With a relatively long growing season, you want to make sure you get the most out of your garlic harvest before your cloves begin to sprout, indicating it’s time to get them back in the ground.
Garlic is rarely consumed fresh straight out of the ground. It’s harvested and hung in suitable conditions to cure in order to give it a longer shelf life and to get maximum use out of your homegrown harvest.
Because most of us tend to grow more than we can use – even after we’ve saved the largest and bestlooking cloves for seed for next season – there are plenty of things you can do with your garlic harvest in order to give it more uses before it starts to sprout. Somewhat ironically, although a couple of the preserving methods below are generally ways to make sure your homegrown produce remains viable for longer-term use when it’s out of season, garlic is susceptible to botulism, meaning the confit, pickled and hot-smoked garlic outlined below will not be shelf stable
