[background music]
Dave Fuller: Hi, my name is Dave Fuller.
I'm with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. Today, I'm going to be talking
about harvesting and drying hardneck garlic. Garlic is an important crop in Maine economically,
both to commercial growers and to home gardeners. We're concerned today about when to harvest
hardneck garlic, because it's not obvious always. Today, we'll learn a few tricks on
how to do the timing of the harvest of garlic. One of the easiest ways to tell when to harvest
hardneck garlic is the time at which the leaves are dying off, turning brown. In this case,
we have one leaf, which is virtually gone, the next leaf is brown, third leaf is brown,
and this is a good time at which to harvest your garlic, when the bottom three leaves
are brown. You'll find that the fourth leaf is still
looking relatively good, dark green, so on and so forth, up the plant. We don't want
to wait until the whole plant is brown, because it would then be way too late to harvest.
A handy thing to know about garlic is that the leaves are associated with the wrappers
on the bulb. In this case, the first leaf is gone now, and you can see this dark spot
on the bulb, which was actually the first wrapper. The first wrapper's gone.
The second leaf here is corresponding to this splitting, so the second wrapper is starting
to break down, and the third one's holding on tight. If we wait too long, we'll find
that all the wrappers will have broken down, leaving exposed cloves. That predisposes the
bulb towards diseases. Also, it's not very marketable at all, because the cloves take
on a very soiled appearance. In terms of timing, you can see that this
variety, which is German Extra‑Hardy, has nine leaves. Two of the wrappers on the bulb
have started to break down, which only leaves us with seven. You see you have a fairly narrow
window of about two weeks to harvest garlic. Garlic in Central Maine typically is harvested,
depending on the variety, from about the third week in July through the first week in August.
When harvesting hardneck garlic, it's best to under‑dig the plants to loosen them from
the soil, using a spading fork in a home garden, or commercially, a one‑row potato digger
works really well. Making sure not to get too close to the plant to spear the bulb,
just loosen like this, pull the plant up, and shake the soil off loosely.
Then you can just lay the bulb on the ground, and we can lay that out for a couple of days,
just to air dry, so we can brush the soil off. After a day or two and the garlic has
had a chance to air dry out in the field, you can loosely brush the soil off.
Then cut the tops down. This way, you're removing a lot of the plant, so that you don't have
the bulk of all those tops to dry and the space requirements needed. Cut about three
inches above the bulb, and then we're going to take them inside to finish the drying and
curing process. If you only have a few garlic plants to dry,
you can hang them up in small bunches or, cutting the tops down to about three inches
within the bulb, put them in an onion bag in an airy spot, out of the sun. But, if you're
a home gardener who has a lot of garlic or a commercial farmer, you need a faster, more
efficient way to dry your garlic. Here we have a simple drying system, a rack
built out of two‑by‑fours and one‑inch chicken wire, fastened with staples. This
is set up off the ground. You can use bricks, a two‑by‑four, or whatever to get it off
the ground, so that the air will circulate freely. Then we take the bulbs that we've
taken from the field, spread them out onto the chicken wire in a single layer, so that
the air moves amongst them and helps to dry them down really quickly.
These bulbs should be ready in about three to four weeks. In the advent of rainy weather,
sometimes it's helpful to have a fan on to make sure that these dry down really quickly.
Otherwise, we might have some disease problems like blue mold.
When putting your garlic on these racks for drying, this is a good time to look for problems
that the garlic may have. Diseased bulbs that look obviously diseased should be removed.
If you happened to have speared or damaged a bulb in harvesting, remove that also, because
it's prone to disease problems, which may spread to the other bulbs.
Once you have the first rack filled, you can simply put some more spacers ‑‑ two‑by‑fours
or what have you ‑‑ for filling the second, third, fourth, and so on, right on up. These
racks are very inexpensive to make, and they take up very little room. Also, they've very
good for drying subsequent crops like onions and dried beans.
By drying hardneck garlic properly, we're going to have a crop that's going to store
better. It's going to appeal more to the customer if you happen to be selling garlic or giving
it as gifts. [background music]
Dave: For more information on garlic, please look at our website at University of Maine
Cooperative Extension. [music]
Transcription by CastingWords