Is this a garlic disease?

I bought some food quality garlic from a local farm and as it is an interesting variety that I wasn't already growing I was thinking of planting some of it.  But the outside of the bulbs is marked up in a way I haven't seen before. Anyone know what this is? If it's something I should be concerned about planting, I will eat the rest of this and order seed garlic.

Oh, and the variety is Early Portuguese by the way.

I can't say if it's a disease but I've seen those same types of markings on garlic grown with invasive grass (my old property). This grass had runners that were pointed and stuck into anything underground like potatoes or garlic.

It could also be insect damage. Maybe plant them away from other garlic just in case. The color of the bulbs is very nice and if the cloves are firm and healthy looking inside the papery wrapping you may be fine.

Thanks Robin. Wow I never would have thought of grass causing that sort of scarring.

It could be that. The cloves inside the paper seem ok so the damage is superficial only. I haven't seen the area where the garlic was grown, so I don't know if it was grassy/weedy.

I had wondered about wireworms, but I think they would have drilled through into the cloves. We had problems with wireworms in a new garden bed this year and they went all the way through the radishes. Pretty much wiped out the early radish crop. If they could destroy a radish it's hard to imagine that a garlic clove would have stopped them.

And I agree, to me this looks more like physical damage than some garlic disease. Not that I've ever seen a garlic disease. But I think your idea of growing it away from other garlic is a good one anyway. We'll have more gardening space at our new place and it will be easier to manage crop rotation.

The colour of the bulbs is very pretty and the variety matures extremely early although I read it is not a long keeper. That's ok though because I grow other varieties that do keep well so this would hopefully fill the early summer 'garlic gap'.

This looks very much like wireworm damage to me; I have a lot of wireworms, my garden is in recently abused soil surrounded by reed canary canary grass.. and I grow a fair bit of garlic.


The wireworms chewed right into cloves to the point of ruining one or more cloves on perhaps 15 bulbs out of 1000. Several hundred showed varying degrees of superficial damage like pictured, most of it not all way through all the wrapper layers, or else just a tiny spot pierced through.


My understanding is that one will not spread wireworms by replanting this, it is purely physical damage as opposed to an infestation in the bulb... but I choose from the undamaged bulbs to replant anyhow, reasoning that they are presumably more robust to be less attractive to pests, and better protected against other issues due to intact wrappers.

Some sort of pest damage yes, my onions have markings that are similar, it doesn't generally go deep like the wireworms do so I don't worry about it much. As robin mentioned it could be couch grass, though that normally grows right through whatever it damages, it seems to really like growing through my best potato/onion.. sigh.