PH's 2018 Garlic Effort

[svalli]

This is interesting to see how much greener the plant with the scape is. Last year I had planted two cloves of a variety new to me, so I left the scapes on to grow bulbils. These two plants kept going long after all others were ready to harvest. I thought that this variety was late maturing, but it could had been caused by the scapes. This year I am planning to remove the scapes, so it will be interesting to see, if those will now be ready to harvest same time as other varieties.

Since my vegetable patch is away from home, I can get there only during weekends and vacation. So I have to remove the scapes whenever I can and the timing may not be so optimum. Now I do not feel so bad about leaving them growing a bit longer, even they may not be so tender anymore. I visited there on Saturday and some of the hardnecks had already scapes emerging and few were already coiling. I removed now only the biggest ones to take home to be used in cooking.

I remove the scapes by cutting just above the leaves. I used to pull earlier to get as long tender scape as possible, but noticed that the void between the leaves is a risk of fungal diseases and gives onion flies perfect place to lay eggs. Now I have so much garlic growing that I have plenty of scapes, even the tender part will be shorter when cutting the scape off.

As far as harvest, I doubt that mine would be ready in three weeks. Harvest time here is usually in first week of August, but this year May was so warm, that harvesting could happen already one to two weeks earlier that normally. I have my vacation planned from mid July to mid August, so garlic harvest should happen during my time off from work.

Sari