As I was coming here to share about the garlic we grew this year, I realized I hadn’t shared about garlic harvests in a few years. The pictures above are from our garlic harvest in 2022. We grew a variety called Music that year that we bought from a farming friend. (Jeff’s first question: does it have large cloves?)

When we looked up Music Garlic, we read it was a good producer, had a good shelf life for that type garlic, and that the taste was medium hot with a true garlic flavor. Sounded good…

The results? We were pleased with it. We liked the flavor and the size of the cloves were great too, so overall it was a variety we liked. (Though, let’s be honest…. have I ever tried garlic I haven’t liked the taste of? Nope. I love garlic, and haven’t met one yet I didn’t like.)

Jeff has always preferred the garlic with the large cloves, that are easier to peel. After comparing the different kinds, I prefer them too. (If you’ve ever spent lots of time peeling teeny, tiny garlic cloves you know.)

Since we like the large, easy to peel cloves, we choose the Hardneck Garlic varieties to grow. The Softneck Garlic varieties are the ones known for being good keepers for longer storage, but there are lots of small cloves per bulb. We really do like how easy to peel the larger cloves are!

In the fall of 2022 we planted two varieties we hadn’t tried before. I would tell you what we thought of those varieties, but the garlic harvest in 2023 was our worst yet and the puny bulbs were not a good representation of those varieties.

We had planted that garlic in some raised beds we grow in during the summer, but that we hadn’t done much overwintering gardening in before. The drainage was just fine with the amount of watering we did in the summertime, but we learned that with the heavy rains of winter (our winters are very rainy here) the raised beds became waterlogged and the garlic struggled.

The raised beds are full of good soil, but underneath is clay. (One of the reasons we grow in raised beds in our garden.) I should add that we’ve grown garlic in other raised beds in our garden without a problem, but those particular beds didn’t work well.

That’s the thing with gardening- no matter how many years you’ve grown something- there are always new things to learn. You can grow things again and again, and then have a surprise… you can have years with abundant harvests and then years when a crop is a total flop.

We learned from our experience and didn’t plant those beds with garlic again last fall. We were not sure where to plant the garlic, and talked about options. It’s one thing to plant a packet of seeds and not have the plants do well, but buying garlic bulbs for planting costs a good amount of money. (I was a bit shocked at the prices the last time we ordered some.) That, and we do love our garlic around here, and wanted to grow the most abundant harvest we could.

We ended up trying something new, and I’ll share all about that with you in the next post about this year’s garlic harvest.

Until then… Do you grow garlic? Do you grow the Softneck Garlic or Hardneck Garlic? Or both? Do you have any favorite garlic varieties?