📌 Quick Diary Summary: Sinking Garlic & Mid-Summer Harvest
- 🧄 The Disappearing Garlic: Garlic actively pulls itself deeper into heavy soil to survive the winter using specialized “contractile roots”. While this is a natural biological process, it makes harvesting in clay a nightmare. See the forum discussion below for practical tips on how growers safely dig out and clean deep-sunken bulbs without snapping the stems.
- 🥬 When to Cut Cabbage: Don’t just guess when early cabbage is done. Forum experts recommend the “squeeze test”—if the head has reached the seed packet’s expected weight and feels rock-solid to the touch, it is ready.
- 🧅 What to do with Tiny Garlic? Growers advise against throwing away undersized bulbs. While they aren’t ideal for next year’s seed, they store perfectly and are highly valued for summer canning and pickling!
I barely managed to dig up my garlic today. A couple of the bulbs had already started to split their wrappers. I got a mix of very large bulbs and some really tiny ones. What should I do with the tiny ones?
Galiy wrote:
A couple of the bulbs had already started to split their wrappers… What should I do with the tiny ones?
Galya, that is great garlic, and you harvested it right on time! I know it’s exhausting digging it up in this blazing heat, but waiting until it all splits open in the ground is even worse.
I actually set all my tiny bulbs aside for my sister. Her garlic completely failed this year, so she is thrilled to get my small ones. She will use them up for her summer canning and pickling, and then she’ll ask me for the large bulbs to use as seed garlic for fall planting.
By the way, tiny garlic stores just as well as the big ones, and the prices for vegetables at the market are crazy high this year!
Hello everyone!
Ludmila, please advise me. My garlic just recently sent up its scapes (scapes are currently curled in a loop). Do I need to feed it with anything else right now? The very tips of the leaves are a little yellow, even though I water it well and recently fed it with a balanced fertilizer. Yesterday, I scattered some “Eco-Potassium” (an organic ash made from sunflowers that doesn’t dissolve in water, you just work it into the dirt) and lightly hoed the bed. Is there anything else I should do?
Also, a question about cabbage! My early cabbage is growing heads, and I think it might be time to cut them soon. But how do I actually know when they are ready? Do I still need to feed them while the heads are sizing up?
Aleksan9ra wrote:
I know it’s exhausting digging it up in this blazing heat…
It turns out my garlic was buried incredibly deep! The largest bulbs were sitting the deepest, and dealing with my heavy clay soil made it a nightmare. The weird thing is, I planted it in early September, and I definitely didn’t plant it that deep!
The photos I posted are after washing and soaking them overnight. We still couldn’t remember exactly how many hours we were supposed to soak them for… I think Ludmila (Hrizantema57) wrote about the soaking method in the local chat thread, but my memory is failing me. 🤦♀️
Sofochkamai wrote:
My garlic just recently sent up its scapes… Do I need to feed it with anything else right now?
Sveta, what kind of garlic is that? Is it a very late-maturing variety, or did you plant it in the spring (softneck)? If it is still actively growing and young, you can give it one more round of a balanced NPK fertilizer.
Sofochkamai wrote:
But how do I actually know when they are ready?
Your cabbage is ready when it reaches the specific size and shape described by the seed breeder on the packet (for example, if it says “heads up to 2.2 lbs / 1 kg”). The ultimate test: squeeze the head with your hands. If it feels hard and dense, it’s ready!
