You might want to braid the softnecks so you can hang them. In your case, you will need to clean them up. I clean and remove roots and excess foliage before drying/curing. Haven't had any problems with that method yet. Same for the hardnecks, except that you cut off the cane a couple of inches above the tops of the cloves and store them in mesh onion or citrus bags. I store them in my second bathroom (in the shower stall, actually) which is only used occasionally for guests and has no outside windows and is not particularly damp. If we do have a run of damp weather (such as right now) I will put a small fan in that room to keep the air moving. Right now, the softnecks are done and hanging in the BR and the hardnecks were taken on the 4th and are hanging on their new rack in the "sewing room." As far as the heat in your home, I don't know how to help you with that. Up here we worry about being warm enough all year long.

The small bulb you dug up will not continue to grow this season, and if you leave it in the ground each clove will sprout to make a cluster of small garlic bulbs next year. You can cure it and replant the small individual cloves in the Fall, but small cloves yield small bulbs. I would just pull it again and use it in cooking. Hopefully your other plants will yield larger bulbs. Pull them when you have 2-3 green leaves left. You might want to consider some Porcelains for next years crop, like German White or Music. These tend to make larger bulbs and have pretty good storage properties. And if you get some decently large bulbs from your other plants this year, save the largest and use them for seed next year as well. Replanted garlic cloves tend to give larger bulbs each year as they acclimate to your garden. Here is a great place to buy garlic for your Fall planting: http://www.wegrowgarlic.com/catalog TomNJ

In the legume family, in general dried beans are higher in protein than dried peas. I think soybeans are the highest,followed by lentils, followed by dried beans in general (black beans, pinto beans, garbanzo beans, etc.) and then by dried peas. In the pea category, dried southern peas (blackeyes, pinkeye purplehulls, zipper peas, crowder peas, etc.) are a little higher in protein than dried green peas (English peas, etc.). It goes without saying that any bean or pea harvested and eaten as a snap bean or as a edible podded pea or as a shelly green bean or pea has less protein than those grown to maturity and harvested dry because at the green stage they have not yet fully developed the proteins that will develop before you harvest them as dried peas/beans. I've grown most of the bean varieties offered by SESE but I grow them as snap beans or as shelly beans(particularly lima beans) at the green stage but not as dried beans, and they produce just fine in spring and fall, but most flower and set beans poorly in mid-summer because the heat impedes their pollination. Pretty much any bean variety I ever have grown, excluding runner beans which also have trouble in high heat, will produce well with only minimal irrigation as long as the temperatures don't go too far above about 90 degrees. At 90 degrees, blossom drop often becomes a problem. I don't grow beans or peas to the dried bean or pea stage because both are so inexpensive to buy in bulk at the grocery store that it does not make any logical sense to me to devote a lot of garden space to growing them and then devote a lot of time to shelling them, only to have a relatively small harvest as a result. When you grow beans to the dry stage, you are discarding the dry pods and keeping the dry beans/peas and it is amazing how a big bucket of bean or pea pods gives you relatively few peas/beans (by weight or volume) once shelled compared to all the empty, dried pods you throw on the compost pile. I don't like spending all that time growing and harvesting them only to keep 5% of the plant to eat while composting the rest, but that's just me. I simply like the maximum production from the soil we've spent years improving, and raising beans or peas to the dry stage gives us a smaller harvest overall than harvesting them and eating them as snap peas or snap beans, although the same harvest if eating them as green shellies. Drought tolerance is in the eyes of the beholder to a certain extent because there are many kinds of drought. Beans or peas that grow and produce well in moderate or severe drought might not grow and produce nearly as well once your area advances to extreme or exceptional drought. The beans that have produced best for me in periods of extreme or exceptional drought are Rattlesnake, Worchester Indian Red Lima and Violet's Multicolored Butter Beans. All southern peas produce very well in heat and drought. Dawn

I've done OK. I get enough to last me until next harvest... and we love garlic. This fall will be the first year that I will be able to plant my own seed. They are in the refrigerator now for an October planting date. You might want to look at http://forums.gardenweb.com/discussions/3024807/garlic-experiment-results?n=6 and http://forums.gardenweb.com/discussions/3943934/another-year-of-florida-garlic-in-the-kitchen?n=12  The picture is from last winter. It is some of the 10 week chill plants from the 10/12 week chill split. Shallots in the background.