Garlic, the non-joy of selecting planting stock.

Every garlic harvest of mine results in some huge heads, many in the middle, and some tiny ones.

The smallest ones usually get composted, as I'm not patient enough to peel them, too much work not enough fruit.  The large prizewinners get whisked away to a cool dark place, they're  the following year's batch.   Leaving me with the Mediocre Middle garlics to cook with.   Which is ok I guess, but I'd rather use those nice fat ones that I've placed off-limits.

I think I 'torture' myself this way each year, I never get to use the prizewinners, I use the averages.

[Same with the homegrown eggs -- we place the largest ones in cartons and bring them to work where the metro crowd gleefully accepts, leaving the family here to use the mediums and smalls.  But I digress.]

What do yinz homegrowers do with your garlic harvest?  Are the big fatties your go-tos in the kitchen, or do yinz do as I and save the chubbies for planting time?

Tomatoes, for example.  You only have to sacrifice one or two fruits to obtain more than enough seeds to plant the next year.  Garlic, you need to reserve about *one-third* of your haul for the next growing season.  Logically, the large ones are protected, hence my predicament.

Gary, I do the same thing as you do. The best are for propagation. I get pretty tired of peeling a lot of smaller ones too.

But last fall I splurged and bought ten types of seed garlic from Giving Ground Seeds. There is a big variation in clove size and number between types. For instance, Brown Tempest has just four huge cloves. Some others have large cloves on the outside and smaller ones near the stem.  And some have a lot of medium sized cloves.

So maybe try some different varieties and see if you find ones that grow well for you and have the clove size you want. Your dilemma may just be the type of garlic you're growing.

In theory, using the largest as seed stock will eventually result in a higher percentage of large ones.

But, garlic plants tend to be clones. Which means there probably isn't much genetic variability between plants, except for the occasional sport or mutation. You might get better results by comparing the soil and growing conditions the different sizes were pulled from, and trying to mimic whatever made the biggest bulbs.

I recently decided to go a different direction entirely, after I found a neglected patch of garlic that had gone feral and was doing just fine that way. It produced enough scapes that I was able to use those in place of regular garlic for most of the year. I'm hoping to expand on that idea a little more this year, I like food that doesn't need tending!

If you don't have enough big cloves for planting and using in the kitchen then you need more plants.

edit:
From my experience the biggest bulbs grow on plants that have the most sunlight. So planting farther apart may help.

Try some elephant garlic. It's not a true garlic, rather a leek relative, but it looks and tastes like giant garlic cloves.

Early in the growing season you could pull up the runtiest plants to use whole as "green garlic" instead of composting them at maturity.  As for eating the best, maybe reward yourself by eating the very best (top 5-10 %?) and saving the almost-best.

Once I learned to plant them farther apart, my average got bigger. But I still set aside the best.
Still have to eat the smalls, though. Microwaving for 15 or 20 seconds makes peeling easy ~ squeeze and they pop right out of the skin.

Last year, I shared a bag of my bigger ones selected for planting with my son, who lives 1000 miles away. But over the winter, fortune enabled them to move out of their rental into their first owned home, so they ate them. At least they didn’t go to waste. This spring, I went out and helped them build a garden, so msybe this year he’ll be able to plant some!

The small cloves don't have to be wasted. Plant them densely in spring and you will harvest single clove garlic/ mono garlic in three months. Hold off fertilizer in the first half of growing season and feed them when the bulbs start filling. In this case you will have big round garlic cloves to enjoy.

i am in my 3rd year of growing garlic, the first 2 season's harvest were quit different from each other. the first year i planted 4 different varieties in beds i built with lots of carbon(leaf mulch) on top of the dirt in the garden and added about 4" of soil on top. even though it was very dry all summer i did not have to water because of the under layer of leaves and the mulch on top. each variety had a diffrent percentage of large, medium and small. measured through a board with holes: less than 1.75" small, 1.75-2" medium, 2-2.5" large and over is xtra large. i had a very good yield percentage(about 95%)over all and about 55% large or better with the medium and small split fairly evenly.

the 2nd year was in different beds with a different underlay. cardboard and grass cuttings also covered with about 4" of soil. the weather was also very dry and hot and they did not get watered. the yield was about 65% however, i was experimenting with a lot more varieties. some of the varieties definitely produced larger bulbs than others. another thing i believe contributed to the yield issue is that i did plant some of the beds tighter than others(closer spacing) and i think they were competing for nutrients.

hoping for a better harvest this year.

all that being said, i guess it depends on how much your going to grow based on how much space you have. i know someone who used 3" spacing and she said her bulbs were mostly large. which leads me to think nutrients and moisture play as large a part as sunshine with regard to spacing but if you can more room is generally better and picking the right variety/s.

i have included a couple of links i use as my go to for garlic questions. both are or were commercial growers but their websites offer a wealth of information about different types of garlic and how to's. the rasa site is my favorite(if interested go there first) but the norwegian adds some other good stuff.

hope this helps.  cheers   james

rasa creek farms

norwegian creek farm

I tend to plant the mid-sized cloves plus some of the lunkers as well as the rounds that didn't divide. I throw small ones into my garlic press without peeling and this satisfies both my aversion to waste as well as my limited patience for fiddly things.

Allium rust made its way into my region about 7-8 years ago and this has meant I don't get monsters like I used to. Some seasons are better than others and I'm finding that planting into beds with lots of biochar and deep wood chip mulch is helping.

The runty cloves can be dehydrated without peeling first, just slice in half or if that's too much bother, crush them with a knife and spread out on the dehydrator tray. The skins will easily separate once the garlic is dehydrated.

