layer of flesh without seeds for the food bucket.

Watermelon seed bucket and food bucket.
Photo Pam Dawling

In the blue bucket is my “dry zone” with my notebook. I write down which melons I harvested, any I discarded, any new ones I added, and how many are left to find in the coming weeks. Generally I harvest 7-10 watermelons per week, generating two buckets of fruit and two half-buckets of seeds. The watermelon seeds are fermented for four or five days, then washed – just like processing tomato seeds I wrote about last week.

Dried watermelon seeds in a paper bag.
Photo Pam Dawling

I harvest 5 or 6 times, from Late July to early September. I don’t want to be selecting for late-ripening melons so I stop harvesting seed long before the fruits are over.

My most recent blog post for Mother Earth News is about repairing garden hoses, most of which you already read about here. It’s in the DIY blog this time (most of my posts go in the Organic Gardening blog). I just heard some numbers for how various of my Mother Earth News blogposts this year are doing, and the big favorite topic is Growing Lettuce Year Round: Succession Planting for a Continuous Supply: 10,924 views! Growing Winter Lettuce: 4,620 views, is second favorite. people sure do love lettuce! Other popular topics this year have been Winter Hoop House Harvest Schedule, Using Open Flats (Seed Trays) to Grow Sturdy Seedlings Easily,  Heat-Tolerant Eggplant Varieties, and Planting Leeks. 

How to harvest garlic scapes.
Photo Wren Vile

When I look to see which posts on this blog people visit most often, I see that garlic harvesting and garlic scapes are very popular, as are posts about sweet potatoes.

Sometimes I post links to my slideshows, but here’s a You Tube I’ve been meaning to tell you about. This is my presentation of Succession Planting for Continuous Vegetable Harvests at New Country Organics.

The September Growing for Market is out. The cover article, by Carolina Lees, advocating a Farmer Retreat. This is a wintertime regional gathering of farmers, with scheduled time for discussion and also for casual hanging-out. No imported speakers! The author is in Oregon, and envy-inducing photos of the beach-side retreat are included. But, what a good idea!

David Ross writes about grower relationships with wholesalers. Shawn Jadrnicek, author of The Bio-Integrated Farm: A Reveolutionary Permaculture-Based System . . .  writes about mulching and crimping techniques for no-till vegetables, including how to have weed-free cover crops, and get the right machinery to roll and crimp them. he uses a manure spreader to spread tree leaf mulch, and shows photos of a very tidy farm.

Rowan Steele writes about obtaining used silage tarps (as advocated by Jean-Martin Fortier) for covering beds to control weeds organically. Rowan writes about how to use the tarps and suggests coordinating a used silage tarp delivery for your small farm community. Contact Travis Quirk at the nonprofit Simply Agriculture Solutions Inc. in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (travis@simplyag.ca).  The tarps may be delivered for the cost of shipping. Canadian farmers are required to recycle their “grain bags”, but it’s hard for them to find a recycling facility in Canada, so the plastics are sent to the US. They are happy to be able to divert the material for a second use. Sounds great to me!

Jane Tanner writes about William’s WIldflowers, a floral design business run by two sisters, using lots of native flowers, especially perennials, for weddings and other formal occasions.

See you at the Heritage Harvest Festival on Friday September 8 (my premium workshop on growing sweet potatoes from start to finish) or Saturday (strolling around). Last time I looked there were still tickets available for my workshop ($20)

Heritage Harvest Festival

Garlic scapes, upcoming events, hoophouse seed crops

Garlic Scapes
Photo courtesy of Small Farm Central

I always know when garlic growers in slightly warmer or more southern climates are starting to find scapes (the edible firm flower stems of hardneck garlic) because my posts about scapes suddenly become popular! My posts “Garlic scapes! Three weeks to bulb harvest,”  and “Garlic scapes to cheer us up” have been reread a lot recently, and Harvesting garlic is due for attention any time now. My Growing Great Garlic slideshow is here. Click the diagonal arrows to view it full screen.

And sure enough, our own scapes are ready too, even though this is a week earlier than usual.We harvest two or three times a week until there are no more. I love garlic scapes as one of the first outdoor crops of the spring, and a flavor different from leafy greens and stored roots, the staples of early spring.

