 Hi, I'm Todd Weiman with the Cass County Extension Office with NDSU out of Far North Dakota, and we're gonna talk today about planting stiff neck garlic. This was grown locally, and if you're wondering, well, I don't know where to get garlic, you can talk to your local nursery, and they many times can order plants or bulbs or cloves or what have you for you that you might not think that they could and go from that route. Or you could contact your local Extension Office and see if there's someone that grows it locally if you wanted to go that route also. This garlic does very well here. This is called Spanish Roja, a nice stiff neck garlic that does well here. And what you do simply is to take your hand and break it apart. It's not that hard. They come apart like this. What I like to do with the ones where the outer tunic has come off, I will actually eat that part in whatever I'm making with garlic. Some of you may wonder why I wouldn't plant one that has the outer layer, outer tunic off of it. The outer brown layer is a protective layer for the plant. And by leaving that on, you're giving the plant an advantage over things that might attack it, various fungus or insect, what have you. This gives it a little bit of a shield where this one does not have that. And so that's why I like to plant these and I like to use these for consumption. But where the tunic has stayed on, I will plant that approximately four to six inches deep in some nice loose friable soil, cover it up. Next spring, what I'll have come up there is a broadleaf grass-like plant, which is the garlic. And it will do very well and have an advantage over the ones that are planted in the spring. The garlic that is planted here needs the cold dormancy period to help it to make a nice sized break apart type of a plant versus a solid, almost like an onion type of a bulb that you can get without a cold period. That's all that's to it. Later on, you'll want to remember that you planted it here or put some stakes here with what it is and where you've got it and you'll be ready to go for next year. We planted the garlic last fall in about October timeframe and it grew, some of it came out, some of it didn't come out of the ground. The snow came and now it's spring. We've got a, oh, between a four to six inch growth on the garlic now and that'll really help it throughout the year. You can see that it's coming up very nice. It has a similar look to grass so you gotta kind of watch this so you don't pull it out and think it's a weed. The other thing with the garlic is with the cold period, what happens with that is when you plant it, it's a nice solid one unit type of a piece. The cold period will help to break that apart so that you'll get the clove garlic bulb look that you find in a store versus an onion type of a look. If you don't have the cold period, it doesn't tend to break apart and it'll be just one solid type of a product. At this stage of the garlic, what we have is a harvest stage. How do you know when to harvest it? Oh, I always go by what the plants are looking at, looking like. If you look at the outer leaf of the bottom of the garlic here, you can see that it's brown and that indicates that the plant is ready to harvest. Sometimes people will cut off the scapes at an earlier stage so that they don't form these little tiny garlic bulbules on the top. What that will do, will cause an increase in the bottom part of the garlic called the cloves or the bulbs to be five to 20% larger than they are now. It's not necessary to do it, but if you want a larger garlic product to utilize, this is a good idea to clip these off. These also can be used for planting garlic, but it's a different type of timeline versus a one season. This can be a two or three season type of an ordeal that you increase your garlic tremendously by planting these, but it does take two to three times as long to get the same product. As far as digging garlic, I like to use a potato fork. It does a nice job of digging it out. Some people will ask why don't you just pull it out? Many times the garlic is six inches deep and pulling it out will actually break it off, causing you to have a product that you have to dig out anyways. If you don't have one of these, you can use a shovel, but for ease of digging, this is the route to go. Well, let's get at it. Here's a little garlic cloves, bulbs that we've got. We just dug up here. They would be five to 20% larger had we clipped off this portion of it, but we haven't and so this is what we have. We're going to gently brush off the soil, let them dry down a little bit in the nice shady spot, and then we'll brush off some more soil and then I'll store them till about October or this fall and I'll peel these apart then and plant them. And also at that time, I will eat some of them, but I prefer to keep the largest ones for planting for next year and eat the smaller ones and go from there. At this stage, I'm going to take them and brush them off after they've dried down for maybe a day or so and the dirt is dry. I'm not a really big into washing them off unless I have to. They seem for me to keep better when you just brush the dirt off and I'll do that, I'll just stick them in the shade, let the dirt dry off and after that, I'm going to store some of them until about a month or so when we plant them again, start up again, eat some of the smaller ones. The larger ones will keep for planting. One thing to know too is there's different types of garlic. This is a stiff neck garlic called Kilarney. It does very well here, as you can see and there are some silver necks and the silver necks, just from my experience, haven't done as well or not as well at all compared to the stiff neck side are here. This is a stiff neck called Kilarney. Very impressed with it and as you can see, it has a nice, beautiful, kind of a light purplish color to it.