Growing Hardneck Garlic Bulbils into

Seedworthy Rounds: A 2-Year Trick

Second Revision November 2019

First Put Out December 2017
By Andy Leahy <garamondo36@gmail.com>
Living in Syracuse, NY -- USA
Growing in Zone 5b, Latitude 42.3° N.
Whitney Point, NY -- USA

Hardneck garlic seed stocks can be multiplied faster

-- and “cleaned up” against soil-borne and clove-
borne pests -- by saving and re-sowing bulbils from
the topsets, then re-sowing rounds or cloves.

Or, at least, that's how the bulbils advocacy goes. There is at least one
catch, though, and the biggest catch is this: Under growing conditions
typically provided by most veteran garlic growers, bigger bulbils (and
similarly sized rounds, previously grown from plants derived out of smaller
bulbils) tend to want to promote themselves to small, clove-divided heads.
And the key word here is “small.” Small heads can be a discouraging end
point for all the bulbil effort expended, as, yes, the cloned seed stock has
multiplied, but it has multiplied more so in terms of numbers, than in terms
of sizing up future individual seed pieces.

Since one of the keys to growing bigger heads of garlic is to somehow,

presto, get your hands on the biggest possible seed pieces, the road from
bulbils to the ultimate destination of bigger heads can seem, at times, far
too rocky. Garlic's natural enthusiasm in wanting to move -- at the first

2 -- Hardneck Garlic Bulbils

sign of decent conditions -- to small, clove-divided heads can trip up the
human enthusiast's big garlic dreams.

This is intended to be a workable road map forward -- much more strategic

than previous bulbils advocacy I've seen -- in order to guide fellow fans of
hardneck garlic who, for one reason or another, are thinking about taking up
the challenge of growing bulbils into seedworthy rounds.

If you want to watch an 11-minute how-to video (in addition to, or rather
than, reading all these long-winded pages), new results through the 2018/2019
cycle of this project have been distilled on YouTube under the same title,
"Growing Hardneck Garlic Bulbils Into Seedworthy Rounds: A 2-Year Trick."

(A round, for the uninitiated, is called by some a roundel, or a rounder.

Others call it “single clove garlic,” and the phenomenon even has a current
Wikipedia entry under “solo garlic.” As you might imagine, these are round
garlics, as they don’t show any of the “clove bumps” found on even the
tiniest regular heads. A round is an energy-storing bulb that embeds only
one future growth point, rather than multiples, as is the case with a bulb of
cloves. A round is formed at some mystical point during the season by a
garlic plant that is without enough strength to put up a scape and/or divide
its bulb into two or more cloves -- presumably due to its small original seed
size, some sort of varietal tendency, peculiar conditions of latitude or
climate, special treatment, or some combination of these factors.)

3 -- Hardneck Garlic Bulbils

The Back Story on Bulbils

Most hardneck garlic growers don't bother with bulbils -- except to annually
snap off the scape stems. These are the bolting central stalks from which
bulbils grow in bunches within a toboggan-cap-shaped umbel, or (often-
presumed-vestigial-or-false) flower. Out of all the labor-intensive ways to
add a bit of extra size and weight to your garlic heads (some say bulbs), the
folk wisdom sagely advising snapping scapes off your hardnecks when they
first appear is probably easiest. Energy the plant had otherwise earmarked
for making the topset bigger and bigger is then re-directed for the rest of
the growing season to the head.

(Softneck Silverskin garlics are reported to only rarely send up a scape --

and, if they do, it's supposedly a sign of stress, not health. Softneck
Artichoke garlics, on some plants in some years, will often set bulbils at a
weird, mid-stalk location, closer to the ground, sometimes called “stem
bulbils” or “neck bulbils.” I’ve tried growing some of these, but most of my
bulbil experience -- and most of what I’m writing about here -- has to do
with working with hardneck, a/k/a stiffneck, garlic.)

Snapped off young

enough, scapes are
tender, mild compared
to regular garlic, and
useable to flavor food;
picked later on, they
can get a bit too
woody. There has been,
these last few years,
quite a lot of hype out
there in Artisan Food
Land about what a
great, early-season
treat scapes are.
Color me dubious. Our
modestly sized,
rustically located
garlic operation has
never made much of a
market out of our supply, which comes out of the fields in several bushel
baskets and often just gets composted.

