Garlic Harvest #2 & # 1 Totals

Today I harvested the "Russian Red" garlic. I am afraid that I once again I waited too long. As you can see in the above picture, almost all of the leaves on each plant had fully turned brown. Hopefully, once they completely dry, each bulb will still have plenty of layers of paper "skin" protection to hold well in storage.

This is my second harvest of "Russian Red" garlic after purchasing a few bulbs of it the Fall of 2012 in Maine. Once again I am in awe over the size of the bulbs. They are so much larger than an "average" garlic bulb.

Once I got all 12 plants carefully dug, I brought them into the shop to lay on the drying rack and begin curing.

After that project was finished I turned my attention to the "Chesnook Red" garlic that I had dug the week before. I cut off the stock from each bulb, trimmed off most of the roots, and then carefully cleaned each of the 15 bulbs. The largest bulb was 3.7 oz., the smallest was 2.1 oz., and the average bulb weight was 2.99 oz. My total "Chesnook Red" harvest this year was 2 lbs.12.9 oz. It is interesting to note that my average bulb size was down this year, from 3.44 oz in 2013. Two possible factors come to mind. I didn't get the garlic cloves planted until Nov.10th last year, almost a month later than I would have wished. Then we had a hard cold spell in early December, when the young plants were just pushing out of the ground. I wonder if either of these factors, or both perhaps, caused my average bulb size to decrease this year.

I was also able to do a little more harvesting in the the kitchen garden this weekend. I found two more small, ripe "Bloody Butcher" tomatoes and I pulled my first "Candy" onion of the year.