Garden On, Vashon

from left: Alex and Kathryn True, Little Story, mom Sarah Laine and Canyon, Leslie Patheal, Cathy Fulton, and Jenn Coe.

Jenn Coe put out the call for garlic harvesters last week, and wanting to see how mature garlic looks coming out of the ground, I wrestled the wheelbarrow into the pick-up and drove off to Happy Garden on Maury Island.

This was the site of last year’s Food Bank Farm, but the land-owner, David Kirkland, died over the winter and his children have other plans for the place. Meanwhile the farm-stand’s gone skeletal, the fields shaggy and blown, and the harvesting of the garlic felt more like plucking survivors from the waves of grain, clover, and thistle coming on strong.

Elephant Garlic

The harvesters were already hard at it when I arrived at the opening bell of 1pm. Mounds of elephant garlic—a leek, actually—were piling up in the trampled rows as shovels and forks popped them out of the ground. My, they were large: heads about 4″ across, the plants as tall as this busy younster who didn’t want to be photographed as he hauled his harvest to the nearest drop-pile.

Hauling the Elephant Garlic

You can see that the garlic has gone brown at the tips, and this apparently is the perfect stage to harvest. Ron Engeland, author of “Growing Great Garlic” who farms the stinking rose in the Okanogan country, says each green leaf represents one bulb wrapper—that papery stuff you have to peel from the garlic head to reach individual cloves—and if you let all the leaves fade to brown, your wrappers are fading away, too. Since you want those wrappers intact to protect the garlic from drying out, the perfect time to pick garlic is when more than half your plants are going brown at the tips of the top-most leaves. 

Since the elephant garlic was nearly all pulled, Barbara Stratton and I applied our forks and shovels to releasing the hardnecks and softnecks. From their magenta color, I suspect that the softnecks were the variety “Spanish Roja”, considered one of the very best. These you can braid, but not the hardnecks, which as you’d expect from the name stay stiff-necked from ground to truck. These are the heads where the cloves cluster around a central shaft, and they are the original form of garlic. Softnecks have been bred over the centuries for market trade; what we buy in the grocery store is probably the softneck ‘California Early’ or ‘California Late’ grown in Gilroy, California.

from left: Leslie Patheal, Cathy Fulton, Barbara Stratton, and Jenn Coe.

With the 500 row feet of garlic all pulled, we sat down to bundle the garlic for hanging in the barn now at the present Food Bank Garden on Wax Orchard Road. Though you can cook garlic “green” as soon as you get it out of the ground, it will keep only if you “cure” it in a warm, shady place around 80° with plenty of air circulation. In fact, the “experts” recommend using fans if your garlic is even a little moist or if there’s little air movement in your “curing” room.

When Jenn’s truck started to fill up, I tried counting the bundles of dozens and lost count at 65. Jenn said, “I know I’m putting more in a bundle than 12,” so I’m guessing we must have harvested 1200-1500 garlic plants. In 2-3 weeks after their “cure”, another work crew will brush the dirt off, peel back outer wrappers to a clean one, trim the roots and stem from each bulb, and crate them for the Food Bank.

Freshly exposed to what a mature garlic looks like, I went home and poked my fingers into the soil around my own garlic plants. Sure enough, there’s a nicely swollen bulb down there. But only 30% of my 24 plants have gone brown at the tips, so I’ll just pull away the drip-hoses to dry them out entirely before pulling the plants at the end of the month.

If any break open in the meantime, I’ll set those aside for re-planting. And come October, when Jenn puts out the call, I’ll go get another lesson in garlic farming and this time, learn to plant.