We harvested our garlic around July 2nd this year. I haven't harvested this much garlic all at once, so I tried a couple different approaches. I tried using a pitch fork to loosen the soil, but the soil was too hard. The soil was so dry that large cracks had formed. The pitch fork approach might still work with different soil conditions. Next, I tried a drain spade which worked pretty well. The soil came up in clumps of dirt with the garlic in the center. I tried getting closer to the garlic in order to have smaller clumps, but I think I ended up bruising a few bulbs. Next year, I'll make sure to put some ground cover around the garlic to prevent soil from drying out.
Once harvested, we tied the garlic in bunches of 10 and hung them in our garage to dry for about 3 weeks. I had a fan on a timer blowing air against them. We also opened our garage when we woke up and closed it before bed to ensure good airflow and prevent overheating.
Once the garlic dried out enough, we bundled them up to hang in our basement. We watched videos and read articles on how to braid garlic. It was very difficult to do with hard-neck garlic. We ended up just tying them in such a way that the bulbs weren't squished together. This was going in our basement, so we didn't care how it looked.
The total harvest was ~100 hard-neck bulbs and ~20 soft-neck bulbs. We started with about 25 hard-neck bulbs and 4-5 soft-neck bulbs. I'm pretty happy with the 400% yield and will save the biggest bulbs to be planted this fall.
