Sunday, July 28, 2013

Garlic disease report

The good news from OUR NEW GARLIC FIELD
We sent our garlic out for disease testing and the garlic from the new field has a clean bill of health so we can sell it for planting for home gardeners and use it for our own planting. Yay!!! (We will use a heat treatment to be safe). We'll sell garlic from this area in about a month.
The bad news from OUR OLD GARLIC FIELD
The bad news is that some garlic from our older field had garlic bloat nematodes which caused some rot of the bulbs. Luckily 98% looked good and is great eating garlic, but the garlic shouldn't be used for planting. Apparently the nematode larvae can live in tiny specks of soil in the roots and spread to a new area. A hot water treatment can be used to kill the nematodes.




Garlic for sale August 3rd

We will be selling garlic this coming weekend. Inchelium Red, Chesnok Red, German Extra Hardy, Malaysian and more.
This will all be garlic for eating. Planting garlic will be available in about a month.

Monday, July 8, 2013

Harvest is almost done. We had one "bad" field where the garlic looked a bit better than I thought it would. Mostly medium sized garlic, but no dreaded white mold. There was some cutworm damage, some rot, some tiny garlic, lots of spotty areas where the garlic didn't come up among other issues. The "good" field was a big success, except for one or two suspicious looking garlics which I'm sending off for disease testing. Lots of big, beautiful garlic and the digging was easy since I watered right before the rain/hail storm June 29th.
 The boxcar is filled with garlic drying
The garlic harvest "crew"