Our tulip poplars are flowering now too, also early. Our average date for those is 5/1, and we’re a few days ahead of that. When I was a beekeeper it was important to be ready for the tulip poplar flowers, because that was our big nectar flow of the year, and I had to dash out to the beeyard and stack up 5 supers on each hive. I had to give up on the beekeeping because the combination of lifting heavy boxes and twisting was hurting my back too much. Oh, and those heavy boxes were full of thousands of stinging insects, but I didn’t mind that bit as much. The flowering of tulip poplars and the germination of ragweed are both phenology signs that signify that the Growing Degree Days have reached 200 (on a base of 50F) and that conditions are warm enough to sow sweet corn. Myself, I watch the young leaves on the white oaks and when they are the size of a squirrel’s ear, I decide it’s warm enough for corn.

This weekend I will be at the Mother Earth News Fair in Asheville, NC. Click the link to see the location, the workshop schedule and the list of vendors who’ll be there. I’m presenting two workshops, Growing Sweet Potatoes from Start to Finish on Saturday 5/6 at 12.30on the Yanmar Sustainable Agriculture Stage, followed by book-signing and chatting at the Mother Earth News Bookstore; and Succession Planting for Continuous Vegetable Harvests on Sunday 5/7 at the Heirloom Gardener Stage.

Of course, you’ll need to be there and  hear me speak to get the most out of it. I’m also doing short demonstrations of How to String Weave Tomatoes at booth 2800, New Society Publishers (near the Bookstore) on Saturday at 10 am, 11 am and 5 pm, and on Sunday at 10 am and 11 am. They’re half-hour time slots. My table top demo kit uses #2 pencils and pink tinsel.

At the New Society Publishers booth at the Pennsylvania Mother Earth News Fair, demonstrating how to string weave tomatoes.
Photo Ingrid Witvoet/New Society

The May issue of Growing for Market magazine is out, including my article about growing seed crops in hoophouses. I interviewed Clif Slade, founder of the 43560 Project at Virginia State University, about several creative sequences of food crops and seed crops he has grown in a high tunnel. (Collards, okra) as well as plant starts (sweet potatoes, onions). He farms in Surry County, Virginia.

Also in this GfM, Simon Huntley of Small Farm Central encourages small farmers to set aside two hours a week for a quick and efficient bit of online marketing “One Photo,
One Paragraph”. His goal is to help farmers stay in the spotlight with their products, without having to spend a great deal of time on it in the busy season.

Conor Crickmore has an article about preparing and laying out no-till permanent raised beds very precisely in a hoophouse. He uses the Quick Cut Greens Harvester to mow off over-size baby salad crops to clear the bed prior to broadforking and adding needed soil amendments.

Spencer Nietmann writes about what it really costs to start a farm. Jesse Frost discusses various types of plastic to cover hoophouses  (high tunnels), and lastly, Jane Tanner writes about native perennials for flower farms

Garlic scapes! Three weeks to bulb harvest!

Garlic beds looking good. Photo Kathryn Simmons
Garlic beds looking good.
Photo Kathryn Simmons

July 2018 update: This is one of my most popular posts. I’ve written much else about garlic too. Just put “garlic” in the search box and you can read much more.

Our garlic scapes are just starting to appear! Garlic scapes are the firm, round flower stems that grow from hard-neck garlic, starting (on lour farm) to appear 3 weeks before bulb harvest, as the bulbs size up. If these are removed, the garlic bulbs will be bigger and also easier to braid, if you want braids from hardneck garlic. Contrary to ideas mentioned by some sources, leaving scapes in does not increase the storage life. Most people who remove scapes cut them where they emerge from the leaves. We prefer to pull ours, to get the most out. Scapes also make a visually attractive early-season  crop.

Day-length as well as accumulated growing degree days determines when scapes appear as well as when bulbs are ready to harvest. Hot weather above 91°F (33°C) ends bulb growth and drying down starts. It’s irreversible. It is important to get plenty of good rapid growth before hot weather arrives. Garlic can double in size in its last month of growth, and removing the scapes (the hard central stem) of hardneck garlic can increase the bulb size 25%.

