Can you eat the skin of freshly picked garlic? My reason for asking is that for several reasons I have trouble curing garlic properly. As an alternative, I was thinking to immediately process the garlic and freeze it.
Also, is it necessary to wait for onions to have the leaves fall over before harvesting? I’m growing purple onions for the first time this year, not sure if I should wait until that happens.
I have made pesto by simply putting fresh basil garlic and olive oil in a food processor… and process it until it is somewhat smooth.
Pour it into ice cube tray and freeze.
Then later once frozen good… pop those cubes out and store them in a ziplock freezer bag in the freezer.
When you make homemade soup… just toss a few of those cubes in… good stuff.
I am sure you could do the same with just garlic cloves and olive oil.
Good luck.
Also, is it better with garlic to err on the side of harvesting too early than too late? Do the extra layers of skin make it easier to cure and preserve the garlic?
So you can eat raw garlic skin, stump?
I think you can eat the leaves and stump. If you cure them in the ground by pushing the leaves down or pulling them out they will they last much longer. I used to cure them, but I don’t have space anymore so I just eat them fresh.
When garlic starts to die back you can lift it and lay it out on the ground, out of direct sunlight, for a few days to let the dirt dry. Then rub the excess dirt off and let them cure slowly out of the sun and weather. I stick a couple of dozen in large brown grocery bags and “stir” them every day to make sure all parts get a little air. Then I take them out, rub off the rest of the dirt and trim the roots. Leave as much skin as possible to help them last in storage.
If you harvest too soon they won’t have quite the size and won’t cure as well; if you harvest too late the cloves separate from the bulb.
Excellent advice was given already. Everything about alliums, eg. Garlic, onions, leeks, shallots, chives, etc. are edible to us. The question is, are they tasty? No one wants to eat the outer protective husk of an onion or garlic because it is like eating dirty wax paper. The stock is tough. Does not mean you can’t boil those pieces into a broth and save the filtered liquid, which if we were in need of doing, we would. It is all edible and frequently eaten. In my area, we eat scallions, which are the green part of onions and sometimes garlic, which is less tender. We will fry scapes if the need comes up. We will eat the onions or garlic seeds in the form of small rounds bulbs. The bulbs themselves we will eat anytime they are worth eating immature , mature, past mature, etc.
Maybe someone doesnt have 20 seconds to peel a whole head of garlic?
Thanks. Wasn’t sure how easy they’d be to process or distinguish parts fresh out of the ground.
I’ve grown a bunch of purple onions for the first time this year. Incredibly delicious and sweet after being barbecued and made into salsa.
Is it best to wait until the leaves fall over on the ground before harvesting?
Anytime is the right time. What all the older farms around here did was leave them in the ground all summer until they were ready to use them. When i was a kid when you went for supper at an older neighbors they grilled hamburgers on the grill from their own mostly grass fed beef. They disappeared out back and pulled an onion and came back with a big beef steak tomato as well. The hamburgers were the best and much of thst flavor was about that slice of onion.
In the ground? I’m amazed they’re so resilient. Imagine garlic’s not like that? We get a lot of rain in the summer here, not sure if that will affect things. For some reason I thought to preserve the onions you had to pick them at a certain time and dry them out.
Yes once the top dies or we run out of season. Usually people start with eating scallions , eat golf ball sized then full size. Garlic i frequently leave in the ground after harvesting what i need. My garlic is already ready to grow again.
Most of my onions have not fallen over yet, although the leaves are looking pretty rough and deteriorating.
Pick n dry?
If you pick them while theres still green leaves, will they not cure well?
You should bend the green leaves over.
What happens if you try to cure garlic with some of the leaves still standing up?
What do you mean by curing, do you mean by pulling out of the ground, if yes, they just shrivel up. I don’t push the garlic green down, I just pull them out.