If you don't want to bother peeling them at all, you can also mince them with the clove skins on and dehydrate, preferably before the garlic is fully cured and the clove skins are still pliable.

If you are growing hardnecks, save a few scapes from each variety and replant the bulbils. After 3 or 4 seasons, the bulbils will yield full sized bulbs. This allows you to eat more and just keep replanting the progeny from the bulbils every season - they are still clones of the parent bulb but a cost efficient way to increase your stock.

Ellendra Nauriel wrote:In theory, using the largest as seed stock will eventually result in a higher percentage of large ones.

But, garlic plants tend to be clones. Which means there probably isn't much genetic variability between plants, except for the occasional sport or mutation. You might get better results by comparing the soil and growing conditions the different sizes were pulled from, and trying to mimic whatever made the biggest bulbs.

My understanding is that garlic clones are able to adapt epigenetically to your specific climate / soil. The resulting epigenetic variability allows you to select for larger heads as well.

Here's an interested study on the epigenetic diversity over time in garlic: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1016/j.scienta.2018.04.044.

@Ian Paf - here is a link to an earlier study conducted in the US

https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/44/5/article-p1238.xml

I have been growing a no ID artichoke strain for many years and from a multi layered softneck, it has morphed in a bulb with a single layer of radial cloves with bulbils forming in the neck, pseudostem and umbel with a scape that needs secateurs to cut when fully cured.

The changes occurred over a period of six years, the original stock came from a friend whose garden was at sea level and had mild winters (sorry can't help with climate zone equivalents), versus our 300m above sea level and snow in winter.

The clove count decreased substantially and the bulb size was reduced. However each clove was larger.

Here are a some photos

Megan, this is fascinating. I've grown lots of cultivars over the years and often wondered why some seemed to get "lost" even though I tried to save each of them for planting the following season. Now I think some of them may have drifted into other phenotypes...I wonder if they will all converge on a land race or if they'll keep cycling through various expressions of garlicness.

I will try to pay more attention in coming years and see if I can spot some of these variants. Thanks for providing such a great set of examples.

Hello Phil, I ought to be more methodical in my record keeping because I have lost track of several strains that I've grown over the years.

The physical descriptions are not so helpful when they keep changing!

I try to keep planting maps as well as labels but every year the blackbirds, rabbits &/or weather conspire against me. Thankfully, I grow out lots of bulbils and am slowly confining myself to good tasting, hardy cultivars with particular emphasis on hard necks from the sps and marbled purple stripe groups with the most flowers and hopefully, highest likelihood of yielding true seed.

I grew nothing but teensy garlic one year.

I finally bought a garlic press and it is the best thing ever. All the tiny garlic smash in seconds, no peeling required so absolutely none of my hard-grown garlic is composted.

I grew enormous cloves last year thanks to good soil and good rain, and even my little cloves were pretty big. I find it funny that I am a bit annoyed at the 'middling' ones, because they don't fit in my press, so I have to  peel and chop them the old fashioned way.

As a lover of tools that make it easy to make good decisions (like not composting my tiny garlic) a garlic press, which is something I scoffed at for years, is great.  Just buying super market garlic? Probably not necessary. But for a garlic lover growing my own it's wonderful.

May Lotito wrote:The small cloves don't have to be wasted. Plant them densely in spring and you will harvest single clove garlic/ pearl garlic /solo garlic in three months. Hold off fertilizer in the first half of growing season and feed them when the bulbs start filling. In this case you will have big round garlic cloves to enjoy.

I experimented with different variants this year to find out the best combination for growing pearl garlic.

I tried two planting dates ( mid March and mid April), sizes (small and medium) and storage conditions  ( room temperature and in the fridge for one month). The most consistent pearl garlics were from small cloves (2-3g) planted on historical last frost date ( April 15th) and they were ready fro harvest in just two months. Average weight is 12 g after curing, which is much bigger than regular cloves (5-8g), and only be surpassed by the biggest cloves out of the largest 3" bulbs (14g).

Although technically I am planting one clove to harvest another one by growing pearl garlics, the return is pretty good considering they can be planted much densely and only take two months. The big round cloves are fun to cook, especially when roasted on a BBQ grill.

If you have some unwanted small cloves left in the spring, give pearl garlic a try.

For people who don't want to mess with smaller cloves, have you considered baking the whole thing? I do that every fall when something else needs baking, by putting a bunch of bulbs in a lidded casserole dish. I don't add oil. When they're squishy, I pull them out. I tried following a recommendation on the web, but they were over cooked, so back to the "test for squishy" approach! I peel them when cool and freeze them loosely. They are particularly handy for recipes like pesto or humus which usually have raw garlic in it, but I've found my stomach objects to garlic raw, and the baked garlic gives the recipes a lovely mellow flavor.

Someone up thread mentioned using the scapes. I made a garlic scape pesto and froze it after squishing it quite flat. I can just break off bits and toss it into whatever I'm making, particularly, tomato sauce on a flat-bread to fake up a quick pizza wannabe.

I don't know which grow bigger, but I do know that a local supplier (John Boy Farms) sells them sized.  That is, you can purchase different sizes and thus pay different prices.  They typically have a guide for how many cloves a given size of a given variety produce.  Now, they may sell them that way to allow for different clientele who perhaps have beliefs about which sizes do better for them or may just be budget conscious.

About all I know is that I tend to grow more than we use, although we do use a fair amount.  I didn't grow up with much garlic, so it wasn't infused into my cooking repertoire, but I'm learning.  

I started some fermenting 2 years ago and like to use some of the scapes to add flavour to what I'm fermenting (along with some basil, cherry tomatoes are neat...they get fizzy and can make a nice bruschetta).