The garlic harvest is in

All of the garlic in the garden has now been harvested. It was done in two batches: garlic in the main part of the garden was gathered in a couple of weeks ago and those in the veg bags, which were a different variety and matured slightly later, were picked a few days ago.

I had a go at plaiting some of the earlier crop but I had left them to dry and cure for too long and the stems and leaves were too brittle to make a tidy plait.

There are plenty of videos on YouTube showing how to braid garlic. The ones I found most useful were:

Plaiting Garlic (in the Horticultural Channel) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8G0sc0JMLE

Plaiting the garlic crop http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0tartEai7Q

How to braid "Hard Neck" Garlics - Garden Harvest  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2R8McOxz9E4

Blue garlic

One of the garlic bulbs that I harvested from the veg bags has a blue-green area on the outer skins. I've heard of  garlic sometimes turning blue-green when cooked but can't find anything about the outer skin of a garlic bulb going blue. The individual cloves are pure white and when cooked they stay white. The bulbs either side of it in the photo are from the same bag and appear normal. They were grown in soil with some home-made compost and the bag had been watered every 1-2 weeks with a dilute comfrey feed. I can't think of anything that has been added to the veg bag to cause this and, as I said, the others in the same bag look normal. Any suggestions or ideas as to what has caused this are welcome!