With garlic, there are three harvests or crops you can use:

• The first harvest is in early spring, when garlic plants are about a foot tall. You can either cut some greens or pull some complete plants as scallions and use them in your cooking as a source of fresh garlic.
• The second harvest is the scapes. Around mid June, hard neck garlic varieties send up a round stalk or scape. When the scapes curl, snap them off. This enables the plants to put their energy into bulb formation. The scapes are delicious and should not be discarded but used in place of garlic bulbs. They contain loads of garlic oil and have the same health benefits as the bulbs. Scapes can be refrigerated in plastic bags for about 3 months.
• The main harvest is when the underground bulbs are dug, cured and stored for fall and winter use. This is the most critical harvest requiring meticulous care to give you top quality, keeping garlic. Careless harvesting can ruin a fine crop of garlic.

Harvest preparations start a month ahead of the actual date that the bulbs are lifted and activity doesn’t finish until two weeks later when the cured garlic is put away in storage. After scape removal, the underground bulbs start to swell and grow quickly over the next month. Little special care is needed as the plant is transferring energy from the leaves to the bulbs. In the event of a very dry year, watering may be needed for the latter part of June. However, stop watering around the first of July to let the bulbs mature.

Garlic is ready to be dug between the first week of July through to mid August, depending on variety and strain.

Source: Harvesting Garlic

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Late blight (Phytophthora infestans) occurs commonly each year in many places around the United States and the world. There are steps that we, as home gardeners, market farmers, and commercial growers alike, can take in order to reduce late blight recurrence this growing season.

1. Grow plants in a warm, dry, sunny area. If you have had blight previously, move to a different area if possible, or replace the upper soil layer since “oospores” will carryover in soil.
2. Water only underneath the plants, not the foliage. Drip irrigation is preferable to watering with a hose, to reduce water splash. Don’t over fertilize or over water.
3. Grow on a light sandy soil if possible or cover soil with a white plastic mulch to increase soil and air temperatures around the plants and reduce humidity.
4. Growing plants under an overhang or a clear plastic shelter will help prevent spores from being deposited on plants by wind and rain. But plants must be covered before infection has occurred. Covering the plants after they are infected may raise humidity and make the disease worse.
5. Grow the tomatoes on raised beds with well-spaced trellises or in containers off the ground. Tomatoes grown on balconies or roof-tops rarely develop late blight, probably because the environment is warmer and drier.
6. Remove all of last year’s tomato or potato debris to prevent carryover of disease.
7. Remove diseased leaves, shoots and plants that are severely diseased, immediately. Bury them, or seal them in a plastic bag and take to a landfill. Do not compost diseased plants. If “oospores” are present, they will survive in compost.
8. Destroy any volunteer potato or tomato plants in the garden.
9. Destroy any nightshade weeds in and near the garden. Nightshade is related to tomato and potato and is also a good host for late blight.
10. Apply copper sprays or other home garden fungicides recommended for late blight at least once a week when weather is favourable for disease. READ THE LABEL. Copper, which is accepted by most organic producers, should be applied for prevention more than cure, that is, before the disease has become established.
11. Gardeners who are unable or choose not to follow a regular fungicide spray program for late blight are strongly urged to destroy (bag or bury) all infected tomato or potato garden plants or plant parts as soon as the disease is observed. If in doubt whether it is late blight, take a sample to a local garden centre or Master Gardener for identification.

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When gardeners on the West Coast refer to “blight”, they usually mean the disease called “late blight”, caused by Phytophthora infestans. This disease is famous as the cause of the Irish potato famine in the 1800’s. Phytophthora infestans is not a fungus or a bacterium or a virus. It belongs to a group of organisms called “protists”, although they are still commonly referred to as “fungi”. They are also called “water moulds” because they thrive and produce spores under humid, moist environment and cause infection only when free water is present on the plants.

Late blight occurs in the Interior too, but “early blight” is more common than late blight in this drier region. Early blight is caused by a fungus called Alternaria solani. Both diseases cause leaf and stem lesions and fruit rot, so are sometimes confused. Although they are called “early” and “late” blight, both diseases can occur at any time from spring to fall if weather conditions are favourable. Early blight generally develops at warmer temperatures than late blight, which generally prefers cool, wet weather. However, with the appearance of new strains of the late blight pathogen, some strains can be expected to cause late blight at warmer temperatures.

Late blight also occurs on other solanaceous plants such as eggplant, nightshade and occasionally on peppers.

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