The Final Garlic Harvest and Tally

Today I finished cleaning and storing the garlic harvest. Back on July 22nd, I dug the "Nootka Rose" & "Silver Rose" varieties and laid them out on my improvised rack to dry for a few weeks. These varieties are called softneck for a reason. As you can see in the above photo, as each bulb dried, the stem became completely soft and limp. For this very reason the stems on softneck garlic varieties are commonly left connected to the bulb. Once the bulbs are cleaned up clever folks braid the stems together and create lovely bunches of garlic to hang in their cellar or kitchen. Since I had some nice storage bags at my disposal I decided to cut off the stems as I did with the hardneck garlic "Chesnook".

Here are my harvested and cleaned "Silver Rose" bulbs. These bulbs were a bit hard to work with. Over half of the bulbs had a large clove attached outside the main bulb. I pulled that single clove off of some bulbs to better clean them and left it attached on others. I ended up with 11 "Silver Rose" bulbs. The largest weighted 3.2 oz and the smallest 1.9 oz. My total "Silver Rose" harvest was 1 lb. 14.9 oz.

Here's a large plate holding all of the clean "Nootka Rose" bulbs. This varieties produced really pretty, evenly sized bulbs. They were easy to clean and pretty to view. The "Nootka Rose" produced 15 bulbs. The largest was 3.9 oz and the smallest was 1.5 oz. The total "Nootka Rose" harvest was 2 lbs. 4.5 oz. This was the largest harvest of the three varieties that I grew this year.

My total garlic harvest for 2012 was 4 lbs. 7.3 oz. Not bad for a first time effort. Now I hope to save the largest bulbs to use as my planting stock this Fall and start eating all of the rest!