For the last week or so, we have been pulling up the garlic we started last autumn. It has been a full growth cycle for the bulbs and time for them to get out of the ground. Then we will dry and cure them for weeks before we decide what to do next with them. Some will probably be seed garlic, going right back into the fields to produce more next year. And some may be sold, but hard to say how much we will keep vs sell right now. Waiting for them to all dry and then we can weigh them.
Here are two shelves of the garlic, right now we are up to about 7 of them full. But we are not done harvesting, so will probably use most of them. Buying 25 shelves seemed like a lot, but rather have more than not enough. And then we are ready for expansion when we produce more in the future as well.
About two weeks ago we built out all the shelves that will hold the garlic while it dries and cures. They are just your basic plastic shelves.. but 25 of them.
Took us about half a day to build them all.
The water reel is being brought back into the building. We will drain it and keep it stored until next year. Without this reel, we would have had a complete loss. As the whole growing season we were under an extreme drought. Garlic areas that did not get irrigation did not survive, so it will be important next year to only plant where we can reach with this water reel.
Harvesting is slow going, we only get a few rows done a day. Its hard work, following behind the tractor and pickup and bulbs the machine misses. I usually do this for an hour or two before taking a break. And then coming back to cut and clean the garlic I grabbed.
We pull out bulbs out of the bags, lots of grass mixed in. So it takes some time to go through it all.
They may look dirty now, but we only cleaned them off a little bit. So we do not damage the skin of the bulb.
We will give them a proper cleaning after they dry and cure.
Another day, another row of garlic to pull up.
You can see we are slowly going through the rows. About half way done at this point.
My foreman runs the machine, and I follow behind pulling up any it misses.
Some of the bulbs are on the bigger side, but many are pretty small. Probably next year they need more water, and fertilizing earlier in the year. We added it to the ground in late April when we should have done it late March. Oh well, next year we will do better on many things.
We have to stop the harvester machine sometimes as the grass clogs it up. Next year we also plan on dealing with the weeds better. Shifting the PH did not seem to help as much as we hoped.
Hah my foreman is so happy! We are glad we made it to the end, with actual bulbs! Success!
Its hard to say how much we have yet, we lost some due to the water reel not reaching parts of the field. Along with the extreme drought. So not sure if we had a net gain or loss on garlic bulbs this year.
We started cleaning them more, not sure if this is too much before drying.
I like the system we have, we harvest before it gets really hot outside. And then we take lunch after a few hours in the field. And come back after our food settles to trim and clean off the garlic we collected earlier that day.
May not look like much now, but once all trimmed and cleaned they are nice bulbs.
Well harvesting was going well, until a line burst on the machine.
One of the hydraulic lines was rubbing on the tractor and went unnoticed. So now we are in the process of fixing it. Hopefully we will be back up and running this week. And then finish up harvest in the next week or two.
So with this setback, we are a little behind. But I think there is still time to harvest the rest of the field as long as we get this hose fixed soon.
