Our garlic were harvested a month or so ago. Today I harvested the red shallots and tomorrow the grey shallots. It’s been a great year for all.

After a year of smaller than I hoped for garlic, I put a lot of effort and guess work into a crop of bigger garlic. I am pleased to report that this year’s crop was the biggest yet in total and individual garlic sizes. I embarrassed to say that this was entirely due to luck.

One of the two beds of garlic produced bulbs 3 to 4 times larger than the other bed. The only difference in the way the two beds were handled is that one got sprinkled every night starting in early May. Karen and I took a vacation and part of our preparation was to water the lettuce on a timer. The only way to do this was to put a sprinkler between the bed of lettuce and a bed of garlic. (In fact, I worried this might hurt the garlic crop.) It was so convenient that we left it on after our return. I guess garlic like a lot of water in the spring. There were shallots in that bed also and they too are larger than usual.

Our Purple Maiskij garlic crop came in at 16 pounds this year — double last year. We grew a couple of new kinds of garlic this year which may account for an additional couple of pounds.

The red shallots will need to dry before weighing. But it’s a lovely crop which we hope will last til winter. The grey shallots look good too, but are a lot of work to peel. :)

I am very pleased with this years crop and am already looking forward to next year.