But back to the bulbils, which represent potentially useful seed pieces
cloned from the parent plant, in the same way that cloves are genetically
identical clones of the parent. Bulbils are smaller than cloves, sometimes
far smaller, but they are usually more numerous per plant, sometimes far more
numerous. And so some see future seed-making potential.

There are only a few reasons why a sane, diligent garlic grower would let any
hardneck topsets and their capsules of bulbils grow unsnapped on purpose.

4 -- Hardneck Garlic Bulbils

Some experimenters have been playing around with leaving some topsets on
certain key varieties of hardneck garlic as nascent flowers, usually
carefully teasing out bulbils, and creating enough room and motivation for
the plants to finish making flower parts in order to possibly reproduce
sexually. This is in hopes of making tiny black true seeds, which -- if
enough of them were to be successfully collected, sprouted, grown out,
tested, and tasted -- could create novel or improved strains of garlic. If
you want to learn more about that challenge, Google “true garlic seed.”

Other garlic growers may have a limited supply of certain choice varieties
and wish to cost-effectively expand production, down the road, by saving both
heads and at least some bulbils, growing out both. Depending on the garlic
variety, as much as 20 percent of a grower's harvest (that’s by head count;
by weight, it can be even more) can be “lost” to the bottom line, just in
order to keep the following year's head count even -- to say nothing of
wanting to expand future production. Again, saving, buying, or trading
bulbils can be a more cost-effective way than traditional trafficking in seed
heads in order to get started with, or more quickly expand production from,
varieties of interest.

The last reason

to get involved
with bulbils
should probably
be the first, as
it’s the most
important: Pest
avoidance.
Microscopic
fungus and
nematode issues
(photo left) can
quietly and
gradually build
up within a
garlic
population that
is repeatedly
grown out from
cloves only,
year after year, especially in the same field. These issues are often not
recognized by growers as too big of a deal until a long-lurking pest
population suddenly manages to explode, decimating the garlic. For the
grower, it’s a bit like not bothering with renter’s insurance, until your
apartment has just been ripped off. Simply getting the religion of crop
rotation -- moving the garlic to new ground, that is, every year or so -- is
unlikely to save the day. And that's because many of these pests are also
unwittingly moved, most conveniently either right inside the flesh or riding
the surface of seed cloves that came out of the prior patch.

5 -- Hardneck Garlic Bulbils

Bulbil advocates make the claim -- not fully supported in all cases by hard
science, to my knowledge -- that starting anew on virgin ground, with bulbils
only, not cloves, can be an effective, alternate scheme for rotating away
from many pest issues. Because the bulbils are curiously set by the parent
plant on a long, unfurling stalk, high off the ground, they are thought to be
free of pests more closely associated with garlic's point of soil contact.

There is an all-too-small pocket of risk-sensitive growers who believe --

even if the high price of seed garlic wasn't a factor -- it may be a much
wiser course of action to introduce different varieties from off the farm by
always starting with bulbils in a separate area, rather than cloves. In
fact, if these veteran, possibly-even-seed-selling growers happened to make
the acquaintance of a rookie on the very cusp of getting started in the
garlic business from scratch, their most honest, un-self-interested advice
may well be to start with bulbils-only, no cloves, and to plan on building
things up over several years in insolation. Such precautions are too late
for most, but some growers also believe it may be wise to occasionally go
through the laborious process of cleaning up one’s own seed stocks by
switching over to exclusively seeding with rounds or cloves that were derived
-- over a pre-planned course of prior years -- from bulbils only, if there’s
new land available upon which to get things started.

If the painstaking work is started and continued on virgin, quarantined

ground -- never within living memory used to grow anything in the onion
family, and protected against soil contamination from uncleaned footwear,
tools, and machinery used elsewhere on the farm -- that increases our chances
of creating “clean seed.”

It's a reasonable theory. Some have expressed doubt it would be a workable

plan for dodging virus issues, as these would seem capable of spreading
through plant flesh in the time it takes for bulbils to even partly mature.
Also, some garlic pests such as allium leaf miners, leek moths, and bulb
mites are very mobile -- the mites capable of taking a specialized form so as
to catch rides by grasping the legs of passing insects! But for the rest of
garlic's thorniest pests -- white rot, fusarium, botrytis, stem and bulb
nematodes, and so on -- the bulbils scheme is so crazy, it just might work.

