Northern Hemisphere Garlic Ranchers/2024 Crop

[JRinPA]

Wow I did not even see that mountain top. I just thought it was a cloud in the background. I was looking at the awesome garlic.
On the pc I rarely zoom in but on the phone it needs zoom and then I see it.

That rack works real nicely. Can slide it around easily since it's totally stable. And easy to stack onions on top too.

[Cornelius_Gotchberg]

2024 crop all pulled, easier than I thought it'd be; initial assessment: Not as many HUGE bulbs as I'd hoped, but better than average

It'll set in the beds overnight, 'til tomorrow afternoon when the real work begins:

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The Gotch

[Cornelius_Gotchberg]

Garlic is washed and beginning the curing process in a relatively cool, dry breeze:

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The Gotch

[JRinPA]

Where did you find a cool, dry breeze?

[Cornelius_Gotchberg]

Where did you find a cool, dry breeze?

It had to break sooner or later...it couldn't just rain forever...could it...?

The Gotch

[MissS]

@Cornelius_Gotchberg What varieties have you got there?

[Cornelius_Gotchberg]

@Cornelius_Gotchberg What varieties have you got there?

No idea, mostly hardneck of some...um...vintage. Got some bulbs from my Maser Gardener cousin-in-law, who used to raise seed garlic for Jung's, and others along the way.

The Gotch

[rxkeith]

this will be my worst year for garlic ever.
partly, my fault. i didn't weed it often enough. i should have mulched it in but didn't.
i have been busier at work, and didn't have my son here to help out, him being in school
down in florida. i think the weather has been a factor. it has been a rainy june and july.
some of the garlic didn't come up at all similar to last year.
the garlic that is out there is under sized. there will be very few usable bulbs. i am going to have
buy garlic to plant, and eat. there will be local garlic at the farmers market. i'll have to start looking
online pretty quick as another option too. win some lose some.


keith

[Cornelius_Gotchberg]

Stopped by neighborhood Garlic Rancher/Nepal émigré pal Kiran, whose ~500 bulbs included some real monsters:

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Between him, his nearby sister, and myself, our haul went well over 1400!

The Gotch

[bower]

The one in hand looks like a porcelain @Cornelius_Gotchberg .
All the cooks love them the best for those giant cloves.
Mine rarely make more than 4 cloves per bulb, which means I have to plant back 1/4 of my crop. The only downside to a beautiful garlic experience.

[Cornelius_Gotchberg]

The one in hand looks like a porcelain @Cornelius_Gotchberg .
All the cooks love them the best for those giant cloves.
Mine rarely make more than 4 cloves per bulb, which means I have to plant back 1/4 of my crop. The only downside to a beautiful garlic experience.

Ours were of the four (4), or fewer, up until a coupla years ago; I don't know what changed, but we rolled with it and haven't looked back.

The Gotch

[svalli]

My garlic harvest for the year is now curing indoors. I lifted 1/4 of harvest two weeks ago and last Saturday the remaining ones. I hung them on a clothes rack in my home office.

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There were some with onion maggots in the stem and few which had botrytis mold, but I am quite happy with the cleaned harvest. Last weeks have been so rainy that leaving the garlic in ground would have been risky.

Many Marbled Purple Stripe varieties had multiple plants, which had not divided to cloves and had produced just one huge bulb. I have heard similar reports from other growers in Finland, so it must be due to the weather somehow. Other type garlic varieties had grown normally and only the ones which should be the most cold hardy had this strange phenomena.

[JRinPA]

Beautiful and I can smell it through the screen.

[bower]

My harvest is all in except for the late ones, and cleaned as of last night (honestly my favorite time of the year, for the smell alone!).
Same setup as before, hanging in the basement for a week or until the tops turn yellow, then roots off and trimmed to six inches or so for another period of curing 2-4 weeks.

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Because my beds are in different locations in the garden it's difficult to judge reactions to the challenges of the year. Last year the porcelains seemed most stressed by especially hot weather, but this year the MPS had more trouble, overall. Less optimal started with a heavy snow in late winter and a very wet spring, and in June we had twice the normal rainfall. The rain just extended into the first couple days of July after which it was quite dry and very hot. Hot for hardnecks, temperatures over 30 C. We had some days in June and then for all of July, maybe two days a week were more optimal and the rest where over 30C and 90F+ at least several days a week. I did some extra watering especially in the beds near the house where the hose was set up, and happened to be MPS on this rotation. Some of these bulbs are pretty huge, about 3 inches which is lovely to see, but there was also a lot of splitting and afaict fusarium basal rot setting in. I learned something about reading the leaves: if they are yellowing out of order instead of bottom to top, you probably have splits and fusarium.

