View Single Post
Old December 21, 2017   #3
bower
Tomatovillian™
 
bower's Avatar
 
Join Date: Feb 2012
Location: Newfoundland, Canada
Posts: 6,793
Default

Nice to see your post PH, and look forward to following your progress when they are up in the spring. Your field looks great.

That is a bummer about losing some stock to molds and mites. Good call to trim immediately, I think. You have a high humidity environment and a large crop - all of which is very moist anyway until it cures. So I don't think you need worry about drying too fast.

The growers in this story link are trimming in the field to two inches, and then to one inch after curing. The method I followed for home garlic small scale trims longer than that 5-6 inches. A different author said that a short trim or a green trim raises the risk of molds getting in but maybe the reverse is true when the greens are supplying moisture in a humid situation. Also mite problems are linked to moist conditions which they like, so less moisture holding material is a plus for that as well.

https://www.motherearthnews.com/orga...aning-zbcz1408

I get the impression that curing roots-up also helps to speed the drying time. I do that as well at home after trimming, because it's easy to poke them through a wire grid and takes less space.
https://ag.umass.edu/vegetable/fact-...curing-storage

Our curing setup at the farm has been ad hoc and less than ideal, with limited space for the size of crop drying. I know there have been some losses some years due to curing problems, as it is often both cool and humid between harvest and planting time and the farm buildings are unheated. So I'm interested to learn about the alternate approach with a trim at harvest time. Maybe it would be a better option. There sure is a huge difference between space requirements for hanging or spreading out plants with greens attached, vs some good rack setup to accomodate trimmed bulbs.
bower is offline   Reply With Quote