In fact, it's probably at least part of a good explanation for why hardneck
garlics are genetically programmed to have adapted what were once -- possibly
some time way back before humans were paying attention -- fully functional
flowers to instead put out an even-more-energy-intensive set of bulbil clones
within the topset. Similar to the life strategy of a walking onion, in a
wild situation, these stalks eventually fall to the ground at some distance
from the parent plant, propagating the parent's genestock at a rooting spot
that's potentially better than before, and perhaps with fewer of the pests
that haunt the plant's original base of operations.

Anyway, that's the basic bulbils pitch. Now here's more about that biggest
catch.

6 -- Hardneck Garlic Bulbils

The Biggest Catch

There is out there on the Internet some information advocating for garlic
growers to get into growing out bulbils, for the reasons described. Most of
the web pages and PDFs I have seen seem to assume that the objective is
winding up -- one or two or three years later -- inevitably generating a
series of many small heads of cloved garlic, which then can be traditionally
grown out further. Like, in other words, they’re okay with that! I, for
one, don’t like this. Small heads of garlic carry small cloves, and it’s
already too much of a treadmill, gradually sizing these up, year after year.
A better objective for any dalliance with bulbils would be to wind up with
many large, seedworthy, single-seed-piece rounds -- in fact, as many as
possible from the supply of bulbils (and, later, small rounds) that we did
all that work to save and sometimes repeatedly sow and grow.

The only question is: How do we do that, without “losing” so much of our
painstakingly grown inventory to those seemingly dreadful, small, clove-
divided heads? The status quo can be decried as a situation where each
season’s growth sends the plant 7 steps forward, but then cloving takes each
individual piece 5 steps back, or something like that.

7 -- Hardneck Garlic Bulbils

A 2-Year Trick

The goal is to get something from nothing -- if we combine “nothing” with

some labor and expertise. Whether we handle the job as a one-time project,
or as an annual procedure, what we want is a substantial collection of
“something” valuable, seedworthy rounds (or cloves), as large as possible,
and as many as practical, to expand, replace, size up, or clean up seed
supplies that would ordinarily be entirely formed from traditionally reserved
seed heads. This alternate seed source is to be derived from a supply that
started out as essentially worthless “nothing” bulbils hiding within topset
scapes otherwise destined to be tossed on the lawn, or composted, or sold or
used to flavor or decorate mid-summer meals.

And we’re willing to do most of this on a two-year cycle. If it could be

routinely done in just one year, at least for certain varieties, so much the
better. But if too much of the work takes three or four years to bear fruit,
we’re much less interested.

Year One: Gather Bulbils, Then A Traditional Fall Sown Size-Up

The starting point for Year One is going to be a partial bulbils harvest --
"partial" because many ongoing hardneck operations are going to be too large
to warrant leaving every scape on every plant. Saving them all could easily
create too big a starting supply of bulbils and overwhelm future labors.
Instead, we’re just taking a sample of topsets from certain varietal portions
of main crop beds that have been flagged so as to remind ourselves to hold
off on the de-scaping for a few extra weeks. Topsets from certain varieties
that tend to form a smaller number of larger bulbils, such as Rocamboles,
should be harvested when the largest of the umbel contents look about pea-
sized, which is about at the halfway mark; left to go further, some of these

8 -- Hardneck Garlic Bulbils

will get marble-sized, which overshoots our starting point mark, and robs
excessive energy from the main crop parent bulbs.

(If one would rather try harvesting large, fully mature, marble-sized
Rocambole bulbils, storing them all the way over winter still attached within
their protective umbels, and skipping directly to the Year Two procedure of
Late Spring Sowing After Artificial Chill in Winter Storage, then that's
definitely worth a shot. If a large-bulbilled variety could be identified as
doing the intended job in one go-around, then this could be a One-Year Trick,
and not a Two-Year Trick.)

Topsets from other varieties, such as Porcelains and Purple Stripes, should
be harvested about the same time as the main crop harvest, because their
larger number of smaller bulbils will by then be nearly as big as they’re
going to get, hopefully rice-grain-sized.

