The day finally arrived – garlic was harvested this morning. Today is also super hot, so we quick harvested and then fast prepped the bed so we can plant carrots tomorrow morning before it rains. In 90 minutes we’d harvested the garlic and done all the prep. Here is a bit of how.

We grow two types of garlic: German Hardy and Music. Both taste great and are excellent storage varieties. With the bottom three leaves of each dead, time to harvest.

As I wrote in a post about how to harvest and store garlic rationally, it is best to wait until the soil is a bit dryer before harvesting and then to allow the heads to dry outside, in the shade for a day or more before hanging them to finish curing. So I shut off the irrigation to this bed a few days ago, and with no rain predicted until tomorrow afternoon, today was the day.

Step 1: Harvest. Pretty simple – loosen the soil with a pitch fork before pulling and be careful not to stick a tine into any garlic! We also did what we could to move the leaf mulch into the walking row as we went. Those shredded leaves are still good as mulch, so we want them. Also, if mixed into the soil they will begin to rob nitrogen, so we want them out of the way.

Step 2: We lay our garlic out on a shaded slotted table where it will stay for a day or two, weather permitting. This helps the garlic start the drying process and allows more dirt to fall off outside rather than in the basement. (We still get a ton of dirt in the basement as they finish drying.) The garlic is also pungent, and as much as we love the smell, giving 160 garlic plants a few hours to release their aroma outside is a good thing.

The remaining steps of how we store the garlic can be found at the link above, but here is what else we did in that 90 minutes.

Step 3: Using a bow rake, break up clods of soil and flatten the row.

Step 4: Spread compost and flatten that. I add somewhere between 1/2″ to 1″ of compost. Remember to spread it on top, do NOT mix it in.

Step 5: The irrigation has been hidden under shredded leaf mulch since last October – now is a good time to run it for a few minutes just to make sure everything is still working fine.

That’s it – now the bed is ready for planting! As above, I’m going to wait until tomorrow when rain is predicted before sowing carrots. This will also give the day (squirrels and birds) and night (raccoons, opossum and others) creatures time to dig around looking for things.