I have never removed my straw mulch. I let the garlic do its thing. Last year we had a lot of rain during the bulbing and hardening-off period (the worst timing possible). I delayed harvest as long as I could but finally ended up digging the bulbs out of the mud because the cloves started separating from the stems on some bulbs (which you really want to avoid). The crop cured fine and stored well.

Depending on your soil type, if you remove the mulch now the hot summer sun hitting that wet soil could turn it into cement and make it hard to dig the bulbs later on.

I would bet a nickel that your mulched bulbs will end up larger and better developed than your neighbor's unmulched bulbs.

My opinion is to leave it be or experiment by removing the mulch from half your bed for a scientific comparison. If you do the experiment, then please let us know the results. :-)

Best of luck!
-Tom

Byron,
Wow, that's a lot of garlic. You could try pulling some off of a small portion & see if you like results.

Soon enough our dry summer will come & you can harvest in July. Then you could plant a fall/winter crop of cool season vegs.

Corrine

Thanks, Corrine. You can see in my other thread (There may be a garlic harvest yet) that I did pull a couple of the early ones and one is close and the other still needs a couple of weeks or so...