For our 5,000-plus main crop operation, every year I hope to harvest and cure
enough umbel capsules to wind up with no more than 4 pounds of new bulbils,
after drying and processing. Using bed feet as a way to guesstimate, I tried
in 2019 to figure out what proportion of the total we were declining to de-
scape, and what that supplied; it looked like about 10 percent, or about 500
plants. Keeping those scapes on those plants led to recovery of only 2.6
pounds of new bulbils, not counting stuff so small it got winnowed away.

The processing job can

wait a fairly long time
until there’s a lull in
other late summer
business. To get a few
extra weeks of
maturation, the scape
stalks can be cut long
and the umbels left on,
standing them up in 5-
gallon buckets of
water, possibly with
added doses from those
nutrient packages used
by flower shops. The
bulbils I left in
unadulterated water
during 2019 seemed to
get a little bigger
over the intervening
weeks, possibly
salvaging additional
energy from the stalks.

9 -- Hardneck Garlic Bulbils

This waiting game is typically going to be followed by weeks of drying or
curing, and eventually teasing out bulbils. (However, I should note that at
least one Facebook Group garlic experimenter, Megan Palmer of New Zealand,
does not even bother separating bulbils, instead planting the dried umbels
whole.) All this is followed by a traditional sizing up effort, sowing in
fall at about the same time as the main crop.

(Another lengthy digression, and I am sorry about that, but these are only
words: I have toyed with the idea of moving much more quickly to a late-
summer, mid-August re-planting of newly harvested bulbils -- instead of
waiting to sow later in fall, as traditionally. This is based on something I
first took a closer note of in 2018. I found that prior year plantings of
small rounds, left in the ground due to procrastination or overwork in New
York State, will start to put down fresh roots and send up green shoots,
surprisingly as early as about mid-August! Something similar can sometimes
be witnessed with volunteer garlic: Heads that got missed in the field at
late July harvest will feature splayed cloves which later that same fall are
already well rooted and sprouted. These seem to be clues that garlic, left
to its own devices, is actually naturally adapted to grow over two cool
seasons -- the first from late summer through fall, then a set-back or shut-
down over winter, and then the second season starting in early spring. There
is a Facebook Group garlic grower, Ronald Chicotka from New York’s Hudson
River area, who swears by a way-early Sept. 11 sow date for his main crop for
this reason, letting the plants sprout far above ground long before winter.
So the theory is, because our aggressively large inventory of new, rice-
grain- and pea-sized bulbils makes us less concerned with over-winter
mortality, we could choose to sow these fairly early, counting on the garlic
to similarly sprout and gain some strength that very same late summer and
fall, then be inevitably set back over winter, and then to pick up growth
again come spring. Such a plan could lengthen the overall growing period for
these bulbils, at least among those that survive. It’s true, however, that I
haven't yet actually tried it; the timing in August or September never works
out, for some reason. But I would like to find out whether such a late
summer sow would be a net positive, in terms of considering both survivorship
and weight gain. If one would rather wait until fall to sow -- a more
cautious, conservative, traditional course -- then that's fine.)

For sowing these tiny bulbils, I’ve settled for the time being on a furrowing
scheme that runs across our 3.5-foot-wide beds, using up about the middle 3
feet, and targeting soil as loose and as fine and as organically infused as
possible. The bulbils are spilled into the furrow at a fairly shallow depth
before burial. And each furrow is separated from the other by about a foot
on center, so as to leave surrounding room to later reach in by hoe or hand
to weed and mulch. Unless I have on hand a supply of pine needles (denser
than chopped leaves) right at planting time -- so I can still see exactly
where to go light and where to go heavy -- I’ve typically handled the
mulching chore only after the garlic reveals itself the following spring.

The bulbils should be spilled in at such a thickness that the starting weight
allotted to each spot is taken into consideration. If we chose a practical,
middling planting density of about 30 square feet of bed space (not counting

10 -- Hardneck Garlic Bulbils

alleys) to 1 pound of seed (about 454 grams), then every 3-foot-long furrow
is only good for about 45 grams of starting bulbils (or about 15 grams to the
square foot), whether they’re pea-sized or rice-grain-sized.

