Garlic Harvest Season Tips - Can You Get Garlic Earlier

Hey nerds, Farmer Jesse here. Welcome to Growers Daily, your daily dose of ecological farming insight. It is Wednesday, June 17th, 2026, and today, with garlic harvest season upon us, or at least coming up for many of us, we thought we'd do a whole garlic show. When to harvest, the four different crops that garlic actually is, and getting garlic early. See? So let's do it. All right, happy Wednesday, everyone. I hope everyone is doing well, and I hope that I am doing a decent job of not just straight up talking the World Cup every day, because, boy, is that hard. It's like a month-long holiday for me. One of my favorite, somewhat non-soccer related things, though, to come out of this World Cup has been the mingling of hordes of international soccer fans and regular Americans, and just seeing, for instance, all these towns and areas around Kansas City, for a good example, the smallest host city, really showing up for the teams they're hosting, and their fans, and welcoming them. The hospitality Americans are showing has me super proud of my country right now. To be clear, I'm not surprised. We are very sweet people, just proud that we get to show it off a little bit, because, well, the U.S. is not exactly, you know, the darlings of the international media right now, and probably, like it is for us with other countries, it's hard sometimes to separate the people who live in the country from the most divisive political decisions of their governments, where most of the time, the people who live in those countries are pretty nice folks, like us. So, good stuff, America. Keep it up. We have several more glorious weeks of this tournament to go. I actually am already sad it's ever going to end, but the World Cup has not exactly done wonders for my productivity, so it's probably a good thing. I will say, though, that I'm busting stuff out a little faster, so that's good, especially with a large planting of lettuce coming up over the next two days. Yesterday was harvest day for me. I actually went with some green Roma beans this year. I don't grow a lot of beans, but those are definitely one I grow. You probably can guess I'm not a big fan of picking beans. I don't know that there are many fans of just sitting there picking beans, but Romas are huge beans in general. Like, they just weigh a lot, and the weight adds up quickly, so I don't mind picking them so much. I can pick like 15 or so pounds in 30 minutes, which is not terrible. My back is not super thrilled about my decision to grow beans this year, but you know what? It complains too much anyway. I say, let me live back. Let's get to the garlic talk, because it is that time of the year. Hannah and I got ours out on Monday, as I said, and it's always a great topic, because garlic is a great crop. So, yeah, Wednesdays are our compilation day, so without more rambling from current me, here are some younger versions of me talking garlic. Okay, so it is just about the time for many of us when the garlic crop will start to come out of the ground, or is it? How do you know? All right, so some of this will depend on where in the world you are located, and some of it will depend on the variety of garlic that you're growing or varieties. I have grown softneck varieties, for instance, that were ready slightly before my hardneck, and others, actually, that were ready a week or so after my hardneck garlics. Hardneck varieties just being the ones that flower and have the, well, like the hard stem attached, and softnecks are the ones with a softer neck that, notably, you can tie together easily and make into a nice little wreath, which is cool. Anyway, readiness in garlic is relatively simple to determine, and really the same for both types, both hardneck and softneck. All right, so to keep it simple, after about a third to a half of the leaves of your garlic have started to brown, you can start checking the bulbs. Pull a bulb or two and see if the cloves have started to clearly differentiate. If so, then you're good to go, you're good to harvest. If not, then you will have a little more time and they will continue to grow and mature, possibly substantially so, depending on the variety and the conditions. So, to see if it's differentiated, you can just look from the top and you'll see the little bumps, sort of, where the cloves will start to form. Like, this is pretty good, but it could probably go another week before it's ready, which you can tell because the leaves are not that brown. This process is also fairly forgiving too, so if you just have a small patch and are afraid you're going to ruin your garlic by pulling it a little early, you won't. If you do see the garlic is browning pretty good at the tops and happen to pull a few bulbs and it seems like it's a bit too early, like it's not fully, the cloves aren't differentiated, well, those bulbs will still cure fine. They may just not last as long or be as heavy as they would be if you'd left them in a little longer. So, it's not a big loss or anything. You will still be able to eat the garlic or use them as seed or sell them or whatever, and I will discuss curing more in depth later this week, but that's pretty much it. Okay, so if you're watching on YouTube, just so it's clear, this is a garlic plant here, right, and you can see this leaf is about, I don't know, 30%, 40% brown. When it gets, when each individual leaf gets down about 50% brown, that's when it's already a harvest. So, there's a little bit of a mix in here. I'd say most of it is about 40 to 50%. You could pull it now, but that's getting pretty close, so that's when you would start checking it. It's really not super complicated to be honest. I mean, garlic is really forgiving. When your patch starts to brown about a third of the way, give a couple bulbs a check, see if the cloves are starting to differentiate, and then go ahead and pull it. Now, if