Curing Garlic and Onions So They Keep

A bad garlic year usually happens in the first fortnight after lifting, not in the cellar in January.

The bulbs come out of the ground looking fine. They go into a crate or a corner of the shed, or they sit in a heap because it rained and there was no time. And then some months later half of them are soft, and the conclusion is that the variety does not store well, or the cellar is wrong, or it was a bad season.

Usually it was the fortnight. Curing is the step that converts a fresh bulb into a storable one, and it is the step most easily skipped because the bulbs look perfectly good without it.

What curing actually does

It dries the outer layers and the neck into a sealed, papery barrier, and it lets the bulb’s surface wounds close.

That barrier is what keeps moisture in and rot organisms out for months. An uncured bulb has a green, moist neck — an open channel straight into the centre. It will keep for weeks. It will not keep for a winter.

Lifting at the right moment

Garlic is commonly lifted when roughly a third to a half of the leaves have browned. The leaves correspond to the wrapper layers, so waiting until everything is brown means the wrappers have already begun to break down in the soil, and split wrappers do not store. Too early and the bulb has not sized up.

Onions are ready when the tops fall over naturally and the necks soften. Let most of the bed go over on its own rather than bending them; forcing it does not improve the outcome.

Lift gently with a fork, well clear of the bulbs, and do not knock the soil off hard. Bruising is invisible now and is exactly where the rot starts in December. Brush loose soil off with your hand and leave the rest — it comes off easily once cured.

The cure itself

Three requirements, and the third is the one people get wrong.

Warm. Ordinary summer warmth is fine.

Airy. This is the real requirement. Moving air on all sides — hung in bunches, laid on a rack or a slatted bench, spread on mesh. Not in a solid crate, not in a heap, not in a bucket.

Shaded. Airflow yes, direct sun no. Sun scalds the outer layers, and scalded tissue is damaged tissue.

Leave the tops on while curing; they carry moisture out of the bulb. Two to four weeks, and the test is mechanical rather than calendar-based: the neck is dry and tight, and the outer wrappers rustle. A neck that still feels soft or cool is not done.

Then trim, sort and store

Once cured: trim roots to about a centimetre, cut tops down to an inch or two — or braid, which is genuinely practical as well as decorative because it keeps air moving.

Then sort ruthlessly. Anything soft, bruised, split-wrappered or with a thick neck goes into the eat-first basket for the kitchen, not into storage. One rotting bulb in a crate takes its neighbours with it, and the sort is the cheapest insurance there is.

Store cool, dark and dry with air movement. Not sealed, not in plastic, not in the fridge.

The record that explains a bad year

That last line, written in March, is what closes the loop. Two years of it and you can tell whether the variety is the problem, whether the wet cure in the year it rained cost you, and how long your storage actually holds — which is the number that decides how much to plant.

Without it, a poor storage year is a mystery every time, and the same mystery each time.

The Harvest Vault has the storage pages for exactly this — what went in, in what condition, and what came back out — alongside the inventory. The free Inventory & Loop Log covers the count on one page.

This month

If the tops are going over, lift on a dry day and get them onto a rack with air on all sides before you do anything else with them.

Then leave them alone for a fortnight and check the necks, not the calendar.

— Hadley