Garlic 2018

bower · July 30, 2018

I agree, don't leave them any longer.
And three weeks from scapes is about right anyway - I suppose that might vary depending on growing weather, but there's no growth happening if the leaves are all brown.

In a dry environment, people count the leaves that are still green as a measure of when to harvest. Each green leaf represents a wrapper on your bulb, so you do want some green left normally when you harvest, or without wrappers there's not much storage life. So they say.

In a wet year here, we don't always see full leaves going brown, but if the time has passed for them to form their bulbs, we also just count leaves that have brown tips, instead of fully brown. The leaves can stay really green if they get rain at a certain point in the season, so the plants can have a lot of green leaves still when we decide to harvest.

July 30, 2018	#32
bower Tomatovillian™ Join Date: Feb 2012 Location: Newfoundland, Canada Posts: 6,793	I agree, don't leave them any longer. And three weeks from scapes is about right anyway - I suppose that might vary depending on growing weather, but there's no growth happening if the leaves are all brown. In a dry environment, people count the leaves that are still green as a measure of when to harvest. Each green leaf represents a wrapper on your bulb, so you do want some green left normally when you harvest, or without wrappers there's not much storage life. So they say. In a wet year here, we don't always see full leaves going brown, but if the time has passed for them to form their bulbs, we also just count leaves that have brown tips, instead of fully brown. The leaves can stay really green if they get rain at a certain point in the season, so the plants can have a lot of green leaves still when we decide to harvest.