Garlic, potatoes, pumpkins and turnips

It's kind of hard to believe it's going on mid-July. I was talking to Marge and commented that the potatoes need to be dug, the onions are fixing to need to be pulled, the corn needs to be picked, and the garlic dug. Seems like summer just began and, dog gone, it's rolling on by.

If you planted garlic, then keep an eye on it. I put a reminder on my phone calendar to check the garlic the last two weeks of June and first couple weeks in July. If you wait too long to dig your garlic, all the layers of protection will dissolve around the garlic bulbs, and they will kind of decay. There seems to be a fine line between picking too early and too late.

Look at the leaves and the stem going down in the ground. If the leaves are browning up and the stem is turning brown and beginning to die, it's time to either check it or dig it. You can try pulling the garlic bulb, but I wouldn't. I'd dig. This way you won't bruise the garlic bulb. When dug up, check the bulb. If you can see the garlic cloves, I'd proceed to dig it all. Marge and I dug quite a bit of ours. After digging, I tie six to eight garlic stems together and hang in the shop to dry.

When the potato plant is beginning to die and brown up, I'd think about digging the potato plant. I usually run the shovel, and Marge pulls on the plant. When we do this, most of the time the potatoes hang on to the plant, and it works better for us. Be careful not to bruise the potatoes by throwing them or bumping them. We dig ours and leave them for several days in our garden carts in the shade to dry.

Once dry, we kind of rub them and get most of the dirt off. We never wash our potatoes. Marge does when we are about to eat some, but not before. We then store our potatoes in a room in the shop that we keep cooled down to the upper 60s. It seems to work for us. We had enough potatoes left from last summer to plant all of our potatoes this spring. We sort ours for size. We go from the small, 50-cent size up to the baker. We grew Yukon Gold and a red variety. Not sure of its name.

We plant onion plants usually the end of March or the first couple weeks in April. We grow bulbing onions that can get up to 4 to 5 inches in diameter. Both the Texas 1015s and the Candies are mighty fine onions. When the onion plant starts a seed head at any time, we pull it and eat it. If for some reason an onion plant's top is dying, we pull it. At some point -- about now for us -- the onion tops will begin to fall over, which means the stem is slowly dying.

When we have the time, we will go ahead and pull all the big onions and tie say six to eight onion tops together. We then hang them in the shop and let them dry. My shop runs north-south, and I have a door in each end. So pretty much all summer there is a breeze blowing through the shop. So when we hang them, they are out of the sun and a few degrees cooler than anywhere else. Watch them because some of the onions will just go ahead and spoil. Most will dry up and store for several months in our cool room.

Pumpkins take usually about 120 days to grow from seed to pumpkin. Halloween is Oct. 31, so go back about four months and you have the perfect time to plant pumpkin seed, which is now. I like to plant my turnips mid-August. This way they will come up and in about a month or so I can pick some turnips tops. Then towards the end of September and first part of October there will be real turnips to enjoy.