Garlick

[valiant veggies]

Hey,

Does anyone know any good places to get garlick from? The left over cloves from supermarkets dont seem to come to anything.

[realfood]

It is always best to use proper garlic stock, certified to be free of disease, bought from a garden center or from any of the seed houses.

[Mike Vogel]

www.thegarlicfarm is a good one. This is onthe Isle of Wight and they sell a good range of varieties. Or seed catalogues. You can get Thermidrome [autumn planting]and Printanor spring planting]from the OrganicCatalogue.

[Marge]

erm, I hate to say this but I have grown garlic from a supermarket bulb with great success this year. In fact from one bulb I had more than 20 decent sized bulbs.

[Mike Vogel]

Where did the original bulb come from, Marge? The further north its origin, the more likely you are to be successful in growing it here, or alternatively, garlic originating in a hilly area may do well in a hilly area here, etc. The advice about avoiding lanting bulbs bought as food is based on the probablity that a variety from a different climate will not acclimatise well to ours. But it depends on where you are, the health of the bulb, etc.

[Colin_M]

The advice about avoiding planting bulbs bought as food is based on the probability that a variety from a different climate will not acclimatise well to ours.

Interestingly, most of the suppliers will also make a prominent statement about needing to buy certified stock to ensure it is free from viruses.

Since I was never sure what these viruses were or the problems they caused, I have to admit I've generally bought from these places in the past.

I bought some this Autumn from a stand that the IOW Garlic Farm (mentioned above) had at country show. They were selling both bulbs for planting and bulbs for cooking. Since some of the latter seemed to have bigger cloves, I asked for some. The guy was very insistent that I didn't try to plant them, saying that they raised them on completely different areas of the farm, couldn't guarantee they were virus-free etc etc.

I thought I'd do a quick google to find more. This came up with the following that may be of interest to anyone curious:
First link
Second link
Last link - note quite a lot of the material here seems v similar to the first link.

Since all of these are quite long papers on many aspects of growing garlic, you can jump to the relevant section quickly by doing a "find" (Control-F) for the text "virus-free".

A quick read located the comment that "...most all planting stock is infected with some type of virus. The viruses are usually mild and do not seriously affect yield...One exception is onion yellow dwarf virus, which can cause severe...

Sorry Mike - I don't seem to have helped much

[John Yeoman]

Has anyone ever had success in growing garlic from true seed? In the 1840s, William Cobbett acknowledged it could be done but he did not explain how. I've read that Japanese researchers have now discovered that garlic seed may well be viable if the seed-bearing bulbules are taken from a hard-necked variety that's been vernalised (kept chill) over winter.

Few farmers had ever done this before because they preferred to grow soft-neck varieties which stored better but didn't yield viable seed. Hence the myth, that garlic seed is always sterile.

If true garlic seed was generally available, we wouldn't have to worry about cloves rotting over winter. We could put the seed in our freezer, in a sealed jar with some silica gel, and it would last indefinitely!

[hilary]

Hi John,
Just picked up on comment re William Cobbett - just reading his book on gardening now and finding it fascinating - a lot of what he says (and he does say a lot!) is true today. The bit which interested me are his comments on storing seed and it seems that we are so used to just picking up a catalogue and ordering seed that we forget just what problems gardeners had in finding a realiable seedsman and the problems of keeping ones own seed with cross fertilisation, etc. Anyway where were we garlick ...... I will try the tip of using grit since some of the cloves were small this year.

Hilary

[John Yeoman]

Hi Hilary

William Cobbett is one of my heroes. It's interesting to compare his two books: The English Gardener and The American Gardener. He became utterly fed up with the English farmer. It was obvious to Cobbett, with his US experience, that American corn (maize) was more efficient than English corn (wheat) for feeding poor families and livestock. But whenever he cried in England 'Grow corn!' the English farmer would say 'Duh, ain't we doing that already?'

No wonder we still don't grow maize much in England!

[Mike Vogel]

I like the second link, Colin - everybody seems to disagree about everything.

[EddieJ]

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