Sure you can march those freshly dug bulbs off to the kitchen and begin using them immediately in your favorite recipes. But if you intend to store your bounty for any length of time it’s important that you first go through the process of properly curing those precious garlic bulbs.

Last month I posted an article describing techniques for providing spring garlic care to the growing plants, today I wanted to continue the discussion with a few comments regarding summertime garlic maintenance chores. Maybe I shouldn’t even use the word maintenance because there really isn’t much to do with garlic during the summer months.

For garlic growers like myself that do all of their garlic planting in the fall, spring is a pretty care free period provided that your garlic is grown in fertile soil and the bed is mulched with a thick layer of shredded leaves or straw.

The gourmet garlic plants have begun sending up their seed stalks which are commonly referred to as garlic scapes. While some garlic growers leave the scapes on the plants, I always remove them as they appear during the early summer months.