Just before I got to digging some garlic yesterday, a friend dropped by and she told me they had lost 1/3 of their crop to mold.
They used a wood chip mulch and apparently that was not so good, and maybe watered too much as well. Lots of pink color she said. I was planning to dig only the ones with four leaves left, but I did see a few spots of orange and pinkish color here and there, and so the mood was on me to keep losses to an absolute minimum, and let someone else get the bragging rights for largest garlic... I never win that competition anyway!
And for some reason, I always see the most damages of one kind or another, on the biggest garlic in the field.
Seeing a few spots here and there in the dirt, I decided to dig all but the ones with scapes before it rained... and having an extra leaf on many of them, I decided to tear them all down to a clean wrapper immediately. I have never done this before except for a few badly damaged ones, but those seemed to cure fine if they were cleaned up. So now the whole porcelain crop are stripped, and I won't be cleaning off dirty wrappers later on.
It poured rain and thundered and lightning late last night after I had cleaned up, and it's been raining steadily all day. Way more rain than was forecast, so I was even gladder of my decision.
I hope the later garlics enjoyed it and are not being devoured by miscellaneous pests.