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These were Tallinn and Kolkja Red Russian, and I decided that although ratty looking plants of MPS Kostyn's and Alexandra in another bed could be left longer. But I found that quite a few Kostyns were badly split anyway, even though the leaves looked more or less orderly. However the flag leaves had telltale yellowing, that inner wrappers were compromised. All bulbs in this bed were smaller due in part to smaller seed as well as conditions. All of the garlic this year had rooted down deeper than the beds and strongly into the gravel below them, probably due to soil and nutrients washing down in all the rain. But in this bed, there were also small tree roots mixed in with the lower roots that came out, so moving the bed back from the treeline has not been enough to stop it. Tree roots under the bed means your water reserves have been taken up by another plant. At least one hopeful finding is that there were no splits on Alexandra bulbs. They were smaller due to small seed but the Kostyns clearly bursted their seams regardless of getting to maximum size. This was clearly due to the excess of rain in June. So I will be watching in future years to see if Alexandra is a bit more resistant to splitting than other MPS.
We did have one Tallinn that also failed to make a scape or a true bulb in the heat - I haven't peeled it yet to see what is edible there.

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And there are some fronds on the Kolkja Purple which haven't been harvested yet, similar to effects of heat shown here by @GoDawgs in Georgia. These have a few days to go yet before they are 3 weeks from scapes, and I am more concerned to get my largest seed than to have perfect storage.
Thanks to seeing the results on MPS and how it read in their leaves, I decided not to leave porcelains longer with rain incoming, when I saw that their flag leaf was beginning to be streaked with yellow while lower leaves were still green. I found some pink wrappers that might indicate the beginning of fusarium too, but after stripping all down to a clean wrapper I found no defects at all, and they will be the core storage garlic for winter and should keep well.
Overall another important learning year for me. I was pleased to produce larger seed and there are enough good clean bulbs of KolkRR and Tallinn to plant those, even though most of the crop was damaged.

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I'm wondering and I did some reading online about fusarium basal rot in splitting bulbs, and I did see some comments from @zeedman on another forum about planting good cloves from your split bulbs. I am hanging them to cure but not sure whether it is a good plan to use some of the mighty huge cloves from these bulbs to grow on. Not great pics but the damage is very one sided (plants also skewed over and leaned due to heavy rain and wind at some June event, and they split on the side opposite the lean) so there are big cloves looking clean on the far side, but the damage is quite deep where it occurred, not just split wrappers but rotted out basal plate, for sure. What do you think?

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[MissS]

I just harvested my garlic. I was very impressed. @rxkeith sent me some little bulbils that I planted. Since they were such tiny little things, I was expecting to harvest rounds to save and plant next year for garlic heads. Much to my surprise, I harvested some beautiful full heads and some of them were larger than the palm of my hand. There was not a single round in the bunch. I don't remember what variety this was but thank you so much Keith. I sure had fun!

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[bower]

Fantastic @MissS !!

[JRinPA]

On what date did you plant last year, MissS?

[MissS]

On what date did you plant last year, MissS?

Good question. Since my beds came down with verticillium wilt last year, I treated them with chlorine in the fall and did two treatments. I didn't want to put the garlic in until I knew that the chlorine wasn't a threat. So given that, the bulbils did not get planted until February. I added new mycos and bacteria, then they were covered in pine needles as a mulch.

[GoDawgs]

A friend of mine in Wisconsin (some miles west of Madison) is growing garlic for the first time and has a question that I can't answer:

"When we planted it we followed all the instructions on our local website. Hubs went down there a bit ago and told me that one patch of it (he didn't look at the marker to tell me which variety of the two it was) had green shoots coming up about 3" high. I had read that this is what you DON'T want to happen, as it will kill the plant! I don't know what to do!

We planted it after our second hard frost. Then this stupid weather, instead of being in the 30's every night, was in the 50's at night, and we even had a few days in the low 80s. All the weather men kept saying this was an unusually warm October and November.

Do you think I'll totally lose the garlic that sprouted?"

Can any of you WES-consinites provide any suggestions?

Here in Georgia I just plant mine around mid October, put on about 4" of mulch and call it good. It comes up through the mulch and grows all winter, only getting covered when temps threaten to get into the 20's. I don''t know how much mulch my friend put over hers. I think she planted around mid to late October. I appreciate any input from the garlic hive mind.

[bower]

@GoDawgs ours have never sprouted in fall but many others here report it is normal. The green sprouts just die down for the winter when it comes, and in the spring they put on new leaves.