Harvest was this past weekend.
We started with the 10 beds that were out in the field on Friday.
I cut down all the tops at 730 am (took 50 minutes with a weed whacker with a 3 serrated plastic blade cutting head) and walked in the house at 830 pm.
Everything went well. We were able to pull a wrapper layer off the bulbs in the field on about the first half of the harvest, so there will be nothing to clean on those. Will buy me a lot of time to get to selling while I clean the rest when they are dry enough.
Music and Romanian Red sized up nicely, but German Extra Hardy was disappointingly small. Maybe could have use 5-7 more days, but we had a small window between constant rain and boy has this spring been wet. Had to take them regardless.
Harvested the tunnel-grown Chesnock on Saturday. Mixed sizes. The cloves are all over the place in size when you break them open to plant, so I imagine the small bulbs i harvested came from the smaller cloves we planted.
Will not plant Chesnock again due to its lateness and variability in clove size.
Still have 2- 300' beds of Chesnock out in the field to harvest this coming weekend.
I had another two areas I planted late and built tunnels over (but never got the plastic on in February) looked like crap. Tiny plants. I figured they were a loss. Tops were almost 80% brown as of yesterday. I pulled the ones that were pinky-sized stems and was stunned. Decent bulbs 1.75"-2".
So I gleaned through and probably got 1,500 bulbs on what I thought was a loss.
Lesson: even a few more days in the ground can really size your bulbs on small stems/plants. Plants can look way past time, and you still will have some viable bulb wrappers if they will go to immediate sale or use. Probably not as good for winter storage or seed saving.
Anyway, an over all success. I estimate we have 10,000 bulbs in the drying trailer...
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