Preparing the garlic for harvest (about 9 months early)

Ah garlic. The stuff that annoys vampires and brings joy to our cooking. We LOVE garlic. Like, LOVE LOVE. I'm planting a LOT of garlic. Three different varieties. We have HUGE elephant garlic, delightful music garlic and an unknown, hardneck variety I picked up (more on that later.) _{Photo courtesy of gardenmyths.com}

As some of you may know - from either experience, education or reading our previous post - garlic should be planted in the fall to give it a "head start" in the spring. In order to plant it, you must prep it.

I ordered garlic from Baker Creek seed company. We ordered the Music and the Elephant garlic from them. The cloves came already separated and ready to go.

The majority of the garlic we are planting, I purchased from our local grocery store. They had heads of garlic on sale for $0.58 each. I bought 22 heads of garlic. Did I mention we REALLY love garlic? Anyway, it did not come separated. So guess what fun we had?

The first thing we did, was add about a gallon of water to a five gallon bucket. We live in the country and have well water, so we didn't need to let it sit for 24 hours to kill off the chlorine (you could also use distilled water). Next we added a tablespoon of baking soda and a tablespoon of seaweed extract. We want to give our garlic it's best chance at success!

We'll soak the cloves in this mixture for a few hours - up to a couple of weeks. I'm waiting on the weather to cool off just a bit more.

I want to keep track of which garlic is planted where, so I grabbed a few of these old, plastic cups (please please please re-use plastic as many times as possible), labeled them, and poured some of our water mixture into each cup. The majority of the garlic was the store bought - so I just threw those in the 5 gallon bucket.

For the next step, I broke open all the store bought garlic heads and selected the largest cloves. Those are the cloves I want to use, because the clove has all the energy the plant will get to use. It also has the best genetics. If you want large heads of garlic, you can't start out with tiny cloves

I've even made you all a little video, so you can see what I mean by large cloves for planting. In the video, if it goes into the clear plastic bowl - it's too small, if you hear a distant splat, that went into the bucket to soak. I'll try to make better videos in the future, but you get the idea. Haha! The little video is here!

Now I'm left with quite a few cloves, that won't be getting planted. In order to keep them delicious, I went ahead and peeled about half the cloves. I dropped them into the mini food processor, and processed them into fine bits.

I put the chopped cloves into an old, cleaned, salsa jar, and filled it with olive oil, making sure to cover the cloves in oil. I store this in the fridge, so no additional processing was required.

This will give me a double awesome benefit. First - I have chopped cloves, in the fridge, ready to go, whenever I need them, and as an added benefit, I have garlic infused oil!! Yum!

The remaining cloves were left in the bowl, unpeeled. I just put a lid on the bowl, and they should be fine for a while. If I don't end up using them up before they start to dry out, I'll process them and add to the chopped garlic in the fridge!

So there you have it! Our prep for planting garlic! Hope you enjoyed the post and I'll see you guys later. Talk soon!