I ran out of garlic in the kitchen, so I headed out to the barn to clean this year’s garlic and bring it in. This year, I have two different varieties – Rocombole – purple, hard central stalk with little edible garlicky bulbs at the top of the stalk and Takahue – reddish cloves and soft green tops when growing.

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I harvested the garlic from the garden just after Christmas and then hung it in the barn to cure.
This morning, I cut the garlic heads from the stalks and put them in the wagon before wheeling them to a sunny spot for cleaning.
To clean the garlic, I cut most of the roots off the heads, rubbed the soil from the roots and removed the dirty outer layer of skin.

I ended up with 41 heads of Takahue and 42 of Rocombole – I planted 50 of each. I have set 5 Takahue and 15 Rocombole heads aside for planting. Of the two, I like the look of the rocombole heads the most – they appear to have consistently large cloves. There are probably less cloves per head as there is a single layer of large cloves around the hard central stalk as opposed to concentric rings of smaller and smaller cloves in the Takahue.
In the final two photos above, you can see the difference between the two types of garlic.