Whether sown in late summer or fall, in most garlic-friendly growing areas

these plants are going to naturally vernalize, on account of having been
asked to live outdoors through the winter chill. As a consequence, they are
going to be on a schedule similar to, though slightly earlier than, main crop
garlic when it comes time to bulb up, lie down, brown up, and go into
dormancy. (To “vernalize,” traditionally, means to be biochemically primed
by the winter’s chill for flowering on schedule. In the specialized case of
hardneck garlic, which usually reproduces asexually, to vernalize means to be
biochemically primed by the winter’s chill for timely bulbing and mid-summer
maturity, including cloving and sending up a scape as a vestigial flower, if
possible.)

So some portion of these bulbil-derived, vernalized garlic plants are likely

to be prone to cloving, especially if growth conditions are especially
terrific, and if the original bulbil seed was sizeable. This cloving issue
is one of the key reasons for my preference for harvesting bulbils from
Rocamboles somewhat early and pea-sized, and declining to enter into this
whole two-year crapshoot with a large supply of fatter, marble-sized bulbils.

For those bulbil-derived plants which both clove and send up a scape in just
Year One, I recommend de-scaping. You may be tempted to instead leave scapes
on, hoping to fairly painlessly help supply the next cycle’s new bulbils (if
that’s what you want to do). That could work, but you won’t get very many
bulbils per plant, because the parents are already on the spindly side. My
prescription for instead taking the scapes off is aimed at gathering an
inventory of small heads carrying small (but not desperately tiny) 1.5 to 4.9
gram cloves -- because those can be just as good as equivalently sized rounds
if they’re saved over winter and submitted to the Year Two, Late Spring
Sowing procedure (again, more on this, below).

(Another small point from close observation: For small garlic, the sending
up of the scape is not a foolproof way of distinguishing all the plants which
cloved from those that just made rounds; some small hardneck plants can, in
fact, clove and then stop, not bothering to finish scaping, especially in
highly competitive conditions. This makes it harder to distinguish these
cloved bulbs from rounds after harvest; sometimes that can be more a matter
of touch than sight.)

The first year I grew out bulbils, I didn’t know the right timing or method
of extraction for the resulting Year One harvest (hopefully mostly rounds).
The timing turns out, helpfully, to be do-able over a week or two before the
main crop garlic harvest becomes a garlic farmer’s main burden. The key
thing is to notice when the leaves on plants that formed rounds (as intended)
start to lay down all tangled together in a mat, still green. The visual
effect can sometimes be blurred due to mixing with still-erect neighboring
plants which promoted themselves to form clove-divided heads (as not
intended), being held up by their scapes. Everything is most easily found

11 -- Hardneck Garlic Bulbils

and disentangled from soil when it’s still attached to mostly green leaves,
not brown. Whether green-leaved or brown, there’s little chance of pulling
rounds free from the garden by simply grasping the leaves; chunks of root-
bound soil must be first undercut, at or below the root level, and loosened.

Another thing I didn’t know beforehand was whether it would be easier to sow
the bulbils bed-wide in a blanket before covering with soil, or to restrict
them to burial in parallel shallow furrows. Having done it both ways, I can
now recommend the furrows. And the reason why has to do mostly with easing
the chore of recovering rounds at harvest from all that soil.

When a hoe is used

to carve shallow
furrows across a
3.5-foot-wide bed,
that can leave
just enough space
between and at the
ends of the garlic
strips to later
apply a heat- and
weed-suppressing
mulch of chopped
leaves or
something similar
-- after the
shoots show, but
without smothering
the plants. Soon
after most of the
garlic leaves lay
down, and start gradually turning from green to brown, a hoe can be used to
strip away some of the surrounding weeds, and the mulch, as well as a couple
inches of soil, adjoining right up against the edge of the first group of
still rooted garlic. A shovel can then be used to undercut these garlic
plants and scoop them all out with a limited amount of soil, transferring to
a wheelbarrow that's filled up for processing elsewhere, seated somewhere in
shade with suitable refreshments. The job in the shade involves combing
through the soil to recover as many rounds and cloved heads as possible,
snapping off the garlic leaves, before returning the soil to the field. Back
in the field, with prior strips of garlic out of the way, the hoe can then be
returned to service against the next, and so on.

The blanket plan, by contrast, seemed to require doing this work seated or
kneeling right in the sunny field, or moving too much soil back and forth by
wheelbarrow.

