Tasmanian garlic harvest a few weeks late as a result of cold weather in winter

Nevil Reed, who has been farming garlic for over 12 years, and said they normally harvest garlic in the week before Christmas, however, harvest had been delayed by a few weeks.

"We have scaled right back because we had a really bad year last year - it's quite a difficult job with garlic in Tasmania," Mr Reed said.

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"Our climate can vary so much and can change so quickly, so we've just scaled back to growing a smaller amount of the premium product.

"It's a very popular crop and a lot of our businesses seed garlic for the home gardeners," he said.

"Everybody likes to grow the Tassie purple, it's such a beautiful big fat juicy cloth."

Mr Reed, a lifelong farmer, said Tasmanian garlic had a robust flavour that was nothing like imported garlic which has been through cold storage and fungicidal treatments.

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"From the time it's harvested, it's still alive, going through an ageing process till it gets to autumn, then it will start to form shoots inside and get ready to grow in the next season," he said.

"We like a nice warmish summer cooling off in autumn which helps stimulate the garlic, that produces the shoots to grow and then we would like it to rain just at the right time so we can get the garlic up and growing nicely".

Despite the late start to the season, Mr Reed said he was optimistic, but not real hopeful.

"In the last 10 years, the seasons have become quite unpredictable and harder to pick," he said.

"Everything we do is not always the highest production, but everything we do has flavour and texture and keeping quality, because mass produce doesn't keep well because it is grown so quickly."