Sometimes when hoovering in the garden you have to sacrifice a bit of your harvest to see what is actually going on. I had planted a whole bulb of garlic in the late last year in I think november.
When looking at when this stuff should be ready, every website and their mothers says that this is somewhere around june/juli/august which is a broad spectrum moment if you ask me. (I always have the feeling that every website is just copy pasting the words of someone else)
But what those same websites also say is that when the lower 4-6 stems are getting yellow, that also means that they are ready to harvest.
Now this was the case at the moment at my garlic bushes that the stems are tipping over, and now I don't know if that is because it was so warm and sunny or if the garlic is ready.
Time to start digging and see what is going on!
Dig deeper!
First of all, I was very surprised to see how deep the bulb had grown and deep I had to go to actually even catch it. After finding the bottom I could easily scoop it out and booom... I had my first ever harvested garlic.
What was interesting and new for me to see was that every clove of garlic had their own little stem that goes up together through the main stem.
I guess that means that the more leaves there are on the stem in this case, the more cloves there will be in the garlic.
Nice to know!
So of course I was able to see that this was not the biggest of garlic as yet, which wasn't surprising me because it is still May and surely this is a bit on the early side.
But I was also surprised to see that there is not really a big 'central' peel on there on the outside of the bulb. It is all just tiny bulbs ties together with not really cohesion in there.
I decided to ask Grok as a small confirmation on what I had already thought. I learned there that the outer skin also still has to form and that takes time. Cool I learned a thing!
Drying time on this one
Now what I do know is that fresh garlic needs drying time in a cold and dark location and you certainly shouldn't wash and clean it.
So I just took it out of the ground, blew off the dirt and sand and hung it in the shed to dry slowly.
To be honest the bulbs looked already like they would be ready to eat at least and that is already a win to me :)
So...yes this first one is promising, but I will leave the other ones in the ground for a good while still! If this will work, than this is the easiest thing to grow like ever.