Spring Planted Garlic

Yesterday I picked the 3 garlic cloves that I planted in the top bed.  I only planted 3 cloves of music that I had forgotten about in the cellar from last year.  The cloves that were planted were all different sizes.  The plant at the back had the largest clove and the ones in the front were smaller.  As I mentioned last week, I have been trying to decide when the best time to harvest garlic is.  In the picture below you can see that each plant is at a different stage of maturity, so I decided to pick all 3 so that I could see which one looked the best.

This is a picture of the largest garlic plant.  The bottom 3 leaves were completely dead and the tips of all leaves were dead. 

This is another picture of all 3 plants; it starts with the smallest and greenest plant on the left to the largest and most dead plant on the right.  The plant on the far left is almost completely green still and could have used more time to ripen up.

This is the close up of the largest bulb.  As you can see it has started to breakout of its wrapper.  This is detrimental to the storage life of the bulb and means that I left it in the ground too long.  The wrapper has started to deteriorate providing less protection for the bulb.

The bulb in the middle is just about the perfect ripeness from what I have been reading.  It does only have 1 ½ dead leaves but it has a full bulb with outer wrappers starting to dry.  This is going to be the look I want for all of the bulbils that are still in the garden.  I might let some of them wait until the bottom 2 leaves are dead along with a couple leaf tips, but we will see.

The following pictures are closeups of the 3 plants:

These are the shallots that have been drying in the blacksmith shop.  I figured it was time to cut the tops off of them and put them in storage.