Garlic 2019

[bower]

Originally Posted by PhilaGardener

Those holes suggest some sort of insect damage, like garlic maggot, so the problem may be more than wet weather.

Good point - I didn't see any culprits but on your reminder cleaned those up a bit better to make sure no small felon was burrowing inside. To my mind it is obvious insect damage and I always have some - mainly blamed on wireworms, but there was that mystery maggot on the plant I pulled earlier - much too large to be onion maggot though, and not like pics of it online, but no friend of the garlic whatever it was.

So most of those dark holes turned out to be shallow and nobody home. The worst of all, which I couldn't tell, I removed the clove from its bulb and stripped the final clove wrapper, which was damaged and dark spot. Nobody home and the clove inside perfect and unblemished. Gotta love those thick waxy clove wraps. Will be for supper.
The key factor for the 'pink splitting' condition seems to be a serious soaking that gets through multiple wrappers. In the case of the insect damage, it would have provided a pore for moisture to get in and cause the same, soaking, bloating of the tissues, splitting of the affected layers. But the insects - maybe some random beetle grubs? seem to have chowed and moved on.

[taboule]

I'd so much love to grow garlic when I grow up ;-) The few I grew this year ended up small. Will try in earnest next year.

Enjoying this thread very much. I wonder what are some of the more interesting ways that people here eat garlic, especially raw (uncooked) which does more justice to the full flavor of this wonder.

Here's one of my favorite, it's a must have alongside grilled (a bit charred) chicken in middle eastern cuisine. Can be done with one of two bases: either labne (strained yogurt) or soft mashed potatoes.

Basically mash a few cloves of garlic very fine, then blend with 1 cup labne (or mashed spuds), oil and bit of salt, in a food processor until homogenized and fluffy light. It tastes heavenly by itself, on bread and of course grilled meats.

[bower]

Taboule, that sounds delicious. Om nom nom. I like to use a rasp for garlic, so it runs.

[bower]

Well I couldn't wait the whole week. Good excuses, hectic work schedule coming up, etc. They could have gone more than a week but... since it's just for home use, they are fine by me. They were on a tighter spacing this time and all the rain had to wash some nutrients out, so maybe they would never be the biggest I grew. A few more pink stained and split wrapper bulbs, but not many. Lots of small bites though, and I did find a culprit - no surprise, a wireworm tangled up in the roots of one. Very little sign of mites this year - I always look for rusty bits around the roots, but many of them are clean this time which is nice.


Now here is something interesting - these three porcelains, last year I could barely tell one from the other. The differences they seemed to have initially have faded and I wondered if every porcelain would converge on the same size, clove number, etc in one environment. But this year with the wild wet winter and spring has proven otherwise.
PH you mentioned that your Music usually have 6 cloves - ours have always had 4. The one I got from the farm "Argentina" came to us from NS, and it was a very large bulb with usually 6 cloves, however they've been 4 cloves on average since their second year here.

Well this year the Argentina reverted to its true type, with a majority of bulbs having 5,6 or even 7 cloves, and just a few 4's. The Music is true to itself, nearly all 4's with a few 5's.
Bonavista was about even between 4 and 6. It had more dwarfing than the others and more pink - but this might be caused by its position in the bed.
Either way it seems that there is a difference among the porcelain varieties, that may cause them to react differently to environmental stresses. That is kind of cool to know, and makes it worthwhile for me to grow more than one kind.

[Father'sDaughter]

Bower, Those look beautifully pristine!

[bower]

Thanks. I really enjoy taking them down to a clean wrapper. It's therapeutic at my scale, I mean I enjoyed taking a moment to pamper these puppies and makin em nice. But they actually are far from pristine - quite a few have small bites that go through this wrapper and maybe the next. Might affect the keeping, but I think they're good enough to do for awhile. It's all triage, right?

[GoDawgs]

Good job, Bower! Those sure are pretty.

