This morning, I cleaned my garlic and prepared it for storage. As usual, I made a braid from the Transylvania softneck garlic, but this time, I added strawflowers for decoration.

It is my first time growing strawflowers in my garden plot, and I am growing them specifically for this purpose. They just started to bloom, so there will be many more flowers in the next weeks and months. I suspect the final garlic braid will look much more colorful than this first version as I will be adding more flowers.

I also cleaned the Red Russian hardneck garlic. I will leave the stems a bit longer for another couple of weeks before I cut them short. I just want to be sure they are completely dry. Those will then be stored in an open crock in the pantry and will be used up first as they do not keep as well as the softneck garlic. As usual, I saved the largest heads as seed garlic for fall planting – two heads for each type.

Overall, I put 2 lbs. 3 oz. of softneck garlic (17 heads) and 1 lb. 15 oz. of hardneck garlic (15 heads) into storage. One of the hardnecks may have been a softneck, but to be sure, I placed it with the hardnecks to be used up first. 36 heads were harvested overall, from 35 planted.