Garlic harvested, dried and cleaned!

Yesterday I had an hour in the barn, cutting the roots and dried leaves off the garlic, then taking off the outer layer of "paper". Brought it into the house and filled a basket.


Some of the heads are quite large, but all are bigger than the grocery store garlic. Here are two heads with a ruler for comparison. These weren't the biggest, just the ones on top of the basket.

After playing with this year's garlic, I used the last of the previous year's to make roasted garlic butter to put in the freezer. How fortunate we like garlic!

 

I sadly did not plant any garlic this year, well done good harvest.

 

You always have an excellent garlic harvest ! It doesn`t like my soil !

 

Mart, my garlic is in back of the barn, where pigs were kept years ago and the soil is very sandy (sand makes the pigs work harder to walk, and you get better hams, supposedly). I thought east Texas had sandy soil--not so?
Are you planting a hard neck variety?

 

Jealousy reigns supreme here, Jane.
They look so good.

 

Oh yes,, we are in sugar sand with a red clay base ! I think its just because the only place I can plant it is on the west side of the house with very poor soil ! Unlike the garden area ! But we have no large garden anymore ! Horses have it now ! And Jim takes care of the lawn and wouldn`t know a vegetable plant if it bit his,,,,butt ! So he went crazy with the weed eater ! I just gave up after a few times of that and decided its cheaper to just buy it !

 

Oh Mart, I'm sorry you don't have your garden any longer. Buying vegetables is probably cheaper, or as cheap, as growing them, but growing is such fun!
Have you considered a small raised bed (weed eaters just hate treated lumber )? I moved our herbs to containers so the local hares would leave them alone. Bunnies hop, but they don't climb! Containers would also protect plants from the dreaded weed whacker.

 

Marlin, Soft neck or Hard neck garlic? It's beautiful.
I grew both and I was very satisfied with the results,
until I watched a few garlic harvesting videos!
Both a woman and then a man harvested awesome garlic,
so much larger than mine. Still, we will have plenty to last the winter.

 

Growingpains, we have hardneck garlic. It does better in our climate and it was what was available at the local grocery store. I bought three heads, broke it into cloves and planted.
The size of the garlic doesn't matter much--it's the taste the "potency" and the keeping quality.
About those videos, would they be posted if the garlic heads were the size of peas?

 

Marlin, the people who put the videos on YouTube are just gardeners like you and me.. The guy was amazed and overjoyed at the size of some of his garlic heads.
I was under the impression that soft neck didn't over-winter as well as hard neck. Wrong! Just the reverse.
We were thinking of eating the garlic sapes. Too tough, maybe due to a long dry spell.

 

Nice garlic!

 

Hummerbum, how does your garden grow?

 

@Growingpains It's definitely growing...lol. No garlic or onions...definitely have to work on that for next year.

 

Hummerbum, it seems that each year we either get good this and not so good that. We take what we get happily.

 

Other than missing out on a delicious harvest, what would happen to the garlic if you left it in the ground? What would you find after a year, or five years?