[zipcode]

Looks like a solid crop with nice cloves.
My garlic this year was a failure, small bulbs with even smaller cloves. The fault is with the (fairly expensive) company called Kiepenkerl which sold virused planting garlic. They say you need at least 2 or three viruses simultaneously to have such visible symptoms as I did. Very disappointing. By the time the symptoms appeared it was too late even for spring garlic. And now I can't use my shallots next year either, since there's a big risk it also got infected.

[bower]

Zipcode I'm sorry to hear that! What are the viruses that affect garlic in your area? How do they spread to your shallots?



I have looked at all the pics online about different allium viruses. I have seen that some garlic dries down streaky, and looks like some of those pics. I was worried about this when I first started to grow garlic, but I've never seen those "symptoms" spread from one type to another in the field. I heard it was spread by aphids but I've never seen aphids on alliums here. I have every kind of insect in my garden here, as we never used pesticide ever. I've seen plant hopper bugs on the garlic, and 'spit bugs' that are always hidden in a bit of foam (really a lot of them this year), and even a moth or two on the garlic might have chewed something, small flies perhaps... but I never see a sign of disease transmission. Please tell me more.

[JRinPA]

I'm sorry to hear you had such a bad year zipcode. Is that problem with viruses going to carry over next year in the environment?

[zipcode]

These are viruses specific for alliums going by the generic name of yellow dwarf viruses. They look streaky, but not just at drying, but pretty much after 15 cm they started looking worse and worse. The streaks are also not continuous, like on those ornamental plants for example, which would likely indicate some deficiency.

We have some thrips, I'm pretty sure those could spread things around no problem, and it's compatible with onions. I was reading a paper that said a lot of the garlic we have is actually infected with one virus, but visible symptoms are not there yet.

[svalli]

Good looking porcelains bower! I can't wait to get my Bonavista rounds planted. Next year I may have divided bulbs from them.

zipcode, sad to hear about that virus thing. Do the viruses stay in the soil? Can you plants some new cloves for next year? I have quite many hardneck and softneck varieties and could mail you some, if you need new planting stock. I have also bulbils, which are much safer to start from, but it takes multiple seasons to get divided heads.

I had a learning experience again this year. Last week I had to go on a business trip and on Sunday I trimmed some of the hanging garlics from garage and brought indoors to cure. I ran out of space to spread them, so I left Red Dukes in cardboard box. Humidity indoors is really low, so I did not think that there would be any problems. When I got back from my trip, I noticed that the ones on the bottom of the box had started to get mold on the outer wrappers and roots. I had to cut all of the roots off and strip most of the wrappers away to clean them. The bulbs must have been too moist when I trimmed them even the leaves were totally brown. I should have just left them hanging week longer. I hope I remember this in future.
Last night I trimmed remaining varieties, which were hanging on the ladder in garage, so I spread them on wire racks when bringing indoors. I will make sure that those are dry and well cured, before packing in boxes or paper bags.

The second photo has the varieties originating from Kolkja in Estonia. Left side is Red Russian and right side was named Kolkja Purple, which I think is the prettiest of all my garlics. It has nice satin luster on the wrappers and bright red cloves. It is also quite good keeper.

Sari

[zipcode]

Thank you svalli, there's other places I can buy garlic here that is not from Kiepenkerl (not that many but some, brought directly from France). Seems like the virus doesn't stay in the soil.
I'll try Messidor this year. I'm giving up on the spring planted ones, Arno didn't give me good enough results, it was very inconsistent in size.

[bower]

I just love to see so many varieties laid out side by side... they're beautiful, Sari!

[bower]

More Music from the back bed I harvested today at 4 weeks from scapes. These were growing up from bulbils, and except for a few small ones they're about the same size as the main crop. My two friends were here today and both said their porcelains were about the same size or smaller. So I didn't do too badly in what is not a great growing season for garlic here.

It is really getting late now for garlic, and weather turned cooler this weekend, but I will leave the Spanish Roja and Persian Star and Chesnok Red for another week. There is some rain in the forecast but not more than 5 cm, hope it sticks to that, and I'll harvest those next weekend. My friends have already harvested all their varieties but the later ones SR and PS were really small. If mine size up even modestly I will give some to my friend for seed instead of keeping those to eat. I have plenty of porcelains anyway.