Of Garlic and Lessons Learned...

[Zeedman]

Garlic was one of the few bright spots in my garden this year... and now that I've opened all bulbs to prepare for planting & dehydration, I'm finally getting around to posting photos.

German White (hard neck / porcelain type) Consistently large bulbs which break open easily. Large cloves with no doubles, and good clove skins. Over 4# from 25 cloves planted.


Krasnodar Red (hard neck / marbled purple stripe type) Large to very large bulbs. Large cloves, with occasional double cloves. This rebounded incredibly well after deer (and veggie poachers ) destroyed half of the crop last year. About 3.5# from 25 cloves planted.

 

[ducks4you]

WOW! I thought deer hated garlic!

 

[Zeedman]

2024 garlic, continued:

Ron's Single Center (a.k.a. Trueheart) (soft neck / artichoke type). Very sensitive to wet feet, but bulbs can be very large if soil is well drained. Consistently large cloves with tight skins even in the center, with very few of the 'mini cloves' so common in most soft neck garlics - so the increase is very high. Lost a few plants in Spring, but over 3# from 25 cloves planted.

Special Idaho (hard neck / rocambole type) Very large bulbs, but fairly difficult to break open. The cloves are highly variable in size, with double (or even triple) cloves on nearly every bulb. The clove skins are very loose, and frequently break open during separation, so storage is poor. So why is this my favorite garlic? Because it has great winter hardiness, and consistently produces huge bulbs, regardless of bad weather or weed pressure. It even produces large bulbs if the scapes are cut late, and decent sized bulbs even if the bulbils are left on. This is probably the closest thing to fool-proof garlic! Those loose skins are easy to remove for drying, and it makes a great garlic powder. About 4# from 25 cloves planted.


Carpati (soft neck / artichoke type) Large bulbs (potentially very large in a good year) but very temperamental from year to year. Much like "Ron's" above, there are very few 'mini cloves', even in the center. It bears less than Ron's above, and I am trying to go down to only one variety per type; but Carpati has a unique characteristic that makes it worth keeping - it signals when it is ready to harvest. The tops fall over when mature, much like onions (Ron's doesn't do this). And because Carpati is usually the first variety to be ready, it tells me when to start checking all the others.

The total harvest weight for the 5 varieties listed above was about 16#, from 115 cloves planted (in a 3' wide bed, 5 per foot in staggered rows). I dropped 3 varieties this year: Georgian Crystal (porcelain), Estonian Red (marbled purple stripe) and Vic's (rocambole)... those were all given away, but probably were another 3-4 pounds total.

I still haven't planted for 2024/2025; but since the freeze is late this year & the ground is still soft, there is still plenty of time. I intend to plant 150 cloves (30 each of the 5 listed here) but this may be my last large-scale planting.

 

[flowerbug]

yes @Zeedman i understand scaling down from larger plots. before i was planting up to 200 large cloves and then a few hundred various sizes for green garlic early harvests. now i'm planting about 30 total and only the one type. i don't want to complicate my life any more than it already is.

 

[flowerbug]

this morning i took apart the garlic bulbs i had left to get cloves for planting. a few months ago when i'd take some bulbs apart they were in excellent condition. i didn't store them any differently than i have in the past. a lot of them were rotted through and empty (about half) and most of the rest had some damage from rot that i don't really want to plant from them but i'm going to anyways. three bulbs were in ok condition and a few cloves from each of them will be replanted and then i have some bulbules from the scapes to use for restarting smaller bulbs but those won't give me a sizeable harvest next summer or maybe even the year after. so i'm going to cut away the rotting top ends and hope there is enough energy left in what is below that can give me garlic for next year, but i'm not sure i can count on it, so some of them i'll leave alone even if it does have a bit of brown rot on the top and hope it works out anyways.

and here i thought that the bad year i had two years ago was just a one off due to the weather but perhaps we had two bad weather years in a row for garlic or i could just be planting them in the wrong garden? anyways i'm going to plant in three different gardens today and plant a mix of garlic cloves (left-alone, somewhat ok, cut rot off and bulbules) and hope that next year this is all a bad memory...