Shadowing Practice: HUGE Elephant Garlic! - Learn English Speaking with Video

got a nice bright sunny morning here it's gonna be another

warm day it looks like the 10 -day forecast is pretty

strong as far as heat without a lot of rain and

so it's actually a good time to be starting to think about harvesting garlic

if the garlic is ready right now we're at july 11th about a week

or two weeks earlier than we've harvested in the past but it's also been

a lot more intense sun

and warmth overall good amount of rain a little bit a little ways ago

and we're drying out

so we want to get this garlic out there's an intersection

here of it's the right time as far as the leaves

which i want to talk about in a moment

that it's good warm dry weather so

that the curing process can begin in a good way

which i'll try to share a little in this video

but we'll make another video talking about our system for curing

garlic at scale we've got about five thousand six thousand heads

in the field here elephant garlic will be the main one

that i focus on first and let me explain why i'm going to be doing

that today you can see that it's starting to yellow down quite a bit

so the general rule of thumb

when it's time to harvest garlic is you're looking for about a third

or more of the leaves to look yellow

or dried down it normally starts from the bottom

and works its way up these dry down in a slightly

different pattern this might be a little bit of water stress

or pest stress i'm not sure i'll have to dig

and see but this is a block of some particularly large elephant cloves that were planted with generous spacing, lots of mulch, lots of compost, and well weeded.

They should be some of the nicer ones that we harvest from the field, so I want to make sure they get out before there's any losses.

I've got the trailer attached to our electric car, and so I've got some tools to work with here.

I've got some Japanese bananas.

Maybe they'll go into the bed, we'll see, but I've got some different seeds to follow up.

I'll talk about that in a little bit.

I've got this little tilther.

It's an electric rototiller, but it really is not very powerful.

It just basically softens and loosens soil so that I can get a really nice seed bed.

Part of doing the garlic right now before it gets even drier, even hotter, is I really want to make sure there's enough soil moisture to set this to parsnips

and beets and other fall crops, which we'll chat about.

I've got our bread crates because what we'll do is cut the stalks and the roots off from these as we go.

And then I'm going to use my five -tine garden fork.

I've talked about this in the past.

This is really nice at decompacting the soil as I go.

So I'm going to get in there, loosen the soil, pull a couple heads, and see what we've got.

Tiny sample set here.

I just got a few out.

Seems like it should not be too, too hard to do this digging today, and I'd say those bulbs are decent size.

I've got the hand of a six foot tall person, and that is the size of that bulb with a few cloves in there that are really huge.

Something I forgot about this morning, but I should have remembered.

There are these little propagules on the side.

Elephant garlic is tricky this way.

It's got these little things we call elephant nuts, and when these fall off into the soil, it's cool in that it's a propagule.

It's a clonal propagule, and that'll turn into an elephant orb in a year and then a full bulb later on.

But I actually do want to kind of collect these

because I'm not sure

that I want elephant garlic to just randomly show up in this bed next year it's a little bit challenging

that it does that be nice

if we could actually transition the crop fully away from elephant

garlic here just from a disease standpoint i like to move these crops through different beds

so i'm going to grab a little container

and as i collect these knock those off

and try to save them they are a propagation point

so it's something we can offer

so part of all this is we offer garlic seed for sale

and we grow a lot of it for our own eating

so any pathway that allows you to increase their numbers i like to explore

but i want to have a little say in how that happens

so i share my thinking process as i go through this

i got a little container collecting those as they go making

sure the soil is getting knocked off back into the bed

and then laying these out into the sun i'm not going

to leave them here for the day some folks talk about

curing garlic in the sun i feel like all alliums the onions the garlics

when we lay them in the sun for hours

and hours they get what i would call a sunburn it's

like it softens it kind of weakens the skin that's exposed to the sun

so a little bit for surface drying that's great

but we're going to move them we'll trim them down

and get them onto these racks and then into a garage with some good airflow

and i'm just trying to think through my flow as i go i don't know

that i'm going to be able to do this entire block before it's too hot so i'm prioritizing the southern half

and so i'm going to go through

and systematically get everything from the middle to the south right down the whole line

and what that allows me to do is thoroughly finish at least some of the harvest

get one or two rows of seeds in

because what i don't want to do is harvest leave the

soil baking in the sun it takes a lot of effort to get soil to be healthy

and this will cook by the end of today this would just be a light gray

and not be able to germinate seeds it's amazing how fast it goes.

So I want to make sure I don't try to overdo the digging part

and then.. not have the bandwidth and the time to seed this.