you wait too long, you can end up in a situation where the outer leaves are all rotted all the way down, which those outer leaves are directly tied to the paper around the garlic cloves. So, you end up with kind of naked cloves that kind of the brown stuff sort of rots off, and then you get these like just naked cloves, and that may affect curing and storage negatively. So, don't wait too long if you can help it. If the clove seems separated, just go for it. If the forecast is calling for 10 days of rain, like ours has been lately, then I would also go ahead and harvest rather than risk rot or overmaturity. Anyway, I hope that helps. Today's episode is brought to you by Grownby. Grow smarter with Grownby, the farmer-owned cooperative. Grownby is the platform for online sales of everything, custom and traditional CSAs, halves of beef, flour bouquets, wholesale to restaurants, and now, Grownby supports in-person sales too. Their new app, Grownby Register, you can supercharge your market and farm stand, finally bringing together your online and offline sales and customer data. Grownby is proud to make local food accessible by processing SNAP benefits online and in person right within the app. Grownby helps you put your best food forward. Schedule a demo at co-op.grownby.com slash no-till. That's co-op.grownby.com slash no-till. All right, back to the show. All right, so yesterday after I saw those scapes on the garlic, I thought I would do a little ode to how awesome garlic is and how many different crops we actually get from this plant because some of those stages will be happening now for you or soon for you depending on where you are on the planet. So the first stage of garlic is what we call green garlic. This is young garlic that occurs before the garlic has started to produce a bulb. We often plant garlic specifically for green garlic really densely usually around our hedgerows and such. It can be a great early spring crop and planting it densely means that we can pull large amounts of it without wasting our main patch. We will though also sometimes thin our main patch of the smaller ones for green garlic for the bulbs that are either the doubles or just clearly not going to be as big as the others. This is a harder market item, green garlic, than others I'll talk about, but it is sellable. Chefs absolutely love this stuff and it's a great, great CSA item because like I said, in the spring when things are kind of slim, this is an awesome one to start filling the basket up. Next up if you grow a hardneck garlic is the garlic scape. Softneck garlics do not scape, they don't put up a flower. This scape comes around mid-May for us, later if you go a little bit further north and again you want to pull that as soon as you start to see it pretty much. I like to pull up slightly, like pull up a little bit on the scape just to kind of inch it out a little bit and then you get some of that blanched scape part and then I snap it off. I don't want to pull the whole thing straight out, sometimes that happens, but when you pull the whole thing straight out you kind of leave a hole right at the top, so I don't prefer to do that because I feel like water gets in there and sometimes you end up with some rot in the garlic, so what I try to avoid is getting all the way up, pulling it up a little bit and then just snapping it off. That little bit of the blanched part is the most tender, most delicious part, so I try and get a little bit of that. At Corvid Ravenscroft asked yesterday on YouTube, quote, please talk about garlic tomorrow, specifically what to look for in regards to harvesting scapes. I have a chef that wants them, but I thought I was supposed to wait until they curled before harvesting. Am I wrong in that assumption? Input needed, end quote. Well, ask that chef first what they want because I don't want to assume, but pulling them early is how you get the nice tender scapes. Waiting until they curl is how you like get really curly is how you get those kind of leathery, I don't know, flower stems. Although both of those forms are technically edible, once they get that stiff, you know, sort of curl, they get fibrous, so it's not really my thing personally and I imagine that most chefs would feel the same way. Anyway, those scapes are a little easier to sell at market than green garlic. Usually we'd sell them in bunches of five scapes for $3 or two bunches for $5, though we often sell them in bulk to a fellow farmer friend who uses them for pickles. If you allow these scapes to grow too long, they will decrease your bulk size, so it is good to get rid of them and they become, like I said, they become more fibrous and less edible as they mature, so effectively just less marketable and less enjoyable and also if you leave them, they will reduce your garlic yield. So we will pop them off even if we don't plan to sell the scapes. After scapes, we enter fresh garlic stage. This is, and don't at me, the best stage of garlic. Hands down, no contest, fresh garlic is when garlic starts to bulb and you can see the differentiation of the bulbs, but that paper hasn't yet formed, so it, you know, the bulb is still heavy and juicy and you can use practically in the entire thing since what will become the paper later is still edible. You do have to be gentle with this stage, it bruises really easy, but in market, we often try to sell, or we did, absolutely as much garlic as possible because storing too much garlic can cut down on profitability, but also, to me, it's just the best stage. Plus, being first to market with garlic is how you get the customers hooked on your product and your garlic for the rest of the season, and fresh garlic, to me, rules at that. We did also always make sure to let the customer know that they, what to expect with fresh garlic, you know, so they weren't surprised when they, there was no paper there, they didn't have to, like, take the bulbs