2025-26 Growing Season

The growing was tricky with cold spells and all the May rains

XL Broadleaf Czech on the Louisville, KY braiding board, #18 $36

Three Growers in 2026

I was delighted to welcome new growers John and Kim D’Amato in Taylorsville, KY for the 2025-26 crop. They joined grower Barbara Johnson in McKee, KY and me with my beds in the Shelby Park Community Garden, Louisville, KY. We planted a total of 362 cloves of five garlic varieties. Broadleaf Czech, Inchellium Red, and a new variety from Allicin’s Ranch SEED, Nootka Rose are all softnecks. Music is the only hardneck variety we grew for the 2026 crop. Our efforts yielded 311 plants during harvest, an 86% yield. I think that’s great! Some seed cloves aren’t viable and some patches of my Louisville plants became overgrown with poke while I was out of town. The garlic could not compete with the vigorous, quick-growing weed that sapped the nutrition from the soil and the sunshine from the leaves. Lesson learned: stay in town with the crop in order to weed every week so the garlic plants have a chance of producing their best crop.

Spring Rains

The spring rains near to harvest time were vexing to us growers. The seed companies I buy from to replenish my homegrown seed recommend “withholding water” from the plants during the last 3-4 weeks before harvest while the plants grow their bulbs. Unfortunately, these were very wet weeks during May and early June.

So all of us growers, sometimes frantically, covered the growing plants under plastic when the rains descended on us and opened the plants to the sun and breezes when the rain passed during those 4 weeks. Unfortunately, we were all too occupied protecting the plants to take pics of our low tunnels.

Throughout those weeks when the plants were “bulbing,” each of us kept checking the bulbs to determine when the moment for harvest arrived for each variety.

**McKee, KY June 5-6 and 19 harvest curing in Monticello garlic workshop June 22, 2026**

**Broadleaf Czech SEED braids, McKee—> next year’s crop**

In all three Kentucky locations, we growers faced the challenges of cold winter temperatures and recurring spring rains too close to harvest.

I didn’t find such a succinct summary for Louisville, Taylorsville, and McKee, KY since none of these have an office of The National Weather Service. Still, south west of us in Paducah, KY, The National Weather Service summarized the 2025-2026 winter weather:

“Temperatures averaged slightly below normal by 0.5 to 1 degree. December averaged near normal, January was 3 to 4 degrees below normal, and February was 1 to 2 degrees above normal. By far the coldest stretch of the winter season was from January 18th through February 1st. This two week period was the 5th coldest such period on record in Paducah and finished in the top 10 coldest for all of our climate sites. We had several extremely warm periods during the winter, including Dec 23-28, Jan 6-9, Feb 16-20, and Feb 27-28. High temperatures reached the 60s and 70s during these periods and several record highs and warm lows were broken.

“Precipitation was much drier than normal, with the majority of our region experiencing their driest winter on record. Amounts for the 3 month period were only 2 to 4” in most locations. A few areas observed 4 to 5”, with these primarily confined to southern portions of west Kentucky along with southwest Indiana…. The highest observed amount in our area was 5.50” at the Todd County Kentucky mesonet station (5 miles south of Elkton). Normal precipitation in a winter season is 9 to 13”, so we were roughly 5 to 9” below normal across the Quad State. January was our wettest month, but it was still 1 to 3” drier than normal.

“Snowfall averaged above normal across the northern two thirds of the region…. A major winter storm occurred January 24-25, which produced widespread amounts ranging from 4 to 14”. This event produced much of our seasonal snowfall, but there were some light accumulations in the 1st half of December.”

Watching for the Harvest

On Monday, May 18, from Barb in McKee, KY: “Garlic update. Music making bulbs and scapes. Minimal bulbs on Nootka Rose. Inchellium Red and Broadleaf Czech are doing well. Except for Nootka, I believe the others will be ready soon.”

Garlic braids