I have never tried that. How many bulbs can you usually get with 1 plant?
What I like about winter gardening is there is practically not much work, not even the need to water as it rains frequently here.
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My peppers have slowed down but I still find a few ripe Sinahuisa (similar to serrano) and cayennes each day. I plan to pull the plants soon, though, because I want to use at least one of my pepper beds for garlic this year.
@naf, to answer your question, each clove of garlic you plant turns into one bulb. If you plant a hardneck variety, you get the added bonus of a scape out of each clove, which is actually my favorite part of growing garlic - the scapes are such a rare treat. My garlic did very poorly this year due to too-wet weather, so I’m crossing my fingers for better weather next spring.
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As @biondanonima mentioned, one clove yields one bulb, but as I’ve learned after many somewhat unsuccessful attempts at growing garlic, the bulbs grow bigger if you plant them in the fall. My early attempts were planting in the spring, and you get a bulb that’s the size of a small clove – baby garlic only.
Fresh garlic is amazing! I love the stuff and I buy from farmers markets when I can. They also yield yummy garlic scapes as they grow bigger, if you like garlic scapes.
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My summer garden’s still continuing due to the mild/warm weather. I’m growing some lettuce and spinach on the side, but I may skip doing a full cold season and let the summer crop ride it out till the end of the year before taking a break and starting spring next year.
I picked a bunch of bell peppers this week, roasted and made soup from them.
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I am making Pepper Jelly 7.0. I really should take more notes.
Curiouser and curiouser…
If you read a few posts up from this spring/summer, you’ll know about my garlic disaster. Too much rain water = rotted cloves and some that never got much bigger than the size of about 2 normal cloves of garlic. I thought I had dug up all the bad cloves, but I admittedly wasn’t sure I was going to find them all. The baby cloves that did grow to some extent, I pulled up by end of July/early August.
Much to my surprise, I now have about 3-4 random sprouts of what looks like garlic coming up now. I started seeing this about 2 weeks ago, and I assumed they would just die with a frost that didn’t come. Now, they’re looking pretty robust as if it were middle to late spring. We are possibly getting snow this Friday, so even I don’t think they’ll survive much past this weekend.
So what will happen to them if I just leave them? Will this second life kick the bucket for good and those cloves are for sure dead and buried? Since we normally plant them before a frost anyway, any chance they would just pause and resume with new sprouts in the spring once the thaw sets in (I know the green sprouts aren’t salvageable; just not sure if the clove is still good or not). Any experienced garlic growers who can give me some advice or insight?
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I’ve grown garlic for maybe twenty years and I still suck at it. I’ve not done it, but I remember reading about growing “rounds” from really tiny cloves. I’m going to try it this year, since my “bulbs” this year were so small. Can’t be worse than killing them on purpose!
They won’t die from the cold - garlic is extremely hardy. The green tops might get a bit of damage but the root system will be just fine. No idea if they will do well in the spring but you might as well leave them and see what happens!
I had a miserable garlic failure this year too, due to excessively wet weather in the spring. I amended my beds heavily with compost and manure this fall and planted 180 cloves of mostly new seed stock - here’s hoping for a better year next year!
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We got the arctic cold these last two days so I guess we will find out! I haven’t checked the garden since it’s dark by the time I get home now, but I’d be curious to what’s happening with the garlic cloves this weekend. We had a short spate of unusually warm days at the end of October, and I noticed one of the new cloves I planted in one of my planters was sprouting too. I had put mulch down in an attempt to keep them warm but those darn squirrels again kept digging up the planters! I think my mulch isn’t so much a covering anymore, but just randomly mixed into the soil.
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Today was garlic planting day. We grow our own every year and trade stock with my SIL. The huge garlic pictured is some she brought back from Greece last visit. We usually get smaller cloves on our bulbs, which is probably a result of our summers not being hot enough, although we have a longer growing season.
106 cloves planted.
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Beautiful garlic! Just watched a Netflix video in the Rotten series on global garlic, very interesting.
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Very inspiring! I hope to be planting my garlic and shallots next week.
We’ve never done shallots, have you had good luck with yours? We’ve done leeks, green onions, cippolini and Walla Walla sweets with varying degrees of success. Again, probably not hot enough summers.
The green onions however, do very well. Love alliums!
I have the BEST luck with shallots. I try cippolini every year, rarely with good results, but I keep trying. I put seedlings in last week, and will direct seed in pots in January or February.
It is plenty hot here in the summer, and I know that’s not my problem. I think of them as fall/winter here, but they spend a lot of time in the ground.
Where do you garden? When I’m not using ones I’ve grown, I get them from Grow Organic here in Nor Cal.
In Gig Harbor, Wa, about an hour south of Seattle, gardening zone 8b. I’ll check out the Grow Organic source you mentioned. Thanks!
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