We went into garlic harvest this season with a fair amount of trepidation. June was the wettest June our area has ever experienced for as long as they've recorded precipitation data. Some of our garlic was underwater for multiple days. We didn't know what we would find when we dug it. I'm happy to report that our garlic crop is beautiful and bountiful and if there are no major problems during the curing process garlic will be making its way to your CSA shares in the next week or two.
Garlic harvest day is one of my favorite days on the farm each season. There's just something about the surprise of pulling up each beautiful head of garlic. This year we had the most amazing weather possible for garlic harvest; it was sunny and around 75 degrees out with a nice breeze. Usually it's a lot hotter than that!
The harvest is pretty straightforward. We use our tractor and bed lifter to undercut the garlic so that the heads pull up without too much effort. Once we've pulled up all the heads we lay out the garlic over some pallets to cure. Curing is simply drying the garlic down such that the skins seal the garlic within. Curing allows the garlic to have a shelf life of around 2-6 months. It takes around 2 weeks to cure garlic.