out and then, you know, break them out of the little paper, I always call it a paper, whatever it is, the shell, if you will. If the customer wanted to keep it that way and, like, in fresh form for as long as possible, we recommended, you know, just popping it in the fridge because fresh garlic will cure and form that sort of paper, that shell, on the countertop, and it will do that in the fridge too, but just not as fast. Then, of course, the last stage of garlic is just garlic, is cured garlic, you know, what we think of when we think of garlic. You harvest garlic when it's about 60% brown and then you cure it for a few weeks, at which point the chemistry and nutrition and flavor changes a bit and you get a more stable crop that can be sold all winter. More details on harvesting and curing garlic closer to when we do that here, or you can watch our garlic video for that as well. So, you could almost say there are, like, five stages, if you count that time before it is fully cured, but has the, you know, kind of, the paper has formed somewhere between fresh garlic and cured garlic. Yield-wise, that few weeks is not only when it's at its most delicious, also it's when it's at its heaviest. Anyway, what an amazing crop, and I look forward to every stage of garlic all year round. Love garlic. Okay, so the last three years, I have grown garlic in our high tunnel all the way to full size with the intention not of curing and selling this garlic as large bulb garlic, but rather the goal has been to simply have fresh garlic, that is, the uncured garlic where the bulbs have differentiated but the paper hasn't fully formed yet and it's still very juicy and, frankly, mind-blowing. I've wanted to have that version of garlic at that specific stage much earlier, and so I started planting garlic in the high tunnels around now, and here's what I learned. One, in order for most hardneck garlic to form a proper bulb, it needs, and this is a rough estimate but is generally accepted time period, it needs 40 days under 40 degrees before the spring to achieve that, though it is more interesting and complicated than that, which maybe we'll get into since it is garlic planting time here in the northern hemis, but we'll save that for another show. In the field, achieving this natural vernalization and necessary cold period is no problem, but in a tunnel with the warmer soils, it seems that one out of the three years we've done this, that about a fifth of the garlic did not properly bulb up, which is not an insignificant amount considering how valuable that space is. However, in the tunnel, every stage of the garlic happens two weeks earlier. Green garlic is available earlier, garlic scapes happen earlier, and fresh garlic is ready to sell two weeks earlier. Notably, I do discuss garlic in the Living Soil Handbook in great detail, which when you pick it up from notillgrows.com, that helps to support our work. At the farmer's market, we were up until this past season when we stopped doing the farmer's market, but we were two weeks earlier to market with all those different forms of garlic thanks to growing it in the tunnel. Now, the way we sell our fresh garlic is at $3.00 a bulb or $2.00 or $5.00, so that means we can successfully harvest roughly 700 bulbs in a 95-foot-long tunnel bed or 28.6 meters, which, and forgive these numbers, I'll try and make it make sense, but which is five rows of garlic at eight inches apart in the row or 20 centimeters apart in the row. So anyway, with that spacing, we get about 700 bulbs and probably a little bit of loss, give or take, but that 95-foot bed can be worth somewhere between $1,700 and $2,100, plus whatever we get for the scapes. So that's not a bad return, and the crop is out in a relatively early time, by early to mid-June, and that gives us plenty of time for a second round of cucumbers or summer greens or whatever, but is it worth it? Well, I like passive crops like garlic where I plant it in the fall and don't really have to fiddle with it until I start harvesting in the spring, but the will take space from other crops like early tomatoes or cucumbers, peppers, etc., plus late crops like lettuce, arugula, and so on. If I'm a home gardener, I'm probably not wasting that tunnel space. If I'm a gardener for chefs and don't have a ton of competition from other growers, same thing, but if I'm a market farmer, it's at least worth dabbling in early alliums. All right, I hope you enjoyed that little garlic compilation. That one about the early garlic was one of my earliest episodes of the show, feels like a decade ago, while it was only about like a year and a half ago in reality, but anyway, I think that's it for this Wednesday. Don't forget, No Till Growers is a non-profit 501c3, so donations are tax deductible and greatly appreciated. Please make sure to like and subscribe and or follow wherever you're getting this podcast. That is an easy way to help us out as well. Enormous thank you to all of our show sponsors, and if you'd ever like to sponsor the show, you can reach out to farmermichelle at notillgrowers.com. Big thank you to Michelle. Big thank you to the No Till Growers board of directors. Huge shouts to Willie Breeding for the theme music, Mike Hilbert for the production help and editing, and my wife Hannah for absolutely everything in the world. Also, shouts to Epidemic Sound for the background music that you can hear. Pick up a hat or a copy of my book, The Living Soul Handbook at notillgrowers.com to support this work. Big, big thank you to everyone over at patreon.com slash notillgrowers, where at a certain level, or if you just bump up from one level to another, you sign up in the month of June, you get a shout on the show. No new signups today, so no new shout outs, but all good. We will get back to Lonnie and his trip down to the Everglades tomorrow, hopefully. Thanks for watching and or listening. We'll see you then. Bye.