So just sharing as I go my thoughts.

The other thing I want to do is as I go really thoroughly hand weed, since the fork is in there, the semi -broad fork is in there,

it's lifting the soil, I can get these perennial weeds out.

They'll go in the walkway for now, and then I can rake them off, draw them back out into the field,

and then use a riding mower with a bagger to collect all the weeds, chop them up finely.

The stalks and the roots will be trimmed off and left here.

All of that can be chopped up.

So if there happens to be allium leaf miner, eggs, or the like, it'll all be into these shredded piles that can then really cook in the sun.

I might try to get them to be like 150, 160 degree cooking compost piles.

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So anyway, I'm going to get back to digging and then I'll share more.

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These are coming out in a way that feels very, very rewarding.

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It's a lot of effort to plant beings like this in the fall

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and mulch and get compost and tend to them and weed them and worry about them and bring them grass clippings.

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And so when they grow to this size, it's so, so lovely.

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There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds about this size.

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And then there are some that are more like this size, which I am very, very satisfied with

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and then periodically there's some little sad friend that's looking like this and it's good to show something like this.

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I see mechanical damage in here maybe

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but I also suspect this might have either been allium leaf miner

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or somebody else somebody who's capable of eating garlic got into this.

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So elephant garlic's a little fragile because it's in the leek family

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and the leeks are a softer bodied allium and can get allium leaf miner and things.

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Long story short this is going to be folded into the trimmings of the roots

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and the stems this whole piece i'm not going to try to save this

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and clean it up i'm going to chop this up real

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fine along with grass clippings along with browns in the form of old hay

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and try to cook this with the rest of the composting process that'll happen later

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and just not try to fold that in

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so it is important whenever you're growing garlic of any type

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hardneck softneck elephant anywhere in between you're looking at the heads as you go

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and trying to get a feel like do I see weird discoloration

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or their soft pockets what's happening here and try to understand

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if there's a disease that's building in your population seeing one random one here I'm like okay

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that I feel sorry for you but you're gonna get chopped up

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and turn into compost

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and feed a different family of crops next year the rest

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of these are looking really really good I'm seeing no significant

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sign of anything to be concerned about just big beautiful mellow elephant garlic head so I'll continue on.

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Our little block is done and I'm about a quarter of the way, a third of the way through the first third of the bed.

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This is slow work and definitely you can see why people move towards using machines for things

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but I like hearing the birds off in the distance.

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This is definitely a community project thing

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so as I'm digging here on my own this morning kind of thinking through the workflow in the process, I'm trying to think through the list of folks that I want to reach out to.

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So if you're in the Ithaca area, Ithaca, New York, and you want to plug in for a day and help us with some garlic, take some home, feel free to reach out.

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If you get this around July 11th or 12th of 2026, shoot me an email.

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And yeah, it's a great community harvesting project to work with.

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Something, another note with the elephant garlic, so if you're getting seed from us or others, they have a tendency pretty early on to split their skin.

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So this looks like it could be oh my gosh there's a disease

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or there's this really big deal problem something like this is not going to store extremely well for the winter

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but this will make for an amazing set of cloves for planting this fall they'll be easy to split out

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and something like that one's actually another one that'd be good for seeds

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so we'll either sell this as seed

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or save this for our own planting there's a tendency with elephant garlic to do

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that pretty early on The skin on this is pretty tight all the way around and in nice shape.

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I can snip that up here, snip the roots off, and let this start drying slowly.

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If you have a small number of heads of garlic, either elephant, softneck, or hardneck,

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you can leave the stalks and the roots and just hang them upside down to really gently dry and cure.

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We've made videos about how we hang small numbers or if we had the room.

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We have too much garlic and not enough room, So snipping roots, snipping stalks, and then drying them on racks with some airflow has worked well for us.

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That's my flow with this, but it doesn't mean it's the best practice.

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First tray roughly cut off there.

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I leave a little length on the stem so

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that there's still a little bit more juice to go back down into the bulb and trim the roots.

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But try not to do, so this is wrong.

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I should not have cut into the base plate like that.

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So that was a mistake on my part.

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That's fine.

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We'll either eat that or enjoy it.

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That's an orb right there.

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It's a single monolithic clove, which is pretty special that elephant garlic does that.

