Tuesday, January 10, 2017

Garlic Harvesting December 2016

Hello Everyone
Greetings from YarraLina Farm ( our property), a humble few plots of garden beds that give me endless pleasure and where I escape to think things through. I also marvel at the wonderful things that nature has to offer and how its so amazing that form a small seed you can grow kilos and kilos of food.
I started this blog over 5 years ago and I just got so busy to keep updating it, but I am going to keep my inspiration going and keep updating interesting items, such as this post and hopefully turn our humble plot into something that I can eventually do full time and rely on a source of income. Well you have to start form somewhere and as they say from little things big things grow.
Here's to giving it a go!
The process of Garlic growing.
So here are some photos of our Australia Garlic harvesting. Thanks to all the people who bought our garlic, Thank you so much for supporting us as its this support at the beginning that gives us the confidence to try and make it work.
 
I initially started growing garlic about 3 years ago and bought some seed from a local farm ( keeping it local) and planted about 240 cloves. I did have a few issues at the beginning as I thought I would just grow it and see how it went. It wasn't until I was not getting much success that I decided to do some research.
There are so many varieties to grow, we decided to grow the hard Neck Australian Purple, and may grow another variety as times on. We have had some great feed back about this variety and I love cooking with it, it has a strong flavour and hot as well.
  • The ground is prepared with a rich manure and cloves planted in April.
  • Then it is watered and weeded ( or you can mulch to prevent the weeds) until late October , early November.
  • When the scapes form, they are cut off ( can be used in cooking) so all the energy goes into forming a large bulb.
  • then after a period of about 2 weeks of dry weather the bulbs can be harvested, cleaned and dried.
 
 
A wheelbarrow full of fresh harvested Garlic


In the Garage , cleaning the Garlic and removing excess dirt

The cleaned Garlic

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Look how beautiful and firm and purple it looks.
 
Want to buy some. we have some left.
We are selling them in $12, $15 and $20 bunches
Send us an email  and we can post it to you. Postage of $9.50 applies
 
Cheers and happy Gardening