When I first heard that over forty people were coming to the farm today to help harvest garlic, I couldn’t understand why. Two days a week the two farmers, two other interns, and I harvest everything we grow on our own. Sure it usually takes over six hours to gather everything together on harvest days, but somehow the five of us always manage to get it done. I came to the garlic harvest today to find out what all the fuss was about.
What I discovered was that the reason the garlic harvest requires so many people is because there are so many steps to the process. First, the garlic needs to be pulled out of the ground, since the bulbs we eat are the root of the plant. The bulbs we pull out are fresh garlic, and can be eaten the way they are. However, dried garlic keeps much longer, and so all of the all of the stems were to be hung to dry from the barn.
In order to do this, we had to first clean all of the bulbs and then tie them together with string in groups of five. When this was done, we loaded all of the bundles onto the pick up truck and drove them over to the barn, where we hung them in rows of laundry lines across the ceiling.
In just a few weeks the garlic will be dried out so we can give it out to our members. Until then, the scent of garlic will remain in the barn. Hopefully, it won’t remain quite as long on me.
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