German Extra Hardy, August 1, 2025
Today in the orchard
August already? It’s time to harvest the garlic. Plant in the fall, harvest in the summer. We grow two varieties: Phillips, a rocambole-type and German Extra Hardy, a porcelain-type. They are both excellent. Although we grow the majority of our vegetable crops down near the house in the Big Garden, we grow a few crops that require lots of space—garlic, potatoes, and winter squash—up the road in the nursery in rotation with our young grafted trees. Hayes, Chance, Cammy and I loaded up the truck with harvest crates and a couple of digging forks and headed up to the nursery. The garlic crop looked great, and in a couple of hours with an amazing team-effort we had a truck-load.
In the afternoon we laid the plants out in one of the greenhouses to dry and cure. Later we’ll snip off the stems and store the crop in the basement. In October we’ll select some of the best heads, divide up the cloves and plant the crop for next year.
We also dug several pounds of potatoes from in amongst the garlic plants. Evidently we did not harvest all the spuds last year (we never get them all), and they rewarded us with a scattering of potatoes this summer. We ate them for supper. They were delicious.
