In the Garden Garlic planting scapes harvest information Zone 8b 2

Hello from this gorgeous day in my garden here in Washington State. My name is Terris. Today I'm going to tell you all about garlic from my very beginner's perspective. If you've ever wanted to grow garlic, see what I'm going to do today in the garden with them, just hang out with me and I'll tell you what I've learned watching other people's YouTube videos and I'd love to share it with you. Today I'm going to tell you all things garlic that I know and I'm going to take you along deeper into the garlic beds that you can see behind me and I'm going to be harvesting the garlic scapes. It's so wonderful. It's yummy. So let's get into it. I'm in Washington as I mentioned and I plant the garlic late October to early November. The zone that I'm in here on the Washington coast is 8b and this is my second year doing garlic. I had a very, very successful first year. We had a very mild winter and so we didn't have a freeze this winter from 2025 to 2026 and that's really what your garlic is going to be looking for. If you can get them in the earth before you have a really cold snap, the cold snap is important for the development of your garlic. I don't know all the deep gardening terms but this is just what I've learned from watching other gardeners YouTube videos. What's the most positive thing about garlic for me is that the deer don't like it. I don't have a deer fence around my garden. I have makeshift fencing around the beds that have deer munchable items but I didn't really want to make a permanent fence here at the retreat center as it's kind of growing and developing and once you make a big fence post it's pretty permanent so that's why I just was like what do deer not like to eat? Garlic we do and I love using garlic so much. I love gifting garlic to friends and community members. It's a great barter tool so that's why I grow so much of it. Today what I'm going to ask for you to join me on is garlic scape hunting. As you can see here on this garlic plant you have this scape that has come up and out of the plant. This is hard neck garlic as far as I remember so I'm just going to with my hands pinch the scapes off that are forming and so I'm going to go all through the bed and pluck the scapes off of all of the plants. Some of them haven't fully developed as you can see here. I want to I'll wait on that one so I'll do two rounds and just to pluck garlic scapes like this. So lots of plants when they are going to mature and start to form seed pods. I just whacked myself. Seed pods then all the energy that they take from the sun and from the earth is going to start to go into these to develop more seeds. We don't want that to happen. We want to actually harvest the root bulb the big bulb of garlic. So that's what we're doing. We're pinching these off. I used to work in tobacco fields when I was a teenager and it's called topping tobacco. So it's like topping the plant. You want to top it take the top off of it so it doesn't go to seed. We're like topping the plant. I grew up in Tennessee and in my teenage years I made a great living by working in tobacco fields as that was the cash crop where I grew up at and I don't really think it's that big of a cash crop anymore in Tennessee but correct me if I'm wrong. See how I'm just going in I'm pinching off all of these garlic scapes. So this is a great time to be doing this. What is today? We're in late June. We're almost at summer solstice and I'm getting all the scapes. Shucks well we fell in the garden. Here are one bed worth one garlic bed. There's the bed right there worth of garlic scapes. I let mine go to waste last year because I just didn't look up any recipes for them. I'm just starting a garlic harvest and I pulled up the very first bulb and this is one of the smaller plants. No this is like a medium-sized plant but the bulbs are really, the garlic head's really big. So I'm going to do this whole bed and then go over to the smaller garlics but yeah I'm excited to share the harvest with you. So this is my garlic harvest. It was laid out here to dry for a few weeks and I'm taking them from this kind. I'm cutting this thing off so I get it like this and then I'm peeling off the outer layer so they look like that to start and then they look like this. There's a lot of work involved and then I'm having these are rougher ones so I'll use those earlier and I have a basket for hopefully prolonged shelf life garlic. So we'll see how that turns out as I share the unique experience of garlic harvesting and cleaning. I'm making a closing statement for the garlic in my sauna. I totally forgot to finish the video while I was outside. I hope that this video gets you excited about picking a garlic that you want to plant this October, November if you're in the zone AP it'd be earlier somewhere else possibly. I'll give you a timeline of what little tasks are needed but don't worry I'm going to make more videos about garlic as we move along through the year but this is just a little introduction about the scapes, about when to plant, about when we harvest and in the next video about garlic I'll even use more detail on how do we know when it's ready to harvest and I'm going to continue to share my garden excitement with you and maybe even more from here at Ways Reiki Retreat Center because I'm right now I'm in an infrared sauna and I'm sweating and I feel so much better. Even though it's summertime I still feel like the sauna is needed to get like your legs sweaty. All right I'll see you in the next video. Have a good one.