Gardening Thread - Show me your gardens!

That's longer than is ideal; at that point the individual cloves are starting to separate from the plant and won't stay intact for drying/storage. Ideally a few of the lower leaves should be brown, but the upper leaves should still all be green.

 

Shit. So start digging ?

 

Sounds like probably yes...
How brown are your plants?

Edit- Aha, my computer just loaded your picture.

Yes, dig them up. They should still be ok, just be careful when you're pulling them out that the bulbs don't strip off of the stem.

 

this was a fun and super easy experiment. I'm going all in next fall.

 

And Chard for dinner tonight...

 

Tastes a lot better than the supermarket stuff, too.
Now go hang them someplace out of the sun but well ventilated to season for a couple of weeks, otherwise they won't store as well. Unless you plan on pickling them?

 

No, I like it roasted with olive oil and mashed and used for a condiment.

 

All at once? You must be storing some of them, I would think?

 

I'm drying it out like you suggested and I have read elsewhere. I only roast one bulb at a time . It's hanging in my garage now to dry but I need to figure out how to store it longer term. I'm afraid my pantry might be too warm at room temp, plus it would have a strong garlic smell and my wife might not approve .

 

That's why I pickle a fair amount of mine; I find that for cooking it doesn't affect the flavor, and I don't have to worry about it rotting, sprouting, or drying out over the fairly long winters we get around here.

Someday I'll have a root cellar, but for now it's not feasible so I have to stick with pickling it.

 

i'm fighting an unknown culprit in my garden. It keeps destroying just one of my tomato plants. it isn't my dog (figured that one out) but i don't know how it could be a rabbit. I have 24" chicken wire around the garden. So i'm struggling to figure out what is doing it.

 

These guys can defoliate a tomato quickly but usually they show up later on, at least around here

Tomato hornworm

Maybe put some sifted dirt around the plant to get a track when the robber returns?

Slugs can mess stuff up too lol

 

Just throw them in a brown paper bag. I store 100-200 bulbs for six months at a time like this. Though my wife doesn't mind the smell since she knows what it leads to

 

They don't devour it down to a stump. Just the leaves. Mine is chomped off at the base like it was bitten off.

 

When this happens to me my neighbor's response is always, "They like a salad too".

 

If you think you have tomato worms get a cheap UV LED flashlight online and go out at night. There camouflage doesn't work so well under ultra violet light.

 

Cutworms, we get them every year too. Lost and replanted six tomato plants out of twenty four this year because of 'em. I use diatomaceous earth sprinkled around the base of each plant. It takes about 24 hrs for the worm to die, and if it rains you need to reapply. Once the stems of the plants get too thick the worms leave them alone.

 

NICE!! I have one of those flashlights but didnt know they fluoresced. This changes the game a little

 

Sounds like cutworms to me, too. DE is definitely a good way to keep them off the plants, but they usually bury themselves within a few inches of the plant they've cut, just under the surface. If you dig them up and kill them it'll keep them from eating any other plants before the DE kicks in and they die.