This is a good time to be paying more attention to your garlic crop, and what better way than walking through pulling scapes?

greencitymarket.wordpress.com
greencitymarket.wordpress.com

Harvesting scapes

  • We harvest ours two or three times a week, for three weeks in May.
  • Late morning is a good time to pull scapes (or early afternoon). The wound heals quickly then, reducing the risk of disease, and the water-loss from the plant.
  • We don’t wait for the top of the scape to loop around (as seen in the photo to the left), as the scapes begin to toughen and reduce the final yield of the garlic.
  • As soon as the pointed caps of the scape have cleared the plant center, grasp the round stem just below the cap and pull slowly and steadily vertically upwards. The scape emerges with a strange popping sound and you have the full length of the scape, including the tender lower portion. See the photo from A Way to Garden at the end of this post.
  • It’s an enjoyable task – a stand-up job, and there’s a friendly competition to see who can get the longest scape. (Encourages everyone to perfect their technique.)
  • Sometimes the scapes will snap rather than pull right out, but the remainder of the stem can be pulled next time, when it has grown taller.
  • We gather them into buckets, with the scapes upright, and put a little water in the bucket.
  • The scapes are aligned, easy to bunch or cut up.
  • They store well in a refrigerator for months if needed.
  • Scapes can be chopped and used in stir-fries, pesto, garlic butter, pickles and other
    dishes in place of bulb garlic. They can also be frozen for out of season use. Searching the Internet will reveal lots of recipes.
  • Scapes sell in bunches of six to ten.
  • 1 acre (0.4 ha) of hardneck garlic produces 300-500 lbs (136-226 kg) of scapes.
  • Take the opportunity to remove any diseased plants from the patch at the same time.

20While harvesting scapes, monitor the plants for signs of maturity. Garlic is ready to harvest when the sixth leaf down is starting to brown on 50 percent of the crop. See Ron Engeland’s excellent book Growing Great Garlic for more on this. For some years I was confused about which was the “sixth leaf,” and I confess that I was counting up instead of down. The point is to have five green leaves still on the plant, to provide the protection of five intact skins over the bulb. Each leaf corresponds to one wrapper on the cloves or bulb; as the leaf dies, the skin rots away. Keeping five intact skins on the garlic is a challenge in our humid climate, and because we are not shipping our garlic anywhere, it seems less crucial. So I also use a second method of deciding when to harvest: I pull three or four plants and cut the bulbs across horizontally and look at the center of the bulb. When air space becomes visible between the round stem and the cloves, it’s time for the garlic harvest. Usually that’s June 7–June 14 for our main crop of hardneck garlic, but it has been as early as May 30, and as late as June 18. Harvesting too early means smaller bulbs (harvesting way too early means an undifferentiated bulb and lots of wrappers that then shrivel up). Harvesting too late means that the bulbs may “shatter” or have an exploded look, and not store as well.

This is also a good time to remove the mulch to help the bulbs dry down, and to prevent fungal diseases.

In our rotation, the spring broccoli is usually next door to the garlic, and we move the old garlic mulch to the broccoli to top up the mulch there. It helps us stay on track with getting the broccoli weeded too.

The value of mulching garlic and how-to

  • Organic mulches will protect the cloves from cold winter temperatures, and frost-heaving to some extent.
  • In the South organic mulches keep the soil cooler once the weather starts to heat up. It is hard to add mulch after the garlic has started to grow.
  • We roll big round bales of spoiled hay over our beds immediately after planting in November.
  • Once we have ensured the shoots are all growing free of the mulch, we leave the garlic plot alone until late February,
  • In February, we start weeding (and repeat once a month for four months).
  • Weed control in garlic is important -Weeds can decrease yield by as much as 50%. First kill the spring cool-weather weeds, then kill the summer weeds.

Understanding garlic stages of growth

It is important to establish garlic in good time so that roots and vegetative growth are as big as possible before the plant turns its attention to making bulbs. The start of garlic bulb formation (and the end of leaf growth) is triggered by day length exceeding
13 hours (April 10 here at 38°N). Air temperatures above 68°F (20°C) and soil temperatures over 60°F (15.5°C) are secondary triggers.

We all have 12 hours of daylight on the spring equinox. After that, the farther north you go, the longer the day length is. Northern latitudes reach 13 hours of daylight before southern ones, but garlic does not start bulbing there at 13 hours because temperatures are not yet high enough. For example, in Michigan, bulbing begins in mid-May. In warmer areas, temperatures cause harvest dates to be earlier than in cooler areas at the same latitude. We have no control over when garlic starts to make bulbs, only over how large and healthy the leaves are when bulbing starts, and how large the final bulbs can be. Small plants here on April 11 will only make small bulbs!  Watering should stop two weeks before harvest to help the plants dry down.

