Garlic Harvest

On Tuesday, we harvested a beautiful crop of garlic in the heat. I was tempted to put this big, physical job off for a few more days until the heat passed, but decided to get the garlic out of the field before we encountered more rain, and let the croip sit through more heat and humidity.

Our garlic harvest practices have changed quite a bit in the last couple of years, even though I've been growing garlic for more than twenty years now. In the past, we've pulled the bulbs from the ground with their stalks on, bundled the plants into bunches of ten, and wrapped a rubber band around the bunch. The bundles were loaded onto a wagon and driven up into the barn, where they were hung on ropes strung between the hand-hewn beams to dry.

Last year, we decided to cure them using the onion-drying setup we put into the greenhouse in 2007, which uses our greenhouse heater to force air through 20-bushel wooden bins holding the bulbs. Curing dries the skin of the onions and garlic plants - actually, the outer leaves of the plant - to seal in the moisture of the fleshy inner leaves. Because we had always bundled the garlic in the past to facilitate handling, we did that again in 2010, then put the bulbs into the large wooden bins.

While we were curing the bulbs, University of Minnesota horticulturist Bud Markhart stopped by for a visit, and noted that the leaves we had left on the stalks of the garlic plant weren't moving any moisture out of the bulb, because they had either rotted (the ones in the bunch) or had completely dried out; either way, they weren't transpiring; we cut the stalks off to about twelve inches to get the extra material out of the bins, and finished curing the garlic. We were pleased with the results.

This year we decided to mow the tops off out in the field, rather than trimming by hand in the greenhouse. Ben drove slowly through the field with the blades of the flail mower operating about eight inches above the top of the mulch; Tommy walked along behind to make certain everything was going right.

Next, we used our big, blue undercutter to slice the soil underneath the garlic. The undercutter has lifting tines on the back so that the soil lifts about four inches up, then drops back down, fracturing and loosening the soil to make it easier to pull the crop out. Unfortunately, it also has two upright shanks to connect it to the lift arms on the tractor; these catch on the thick mulch of rye straw that we applied to the garlic last fall, balling it up and causing the digger to lift out of soil; Tommy had the hot and dirty job of clearing the straw away as it clumped up.

The crew pulled all of the garlic and placed in our plastic harvest totes, then put the totes in the van, then moved all of the garlic down to the packing house to get everybody out of the heat. In the packing house, the crew removed the outer leaf from the garlic, then quickly cleaned each bulb with a pressure washer set to "pretty low."

The clean bulbs were placed into our large wooden bins, then moved with a tractor to the greenhouse, where they were stacked two high and wrapped with plastic. We used lath to attach the plastic to the tops of the bins, and sandbags to block off the bottom; a plastic tube and some very large duct pieces were used to attach the greenhouse heater and fan to a plenum that distributes the air under the bins; the top of the bins are open, so that the air blows through the bins.

In about ten days, the garlic will be cured and ready to place into our cold, dry onion cooler. We'll trim the tops to about one inch, snip off the roots, and put them away until we need them for CSA boxes throughout the summer, fall, and winter.