It took us most of the day today cleaning the garlic for curing. Even it is not recommended, I like to remove some of the soiled outer wrappers before drying, because I found that it is easier to do while they are still soft. I make sure that there are enough layers left by counting the remaining leaves. I used the multipurpose ladder to hang the garlic on our covered deck.
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Last year I let couple of the scapes to grow and planted the tiny bulbils in the fall to big nursery pots buried in the ground. I used the pots so that I can easily harvest the small bulbs. Result was quite small bulbs, but compared to the bulbils these are actually large. I will plant them in ground this fall, but since this is so slow way of getting multi-clove bulbs, I will do this only as an experiment and plant main crop from the just harvested crop.
This is what I got from the bulbils this summer.
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The hard-necks seemed to do better in our climate, so I may not plant so many of the soft-necks. Most of the soft-necks did partially bolt and produced bulbils in various parts of the stem and that seemed to make the main head smaller. I planted some of the same varieties in spring and those did also bolt, so the bolting should not be caused by the cold during winter; I wonder if it is our long days during midsummer, which makes the soft-necks to bolt.
Last winter I ordered Ted Jordan Meredith's book The Complete Book of Garlic and dreamed about this season's harvest while reading it. I do recommend the book for anyone, who wants to know more about garlic.
This was my second season as garlic grower, so this may have been just beginners luck or garlic is actually really easy to grow. It is a long time to wait them to grow from planting to harvest, but since these are planted in fall, there is one less thing to do during spring.
Sari