Garlic Harvested in late June, 2012

I harvested my garlic this week.  Mrs. Jimmy helped me get these 100 bulbs out of the ground.

After a little online research, I have discovered that the variety is named “Chamisal Wild.”  It was found by Kristen Davenport Katz from Boxcar Farm near Santa Fe, New Mexico.  After describing it to Kristen, she told me about the recent history of this purple-stripe hardneck:

It was named by us… and the story goes that the postmistress in our small village of Chamisal, NM, told us to go look by the little ditch that ran through the village. The village has been settled since the 1600s by the Spanish, a small Northern New Mexico mountain town. So the postmistress, Noami, told us where to go look because she knew we grew a lot of garlic. So one afternoon in early spring we went wandering down by this creek near an old adobe (hardly anything left of it, really) and I was walking around thinking, gosh, there’s no garlic here … then the scent hit me in the nose and I realized I was walking through a FIELD of garlic that looked like a thick-bladed grass. We went back in August after the bulbils were set and harvested below-ground bulbs and planted it… within 3 years the bulbs were as big as fists. Plus, it tastes great. I think this was 2004. So we’ve been growing it eight years now. Glad you enjoy the garlic, it has spread wide because it’s such a lovely variety.

Many of these garlic bulbs are in the 2 1/2 inch range. A few are 3 inches across. The ones that I left the scapes on are only 1 to 1 1/2 inches in size.  That does seem to matter.

For now, the garlic is resting on my back porch picnic table.  This weekend I will have to get it hanging up in the garage to cure for a few weeks. The garlic is done curing when you can cut the bulbs from the stems and there is no moisture, no juice dripping.

The biggest of them all will become my seed garlic. I’ll plant next year’s crop in a few months.

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