Everything You Need to Know About Harvesting Heirloom Garlic

            This week is one of my favorite weeks of the year: the beginning of garlic harvest! After four seasons of running the garlic harvest for the farm I work on, where we harvest, cure, and store over 20,000 heads of over 20 varieties of garlic each year, here are some of the tips I’ve learned.

First garlic of the season

 

When Is Garlic Ready?

            In my experience in Massachusetts, the first varieties are usually ready around the fourth of July. Obviously, this is very dependent on the varieties you’re growing, where you’re located, and the weather that season.

            Luckily, you can tell from looking at the plants when the garlic is ready to harvest. As a general rule of thumb, garlic is ready to harvest when half of the leaves have turned yellow and died. When looking at a variety, at least ½ to ¾ of the leaves should be yellow/dead. Often, you will see plants whose stems are falling over as well, which is a good indication they’re done. If you harvested the scapes, the garlic will usually be ready for harvest 2-3 weeks after that. While sometimes the timing is inconvenient or you want it to get a little bigger, don’t wait too long past this point in ratio of living: dead leaves or there will be too few layers of wrapping protecting the garlic.

            When the leaves look ready to harvest, try pulling up a few bulbs to check if it’s the right size and looks ready.

            For more information and some helpful pictures, read this article on Garden Betty.

 

What Do I Need to Know Before I Harvest It?

            Especially if you’re harvesting garlic to cure and store, the most important thing to remember is that GARLIC IS FRAGILE! If you bruise it during harvest you usually won’t know until weeks afterwards when it rots as it’s curing. My boss used to tell us “treat garlic like raw eggs”. It can be tempting to knock the bulbs together or against the ground to get the dirt off, but this will cause them to bruise. Be especially careful when you put them in bins: if they hit the side of the bin or the other garlic too hard, they will bruise. A good rule of thumb is that garlic should never make noise. If you hear the garlic hit the bin, you’re not being gentle enough.

 

How Do I Get the Garlic Out of the Ground?

            Great question! There are a few different options, and it depends on the amount of garlic you grew, the type of garlic and the texture of the soil. You can either: pull it out by hand with a trowel as backup, pitchfork it, or undercut it with a tractor.

Here’s a chart with the Pros/Cons of Each Methods and When You Should Use It:

Method	When To Use It	Pros	Cons
Hand pulling with trowel backup	Small amounts of garlic that is easy to pull	Fast Doesn’t require equipment	Can result in breaking a lot of garlic if you’re not careful, very slow if large quantities
Pitchforking	If you don’t have a tractor or you had trouble pulling it by hand	Doesn’t require a tractor Makes it easy to hand pull	More physical effort
Undercutting	If you’re harvesting a lot of garlic	Fast Reduces physical labor required	Requires a tractor

Hand-Pulling With A Trowel for Backup

            To hand-pull garlic, simply reach as low as you can on the neck (as close to the soil as you can) and pull the garlic up. If you have trouble getting it out, use your trowel to dig around it (being careful not to hit the garlic with the trowel). Sometimes, it will feel like the garlic is going to break, and it probably will. It’s okay to break a few, it will teach you how hard you can pull. If you start breaking a lot of them (when the neck separates leaving the bulb in the ground), it’s time to try a different approach. If you have a trowel and only a few are breaking, you can just dig around the ones that are having the most trouble coming up. If most of them are difficult to pull, use a pitchfork or tractor to undercut them first.

 

Pitchforking

            Pitchforking lets you loosen the soil around the garlic so it’s easy to pull it up by hand. To pitchfork, start about six inches from the garlic along the side of the bed, and put the pitchfork in as deep as you can. Once it’s really deep, angle it upward towards the garlic, essentially lifting the garlic out of the ground. Depending on how close together your garlic is planted, you can do this either to every garlic plant, or just go down the row. This won’t pull the garlic all of the way out of the ground, but it will make it much easier for you or somebody else to hand-pull it afterwards.

            It can be difficult to find the right distance to pitchfork: if you’re too far from the garlic it will still be hard to pull up, but if you’re too close you can poke the garlic and damage it. The best way to learn is to check the bulbs often. Have somebody right behind you (or do it yourself) pull up the garlic right after you pitchfork it so that you can immediately see if you’re damaging the garlic. If you feel like you aren’t getting close enough, try moving closer but be sure you check for damage frequently. You can try digging down deeper before pulling up, that’s a good way to loosen the soil more without damaging the garlic.

            If you find pitchforking to be too labor intensive or take too long on the scale you’re working, try undercutting with a tractor.

 

Undercutting with a Tractor

            Undercutting with a tractor is a really efficient way to harvest a lot of garlic without a lot of physical labor. Like pitchforking, this method won’t pull the garlic from the ground, you will still need to hand-pull it after. But, if it’s hard to hand-pull, you can quickly undercut an entire bed so it can be harvested.

            To undercut a bed of garlic, the most important thing is to find the right height to set the undercutter. You need it to be high enough that it actually makes it easier to pull the garlic out, but low enough that you aren’t damaging the garlic. Once you start undercutting, check after a few feet (and check again several times throughout the process) by looking at the bulbs to make sure you aren’t damaging them.

 

Fresh garlic

 

A Note About Heirloom Varieties

            If you’re harvesting many different varieties (and especially if you’re planning to use them as seed next year), it’s really important to keep track of which garlic is which variety. To do this on our farm, we only harvest one variety at a time so the entire crew is doing the same thing. Then we label each bin three times: one label on each side (made on masking tape with sharpie), and a piece of tape across the top labeled with the variety. This way, as we prepare them for storage, we know which variety we are dealing with.

 

Storing the Garlic

            Now that the garlic is out of the ground, it’s time to prepare it for storage. You don’t want to let garlic sit in the sun for too long, so make sure to bring bins to a shaded or indoor area as soon as they’re full.

            After harvesting, the next step is to cure the garlic. Curing the garlic means laying it out to dry for 6-8 weeks so that it can be stored for a longer period of time. Before you lay it out to dry, consider washing it. There is much debate within the garlic community about whether or not to wash garlic. Washing garlic can be helpful because it removes the dirt which lets the garlic dry faster. However, you have to do it carefully so that you’re not spreading any diseases through the garlic, and if you wash it you need to cure it somewhere with great air circulation so that the extra added moisture is not a problem.

Garlic on the Spray Table for Washing

            To wash the garlic, lay it out (we use a spray table) and spray it down with the hose. You can spray it pretty hard (some people even power-wash it), and you need to spray it with some force to make the washing effective. Be sure that however you wash it, you’re being careful not to spread disease (a really common mistake is to wash the garlic by dipping it into a bucket of water, but this spreads disease from one bulb to any others you wash in the same water).

            Next, find space to lay out the garlic. We lay it out in the greenhouse, but you can also do it in a barn or any other structure that is shaded and has good airflow. Before we had a greenhouse, we used to hang it from netting on the walls of the barn because we didn’t have space to lay it out on any tables. That took a lot more time because we had to tie the garlic into bunches of six, label each bunch, then tie it to the netting, but you can definitely be creative and make space if you don’t have a big area.

            When you lay out the garlic, be sure to label it by variety. We label with one piece of tape across the garlic and other pieces along the edge. Make sure you leave space around each variety so that no bulbs get mixed together.

 

Garlic drying in the Greenhouse

 

Next Steps

            Now, you wait. While the garlic is curing, focus on your other crops and enjoy the lovely smell of garlic in your greenhouse! In a few weeks I’ll post about what we do with are garlic after it’s cured.

 

            Do you have any tips and tricks for harvesting garlic? Which methods do you use? I’d love to hear in the comments below.