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really kind of want to do more like this where i'm trimming but not cutting into the body of the bulb

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and a nice stock i cut it out of bias so

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that more moisture can come off of there and again is

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that best practice universally i'm not going to say

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that at all i think hanging and letting them dry slowly

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if you can is nice maybe might be quite a bit

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better trimmings are right here i'm going to go pass over

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that back and forth with the riding mower and suck all that up chop it mix it with grass

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and compost it hot somewhere.

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We've got a banana in there for fun.

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I think I'm going to actually finish this whole block to the middle.

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It transitions to another type of garlic right around where I stopped digging there.

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So I'm just going to do this one type and then get this seeded.

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So a pretty insignificantly small amount of harvest for a few hours while talking about it in the heat.

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So it feels a little disheartening to think about how many more blocks there are, but it's a wonderful thing that there's

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so much garlic here i appreciate it immensely i just have to get used to the rhythm of it

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and there we go a bunch of elephant nuts there one other quick observation that's worth noting something

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that might happen

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so we use quite a bit of wood chips in our farming practice we use them in the walkway

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and then we move them into the beds

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and here it looks like oh my gosh there's fungal stuff

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happening this garlic is infected with a horrible fungus this This is mycelium almost certainly from the earth around the garlic,

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from the wood chips that are down in there.

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So if you're using a wood chippy, branches, leaves, you know, fungal supporting soil amendment or mulch,

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you might expect to see some mycelium running on the outside of the garlic.

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If it's white and smells sweet, it's probably not fusarium rust.

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I'm not going to say for sure of that, but this doesn't make me nervous.

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It lets me know neat this garlic had a mushroom relationship while it was growing.

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We also are finding lots of worms through the root systems, which is telling me the garlic is actively putting a little bit of juice back into the soil.

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So we'll finish harvesting this block, or I'll finish harvesting this block, get this sown, watered in, labeled, mulched again, and be able to leave the field this morning.

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First part of this bed is done in a nice full contiguous way.

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We've got the banana in the middle there.

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We've got a dahlia on the end, a random milkweed coming up.

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That's cool.

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So I'm going to work the middle of this with a little bit of compost from the chicken yard.

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And so far, this is the winner for size overall in here.

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It's a very significant head of elephant garlic.

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You can see one of the cloves in there, just about the size of a good average or smaller onion, one clove.

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And that's from a bed that got no irrigation whatsoever, no chemical fertilizers, no plastic just compost and lots of sun

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and some space and some good mulch to let the soil life do what it needs to do

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so three full crates will come out of this one block

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it's about maybe four feet wide by about 16 feet long

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that was harvested this morning so let me get them cleaned up

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and in the shade

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and get this ready for the next crop the crate of

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compost from the chicken yard you can see some dark splotches there right through the middle

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because i figure highest fertility in the middle you do your hungriest crops there

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and the nutrient will spread out to the edges over time.

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I'll bring a tripod and show how this thing works.

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It seemed like a silly investment at the time to take soil that has dried out a bit and

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break up the clods just to the depth of where the broad fork, where my garden fork went down.

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So this is not a deep tillage event.

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This is not a soil inversion event.

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It's just breaking up compaction in these clods so

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that fine seeds have a better chance of starting

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and working some nice compost in as well

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so what would be the wrong move is if i did

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that level of disturbance

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and then said all right cool i'm going to come back in a week

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or two and get this sown

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and in fact talking about it right now i'm thinking all right man get the seeds in get them watered

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and get them mulched so what i had with me

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and this is what will be in the center

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and on either side of the center saved seed from some

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parsnips we grew at our ellis hollow home e h parsnip from 2021

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so they are way over sewn in here i'm going to get some soil on top

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and then wet this all down and mulch it

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and then some slightly older detroit dark red beets

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which are flanking either side

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so there'll be some symmetry a parsnip in the middle a good tap rooting high value storage crop

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that i think can come to fruition

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if we get mild weather this fall beets on either side

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and then where it gets a little bit more feral

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and raw and rugged brassica tubers do incredibly well in not finely prepped soil

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so black spanish round radish on either side

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and then we'll have this nice rainbow of deep big radish

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beets parsnip beets radish we have a nice relationship with a local amish nursery

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and my friend daniel has these containers that he's often getting rid of

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that have organic fish emulsion that he uses for his nursery start.

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So I'm collecting the waste stream from the Amish nurseries

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and we can fill these with rainwater back at our home

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and then transfer that into a little watering can that I got for four bucks at reuse

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and water these little friends in.

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So there's about a thousand or so seeds.

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They are going to get watered first so that I can feel confident that the seed bed they're in is really hydrated, so they're still not covered.