(Whether it would help to use some combination of a weed whacker, a walk-

behind mulch-collecting mower, or a leaf blower to beforehand get both the
garlic leaves and the mulch out of the way, I don’t know, but that seems
worth trying. Another possible time-saving innovation that I haven’t yet

12 -- Hardneck Garlic Bulbils

tried would be to obtain or build a setup for sifting the garlic-laden soil
through progressively smaller screens, similar to what they do on an
archeological dig.)

For several weeks after this Year One harvest comes out of the ground, I
spread each varietal group out in a thin layer on screens, under cover
against sun and rain, in order to get them quickly dried down. Afterwards,
the harvest is safer against mold and mildew issues when it is stashed away,
sitting inside labeled paper lunch bags, awaiting the sorting process.

Year Two: Overwinter Storage, Artificial Chill, Late Spring Sow

The starting point for Year Two may as well be a preliminary sort through the
harvested (mostly) rounds from Year One:

• Pull together those that actually cloved, which, again, is sometimes more
a matter of touch than sight. You can’t weigh these down to each individual
clove yet, but you can guesstimate by weighing whole heads, approximating
clove numbers, and taking an average. So definitely save them, especially if
you judge they currently hold at least some cloves greater than or equal to
1.5 grams per, fairly fresh weight.

• Among the rounds, anything less than 1.5 grams per probably (and, sorry to
say, unfortunately) still has another year to size up again on a fall sow.
Actually, to be more precise about this, stuff that’s 1.0 to 1.5 grams fairly
fresh weight in fall has worked for making marginally seedworthy rounds in my
Year 2 setup, but the results are unlikely to be much of a size improvement
over simply continuing to grow out all main crop garlic from regular cloves,
as traditionally. So I’ve started lumping these smaller rounds into a “fall
sow again” group, alongside new bulbils.

13 -- Hardneck Garlic Bulbils

• Those rounds that fall in the range of 1.5 to maybe 4.9 grams are the best
candidates for over-winter storage in a refrigerator, immediately followed by
a late spring sow, as will be further explained.

• Any rounds that are already equal to or fatter than 5.0 grams, we simply
use as small but acceptable main crop seed that very fall.

Note that it’s pretty difficult to make these gram-level or tenth-of-a-gram-

level distinctions without using a gram scale, at least to get started. Most
of us would need to check, using a dieter’s kitchen gram scale that has a
readout ostensibly accurate down to a tenth of a gram. After we've weighed
out a couple dozen that are confirmed as falling within a certain prescribed
weight range, the remaining sort becomes more of a process of visual
selection, and only occasionally double-checking with the scale.

The sort setting up Year Two can happen over any number of weeks after the
initial cure, and there’s not really much of a deadline (unless one intends
to quickly re-sow, in late summer, rounds that came back a disappointment,
weighing less than 1.5 gram per). When we’re done sorting, we’re left with
an inventory of rounds and small cloven heads in labeled varieties that are
destined to skip pre-winter planting, and to instead spend the winter
indoors, ideally being refrigerated for most of that time.

In the past, I
have refrigerated
for only the last
2 months or so
before sowing.
When combined with
the right sow
date, it worked,
but too big a
proportion of my
inventory died due
to dehydration or
fungal issues, no
matter how much
(or possibly
because of)
humidifying effort
I gave the supply
during all those
other months of
room temperature
storage. Over the 2018/2019 cycle -- seizing upon a suggestion from Facebook
Group garlic buff Bjarne Solberg of Oslo, Norway -- I tried refrigerating
some small seed for the last 5 months before sowing, embedded in dry powdery
peat moss, and containing the entire mess within the fridge in breathable
paper bags or cardboard boxes. And that scheme worked dramatically better.
I learned that the extra time in the fridge didn't seem to matter in terms of
vernalization (everything was willing to "bulb up," whether it bulbed up

14 -- Hardneck Garlic Bulbils

cloved, or bulbed up round). But it absolutely mattered in terms of cutting
down on dehydration and fungal mortality in storage.

Going forward, I'm storing all my spring sow-intended small seed in this way,
chilling in a fridge from the end of curing and sorting, maybe late August or
early September, all the way through to May. So it will be 7 or 8 months of
chill -- not because the garlic needs that much chill time to vernalize, but
simply because the cold helps fend off the death of your seed.

(Another digression that could be of interest to any garlic farmer, hardneck

or softneck, whether or not they have any interest in laboring with bulbils:
This over-winter fridge storage and late spring sow procedure could just as
easily be tried with small cloves, stuff that gets discovered and rejected at
the time of breaking up seed heads for main crop seed.)

