Fall planted hardneck growing single bulb

[svalli]

I was crawling on my hands and knees yesterday to remove all weeds growing from the planting holes on the black plastic on my garlic beds. The second bed has quite many varieties, which I had only few to plant and some of those are not so hardy. To my surprise I noticed that none of the Primor variety had formed scapes and most of them were falling over. When weeding one of the bulbs came up and it has quite large round on it. I have seen some hardnecks grow this way, if the planted cloves were small, but as far as I remember, these were not so small and none of this variety seems to be growing a scape and cloves this year. The planting stock were cloves, which I grew last summer.

We had no rain for a month until last week, but this year my vegetable plot is in a location which stays moist and I have watered it couple of times. We also got couple of really warm weeks in end of May after a cool spring so the weather has not been typical. All other varieties are still growing as expected, so the drought or warm weather should not had caused this. Primor is a common commercial variety from France, so if it grows like this I will not plant it again, because there are many more varieties, which grow well here.

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