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Too much rain! But garlic scapes to cheer us up.

Having plenty of 5 gallon buckets is important. Credit Bridget Aleshire
Having plenty of 5 gallon buckets is important.
Credit Bridget Aleshire

We had 4.6″ rain over a few days and nights. We had to dig trenches across the potato patch to drain out the water, which had reached the tops of the hills (thank goodness we got the first hilling done before the rain!) We also dug “:flood abatement” ditches at the low end of our raised bed area. Even so, we have been really restricted in where we could work. I tell people to harvest or weed at the dry ends of the beds, and back out as soon as their feet start to sink in mud. I don’t want us to compact the soil and make future drainage worse, and give the roots have a hard time growing. To use the rainy weather, we washed our work gloves and started tackling our “Stuck Buckets” stacks. I don’t think we unstuck any at all last year. We had about 50 or so stuck in pairs or triplets. After wrangling them and trying various back-muscle-risking maneuvers, we run them through our commercial dishwasher. When the plastic is hot, the wet buckets come apart more easily.

Blueberry bush with green berries. Credit Kathryn Simmons
Blueberry bush with green berries.
Credit Kathryn Simmons

We’ve had to be creative in finding work we can do. Tempting as it is to take a big nap, I know we will be scrambling later, as soon as it warms up and dries out. So yesterday we put our blueberry netting up. The berries are still green, in some cases they are still blossoms, but it’s one job we won’t have to do later. We’ve also pre-emptively been organizing our drip tape and setting up systems we won’t need for at least a week.

This is how we usually sow our leek seedlings in an outdoor nursery bed. Credit Kathryn Simmons
This is how we usually sow our leek seedlings in an outdoor nursery bed.
Credit Kathryn Simmons

We’re also starting our leek transplanting. Normally we do this in early June, but this year we sowed our seeds in flats rather than in an outdoor nursery bed, and the plants are big earlier, especially the faster growing King Richard and Lincoln. So we’re going to transplant those today. They are nice and cold-tolerant (we’ve got a forecast low of 34F in a few days!), and will keep us from putting tomato plants out too early and regretting it later.

Starting to harvest garlic scapes lifts our spirits because it is a tasty attractive new crop for the year, and pleasant work. Here’s what I wrote about them for my book, Sustainable Market Farming (c) Pam Dawling 2013.

Garlic plants in late spring. Credit Kathryn Simmons
Garlic plants in late spring.
Credit Kathryn Simmons

Garlic scapes are the firm, round seed stems that grow from hardneck garlic and start to appear three weeks before harvest, as the bulbs size up. If these are removed, the garlic bulbs will be easier to braid, if you want braids from hardneck varieties. Scapes also make an early-season visually attractive crop. Contrary to ideas mentioned by some sources, leaving scapes in does not increase the storage life of the garlic.

Most people who remove scapes cut them where they emerge from the leaves. We prefer to pull ours, to get the most out of them. We don’t wait for the top of the scape to loop around, as the scapes will have begun to toughen and reduce the final yield of the garlic. As soon as the pointed caps of the scape have cleared the plant center, grasp the round stem just below the cap and pull slowly and steadily vertically upwards. The scape emerges with a strange popping sound and you have the full length of the scape, including the tender lower portion. Sometimes the scapes will snap rather than pull right out, but the remainder of the stem can be pulled next time, when it has grown taller.

We gather into buckets, with the scapes standing upright, so we can put a little water in the bucket and the scapes are aligned, easy to cut up. They will store well in a refrigerator for months if needed. Late morning is a good time to pull scapes (or early afternoon). The wound heals over in fifteen to twenty minutes in the heat of the day, whereas otherwise it could drip for up to 24 hours, increasing the risk of disease, and losing water from the plant.

We harvest scapes two or three times a week, for about three weeks in May. The crew always enjoys this task, partly because it’s a stand-up job and partly because we encourage a friendly competition to see who can get the longest scape of the day. This encourages everyone to perfect their technique too. Scapes can be chopped and used in stir-fries, pesto, garlic butter, pickles and other dishes in place of bulb garlic. They can also be frozen for out of season use. Searching the Internet will reveal lots of recipes. Scapes sell in bunches of six to ten. One acre (0.4 hectare) of hardneck  garlic can produce 300–500 lbs (140–225 kg) of scapes.