Harvesting our garlic

I have been fascinated by elephant garlic for a few years now, but was not willing to pay so much money for a bulb to start growing them. I ordered seeds that elephant garlic form around there bulb, but these where a total flop. Last fall I was so happy to find elephant garlic bulbs on sale for a reasonal price. I bought one that turned out to have only 4 cloves. I planted all 4 along with the other garlic I always plant (from home grown garlic cloves) last fall.

This spring I did my best weeding the garden bed, but I have trouble to bring myself pulling out all of the beautiful flowers, so end of spring the garlic was a little hard to find as you can see in this picture.

I always find it hard to determine when the garlic is ready, but after seeing several leaves turning brown I decided to harvest and that was good. A few garlic’s where hard to find underneath all of the flowers and also because they dried in completely already, but the harvest was ok. These are 2 different varieties and the elephant garlic is on the first picture above.

I think I should put a lot more manure/ compost with the garlic I will plant this fall. I hope on bigger garlic, but the garlic this year is already a lot better than it has been the last few years. Another thing is to select the best and biggest garlic cloves to replant this fall, instead of using these in the kitchen. In the past I did this the wrong way around, because I hate cleaning all of those very tiny garlic cloves I had been planting these. Also I need to plant a lot more garlic, since this garlic will not last us very long.

The elephant garlic also made a lot of seeds at the garlic bulbs. When I ordered the seeds online there was a manual as to how to plant them, the way how was a little surprising to me and it turned out to be a total fail. This time I will simply plant all of the seeds as I do with the cloves, well maybe just not as deep as the cloves, this fall in the same garden bed.

While harvesting the garlic, we also pulled out all off the faded flowers and planted some very sad looking tomato seedlings. I planted the variety Primabella and hope they will recover and grow; apparently the potting soil was not good for pre-growing seedlings.