Yam harvest - Winter 2016

There have been a few frosts and the yams have died back, so it's time to start harvesting before the grubs eat them all.  Last year's harvest was a debacle and the grubs got most of them.

I planted late in January, as I had read that they don't really start growing until late anyway.  Previous years I've put them in, in the Spring.  But it doesn't seem necessary.  I can't find the photos on flickr, so labelled and uploaded them.

2016-01-07: The bed has been dug and 90% of the stones put aside.  The yams saved from last weeks harvest are sitting there in the egg cartons.  They're survived the Winter pretty well, and the ones with cuts or damage were dipped in ash which seemed to do the trick.

2016-01-07: The yams all planted out.

2016-01-07: The netting has been laid down to prevent the free-ranging chickens from scratching the beds out, and a covering of hay has been scattered over top.

The bed pre-harvest today.  Not bad looking considering the one time it was weeded, and perhaps two times it was watered.  The problem with weeding was that pulling out the grass or whatever the weeds were, would easily pull out the yam roots.  So it wasn't really possible to weed without damaging the crop.

Just pulling the netting off pulled out some of the better yams.

The recipient of the yams doing his own cleaning with the sieve I bought on recommendation from Rowan.

And the cleaned yams.  I picked out 12 of the best and put them in a cupboard in an egg carton for next Spring's planting.  I'll probably pick at least another two dozen as I harvest more.

Not bad for just the effort of one light weeding, perhaps two waterings (the Spring, Summer and Autumn were not that dry here), and the harvest of course.

Unharvested garlic results

I'd heard someone say that if you didn't harvest a head of garlic, what would grow would be small due to the lack of space the clustered bulbs would have.  I noticed in late Summer/Autumn 2015 that I'd missed some (likely I'd been pulling them out of the sandy bed by  their stalks and the stalks broke off) as they's already started sprouting.

So, returning to that bed, when I was down to the last two "volunteers" I decided to photograph them.  There are two resprouted heads here.

And here are the heads dug up and laid out in approximately the same places.

The head on the left produced small and poxy heads.  And the head on the right produced decent sized heads.  My vague recollection was that out of the eight or so "volunteer" heads, only two were small and poxy, and the other six were decent sized. I wish I'd been more proactive in taking photos to be sure.

Harvesting the garlic

The Summer 2015 garlic harvest was rather lackluster, likely because of a lack of water. Winter 2015 I planted a lot more, and made sure to water it at least once a week if it hadn't rained that week.

The following photo is of the main bed with perhaps 2/3 to 3/4 of the garlic still to harvest.  The garlic along the far right hand side and end of the bed, seemed to sprout months after the near end.

A decent sized head.  It rained for several days before the photo, and this bed is still mucky, so most heads are hard to clean of dirt.

This bin contains all the garlic that remained in the bed above, and a few more that were lost in Summer 2015's harvest and regrew in that garden bed.

The garlic that sprouted and put leaves out earlier grew to a decent size.  I'll set aside the best heads and in Winter 2016 plant at least twice as much.  After all, garlic goes for $20+NZ a kilo here.