Determining Harvest Time

Here in Northeast Washington state, we're getting ready to start our garlic harvest. Our early varieties have about 6 green leaves left of their original 8-10 leaves, smaller plants have about 5 green leaves. Subsequent varieties likely have another 10-14 days. It's been a cool season, and the plants are drying down slowly, hopefully this will lead to some nice big bulbs.

I get so many questions on when to harvest garlic. Harvest timing is one of the most important aspects of growing garlic, especially if you want those big "wow" worthy bulbs. You can do everything 100% perfectly up until this point, but harvesting too early will mean small bulbs, and harvesting too late will lead to split bulbs that won't store well. You get 1 chance to harvest this crop, so go slow and start with a couple of bulbs. We've all gotten excited and caught up in the giddiness of harvest season only to realize later that you could have doubled the size of your bulbs with a little patience.

Every variety, every garden, and each harvest is subtly different. Let the plants guide you to your optimal harvest time. In a small garden you can harvest a few bulbs at a time as they become ready, in larger plantings you often have to look at an average over the whole crop. Remember that some varieties will be earlier than others, sometimes by several weeks. Here is how we determine harvest time in our 1-acre garlic patch, I hope you are able to adapt our process to your garden.

• Begin by counting the number of green leaves on your plants. Most varieties dry from the bottom to the top, so that lower leaves will brown and die off while the upper leaves are all or mostly green. Some varieties yellow more irregularly from the tips inward. In either case, you want about 40-60% of the plant to be green when you harvest. These green leaves will be the wrappers left on your garlic after curing and help to optimize the storage life of your garlic.

• Harvest a couple of average looking bulbs (we usually sample 10). Use a shovel or pitchfork to gently lift the bulbs to the surface, wiping off excess dirt and gently working the soil out of the roots.

• Bulbs should have a squat appearance and less of a globe/onion shape. The cloves will be well defined beneath bulb wrappers (see below). The basal plate (where the roots emerge from) should look healthy with no signs of rot or splitting.

• Remove any split or damaged leaves/wrappers (1 leaf = 1 bulb wrapper) and see how many green leaves are left. If we're down to 4 or 5 green leaves (intact bulb wrappers) it's time to harvest. If we're at 5 or 6 green leaves but we're seeing signs of pest damage, split wrappers, or have an abundance of rain or a prolonged heat wave in our future (it is common for us to harvest in 100F weather), we will begin harvest a few days early.

  Most years we find that the plant dries down at a rate of 1 leaf per week. Your rate may be different but take note of these types of observations. If we're at 5 or 6 green leaves and the bulbs are in good condition, we'll come back and repeat the process every 5 to 7 days. When we feel we are 3-5 days from harvest, we will stop watering our garlic so that the soil may dry out. Prior to this, we continue to irrigate weekly in our hot, dry climate.

 It is a harvest window, as plants begin to mature your harvest begins. In a small garden it may be a few bulbs a day for a few weeks. In a large garden, particularly if only a few varieties are grown, the harvest may be done all at once when most of the bulbs are fully mature and only a few are over/under mature. In our garden, harvest season typically lasts about 2-3 weeks, with early varieties like Purple Glazer and Russian Red getting us started and Carpathian always the last to maturity. 

I hope this helps you determine YOUR optimal harvest time. Please reach out if you still have questions. If you haven't ordered your seed garlic yet, now is a great time as you're seeing and tasting what did well for you and what didn't.