During these days, the garlic sector is at its peak activity with the harvesting tasks. Some weeks ago they started to harvest the spring garlic and now the purple harvesting is taking place. Of course, this is the most coveted garlic in the kitchens of Spain and much of the world. In our area, Las Pedroñeras, garlic is the engine of the economy and therefore is the most careful and pampered crop of the area to have a harvest of the highest quality.
On this occasion we visited the Casas brothers (Gabriel, Julián and Juan) in their facilities and fields where the garlic is planted. They are real garlic farmers and live it with a lot of passion. This year they have updated the harvesting machinery and tasks in order to do it much faster and to be able to store the garlic in their warehouses as soon as possible. Here are the details of the process.
First, they use a four-row Zocapi garlic harvester cutter machine that cuts the stem. This machine has an unloading arm that put the garlic in the trailer. These trailers go directly to the warehouse where the garlic is placed on palots (boxes of about 350kg) for further processing. This process consists of drying the garlic and then cutting the roots before delivering them to the Cooperative, which will carry out the final preparation work before selling them in Spain and the rest of the world. One of the big differences of this new harvesting method is that the stem is cut at the time of harvesting and the garlic is not any day in the field after being harvested, so you avoid problems with the rains that can occur in summer sporadically and usually quite torrential and besides avoid problems of theft that are sometimes quite common. In addition, working with garlic in the stores is always much more comfortable than working in the fields where the summer heat is a factor that makes harvesting and cutting tasks very hard.
We show you a video where you can see the complete process of harvesting and we encourage you to consume "Ajo Morado de Las Pedroñeras", which is undoubtedly one of product to stand out from our famous Mediterranean diet.
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