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I'm going to water them really thoroughly first, and then by hand, look for remaining clods of soil.

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That would be nice to break up, and make sure I hide the seeds, and then I'll walk that in, put a little bit of really finely chopped aged hay.

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There's some wads on the sides here, and that should get this ready to be.

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Watered and walked in.

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That was two and a half gallons of rain water.

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That did a all right job.

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Okay, the clods are broken up and put over the seeds that were watered.

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Walked in once more, and now a light mulch of hay.

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It feels like putting in the extra effort

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when we're going into 10 days of no rain

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and approaching 100 degrees that you really need to get the seed bed really prepped, soft, fluffy, seeded, watered, mulched,

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and maybe in a week or so I come back and water once more.

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But for a budget of two

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and a half gallons of rainwater in a $4 watering can carried over in a dumpstered container with about $4 of seed,

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the only stuff in here is labor.

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And it was about 30 minutes.

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If it works out, we might get a bunch of crates of really nice storage crops for the winter.

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We'll see.

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We'll do an update.

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That's enough sun exposure, maybe for me, but mainly for the skin of these elephant garlics.

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I need to bring them back to the shade.

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They'll go on those bread racks, onto a rolling cart, into our garage.

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No direct sun, but there's airflow from our basement up through the top and out.

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And with a solar panel, I could run another fan to kind of stir air around them.

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This dry, open weather like this is really positive for curing garlic.

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It's harder to establish the following seeds or do transplanting

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but it's quite good for the actual harvest of garlic so

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if you have some hot sunny days coming up

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and you can do some work in the morning seed

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and water thoroughly afterwards and get your garlic out of the sun

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and starting to dry you might have a really nice crop

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ahead of you we'll share more as we harvest more of this garlic

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about making it available if you are a member of our channel thank you

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so so much just as a heads up

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we normally offer our seed garlic and our other plants to members first

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and so if that's something

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that would be compelling to you feel free to follow the link to do

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that it's really nice to support us directly

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but we'll come back around to that as we go more garlic to harvest

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but I think that's it for this morning thank you

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so much for enjoying this long meander with me let me know what sort of questions you have

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or concerns how's your garlic coming along if you're in a much warmer place, I suspect you're done.

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And there are some of you in much more northern areas where you're waiting another few weeks.

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Anyway, lots going on in this field.

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We'll do an update as time allows.

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Take care.

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Harvesting Elephant Garlic: A Practical Dialogue for English Learners

The video follows a gardener on a sunny July morning, discussing the timing and process of harvesting elephant garlic. With details about weather, plant health, and tools, the dialogue is rich in everyday vocabulary and natural speech patterns, making it ideal for english speaking practice. The conversational tone and specific tasks (like checking leaf color or using a garden fork) provide context that helps learners connect language to real-world actions.

Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication

"General rule of thumb": A common way to describe a practical guideline (e.g., "A general rule of thumb for cooking rice is 2:1 water to rice.")
"Drying out": Refers to soil or plants losing moisture (e.g., "The plants are drying out—we need to water them.")
"Curing process": The act of drying food to preserve it (e.g., "The curing process for herbs takes about a week.")
"Decompacting the soil": Loosening hard soil (e.g., "Using a fork helps with decompacting the soil in the garden.")
"Generous spacing": Planting with plenty of room between plants (e.g., "Tomatoes need generous spacing to grow well.")

Step-by-Step Shadowing Guide for This Video

To master the dialogue using the shadowing technique, follow these steps: 1. Listen and repeat short segments: Pause the video every 5-10 seconds and mimic the speaker’s tone, pace, and pronunciation. Focus on phrases like "it's gonna be another warm day" to practice casual contractions. 2. Emphasize key vocabulary: Words like "propagules" or "tilther" are specific, but the speaker explains them in context—repeat these to improve clarity. 3. Match intonation: Notice how the speaker rises in pitch when asking questions (e.g., "I'll have to dig and see but...") and falls when making statements. 4. Practice in real time: Once comfortable, play the video and speak along without pausing. This builds fluency and trains your brain to process English quickly. 5. Record and compare: Record yourself shadowing, then listen back to identify areas for improvement (e.g., vowel sounds in "harvest" or "moisture").

This video is a great resource for learn english with videos because it combines practical content with natural speech. Use it as a shadowing site to refine your pronunciation and gain confidence in everyday conversations.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	were planted · is cut · will be trimmed
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	we've harvested · I've talked · We've made
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	clove, which is · systems, which is

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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