Garlic story and an early harvest for long storage

The garlic story. What you just about see is amazing. It's one of the most incredible vegetables that I know many of you grow. Do please subscribe because that will give you updates on so many of these fascinating stories, vegetable stories, and how to grow them, how to store them as well. And upcoming also on my channel is the small garden, which is just behind us. I see over there and that we'll be filming tomorrow and jobs for June and July. This busy time of year, so busy, there's so much to do. Timing is a lot of being what being successful is. Have a look at this because how do you know when garlic is ready? I'm in the polytunnel. So that's why this garlic is ready sooner than if you're growing it outside, it probably won't be ready yet. But this is a useful prelude to what you can do, what you're looking for to find out is your garlic ready. I often see advice like wait till it goes yellow. Well, no, actually that's gone too far by then because if your garlic's gone yellow, that means that these outer skins, the outer sheath that surrounds the developing cloves is starting to decay. And honestly, this is about right because you can see how there's this swollen profile around the edge of the bulb. What it means is when you catch it at this stage, you can even go right up there and peel these down and they come off revealing a beautiful white bulb, which if you leave this much longer would just take away the skin from around even the bulbs. A little bit of something there. Actually, do you know what? That's the first time I've harvested a lot of these this morning in here. Maybe because it was right on the end or something. This will be put on the compost heap, but you can see, yeah, that's a nice garlic bulb already. And then there's one here, which I got in a bit of a muddle last year when planting. I had two varieties here, which I hadn't appreciated and that's a different variety that essentially is not quite ready because you can see how it's still smaller, very white and hasn't differentiated. So that one can stay for another two weeks. So you might well have different varieties. This is an early variety. When I say the story of garlic, this one goes way back to 1998 in my case when I bought some garlic in the local greengrocer and I've been planting ever since. So, you know, once you've got a nice garlic like this, keep it till October. That's when those were planted and plant it and you can plant it outside as well. There's some garlic up there which we planted at the same time as in the polytunnel. And that's, it's got more rust. That's partly why I do it in the polytunnel. It doesn't get so much rust. Rust is, yeah, it's a problem, but it's not the end of the world. Don't despair if you get rust. You'll still have a harvest, but it will be quite a bit smaller because rust stops the leaves photosynthesizing. And one of the beds there that I'm meant to say is empty and that's because there's a lot of new plantings coming up now and when you finish your garlic, you want to have some plants ready or you can put plants between the garlic like beetroot, for example, multi-sow beetroot. You could multi-sow it now and or you could have even planted it already or you could sow carrots between your garlic. So there's a lot of succession stories with garlic just there is in the whole rest of the garden. So here we have what I've been up to this morning and last year actually because this is garlic harvested exactly a year ago and it's been in the conservatory and Adam came up with this brilliant wire method. We found it a lot quicker than you just have a little hook on the end of the wire. It's high tensile wire. It's pretty strong and then just drop the stems over the top of the wire. So this is Adam Wood patented, should be anyway, and so I've been, you know, to eat these now, you just grab them off the bottom or off the top if you want. So that's a year old garlic and it's still really firm and actually very tasty still. So there you have it. That's one of the reasons why garlic is such a great vegetable to grow because you've got one harvest and then so much eating after that over such a long period. And what I've been doing is what I showed you in there, I cut the bottoms off as well. So I've got a little sort of rough knife here. Just doing this one little thing at this stage. I didn't used to do it so early, but I find it really makes everything else nicer. In other words, that's the difference. We've gone that to that and Nicola, who was filming, was just asking like are these the same size? Were they the same size at harvest time? And well, it got me wondering actually because I haven't really twigged. You get used to them being a certain size, I suppose. Is that just from drying over a year? It might be. I must check my photos. I mean, there's a bigger one, but even that if you look at some of these here, you know monster. Fantastic. That's probably the biggest one actually. So we got these two varieties now and I did harvest some of the less mature one. So you can see I can feel the cloves in there but it's obviously not so ready as that one that I just harvested for you. So watch your garlic whether it's undercover or outside. Don't wait too long. You'll probably have this many green leaves and a green stem at harvest time. That's good. That's fine. That's how it wants to be. Then what I do is over there is some that we harvested. We could just go and have a quick look actually. I'll just show you because the in-between stage of storing and putting it on the wire is putting it undercover. In other words out of the rain mainly, but as you know more out of the sun. Oh both. Because sunshine on garlic at this stage is actually quite detrimental to it. And so I'm keeping it. I don't mind a bit of the morning sun, which it gets in the evening sun, but the midday sun that's what's that four days old now that that's been there and give it a three or four weeks and this will then be quite pale and dry and you can drop it over your wire and then or cut it off first and drop it on the wire. So there you have it as one thing I haven't mentioned actually is Allium leafminer and we did find a bit on this. I'm pretty sure that's what's going on here Where we're finding it's making little holes, but it's not destroying the garlic Undercover, there's less. We've got some outside, but I'm more optimistic than I was actually It's I'm still unclear. It's a new pest here since last year how much damage it does If you've got it big time, well, maybe you need to grow more undercover. But yeah garlic remember this October Plants out