The original idea regarding refrigeration was simply to get the chill in,
artificially vernalizing the seed without rooting, for at least two months
prior to spring sowing. Some online garlic merchants offer similar advice to
late fall, early winter, or early spring main crop sowers located in southern
U.S. states, places that may not get cold enough to naturally vernalize the
garlic in the field. The two-month chill minimum may have been established
by 1950’s-vintage softneck garlic studies by Californian Lewis K. Mann, who
sometimes worked with one or another co-author. Mann reported at least two
months of chill triggered bulbing on schedule; if you deprive the garlic of
sufficient chill time, those plants tend to misbehave.

I’m not sure this actually matters, but this fridge air could be humidified
in one way or another, at least for the driest, coldest time periods of
winter (and especially if your home heating system is of the forced-air
type). In the past, I have had luck keeping damp but not dripping paper
towels inside a vegetable crisper drawer, next to a small amount of winter-
stored small seed, plus a humidity meter, and regularly checking. These past
few times around, with a bigger inventory, I tested out humidifying my entire
fridge. Again, with guidance from a humidity meter, it works pretty well to
simply hang one or two damp but not dripping pieces of cloth on a fridge
shelf, with adjustments made by partly unfolding or folding, and thus
offering more or less surface area for the water to evaporate into the fridge
air. My best guess is 50-70 percent relative humidity should be okay.
(However, I did recently learn that the upper end of these humidity levels
can clog up your coolant coils with excessive ice, at least during late
summer or early fall, when the motor’s clicking on more often in an un-air-
conditioned house.)

By the end of the first week of May, and not before, it’s time to crack open
the refrigerated bags and boxes, and to get ready to immediately sow some of
the saved seed. I say “immediately” because one of the things I’ve noticed
about chilled garlic is that it sprouts very quickly after being returned to
anything in the neighborhood of room temperature. The matching varieties of
small cloved heads that we saved whole are now ready to be broken up and
looked over, choosing those cloves that now happen to be at spring’s 1.0-to-
4.9-gram target range.

15 -- Hardneck Garlic Bulbils

So here’s my fine-tuned spec’s for the full sort in spring, working with what
are now partly dehydrated weights, and again using a digital scale that’s
good down to a
tenth of a gram:

• Small stuff,
cloves or rounds,
weighing 1.9 grams
or less in spring
gets sown right
away, after the
end of the first
week of May, or
around May 9,
which’ll be a
Saturday in 2020.
The rest goes back
in the fridge for
another week or
so.

• Medium stuff
weighing 2.0 to
3.4 grams apiece
can be pulled out
and sown after the end of the second week of May, or around May 16.

• Bigger stuff weighing 3.5 grams and up will have to wait a bit longer in
the fridge, until getting sown after the end of the third week of May, or
around May 23, which will be an early U.S. Memorial Day Weekend in 2020.

If you are not absolutely convinced that what matters, besides sow date, is
the size of the seed pieces -- rather than their anatomical shapes, cloves
versus rounds -- then, by all means, plant equivalently sized cloves and
rounds in separately marked furrows, and let us know the results.

My process for late spring sowing of rounds and cloves into Year Two is
similar to my Year One procedure of setting up 3-foot-long furrows a foot
apart, on center, running across our 3.5-foot-wide beds. I’m still making
the same plant spacing adjustments based on starting weights, and not based
directly on seed numbers: Every 3-foot-long furrow is only good for about 45
grams of seed (or 15 grams to the square foot). So if my supply averages
about 1 gram per piece, then maybe 45 seed pieces per; 2 grams per, then 22
per; 3 grams per, then 15 per, and so on. I’m not sure it matters all that
much whether all the seed pieces are placed root side down. In the past,
I’ve made an effort to do that, but lately I’ve had too many saved for the
extra bother.

16 -- Hardneck Garlic Bulbils

Some Promising Results and Some Unfortunate Mistakes From 2019

For the Year 2 part of my scheme, I've been working every cycle with about a
20-pound supply of numerous rounds and small clove-divided heads in many
hardneck varieties, most of it derived from a prior year (or sometimes years)
of growing out bulbils on a fall sow, as traditionally.

I cut myself off at 20 pounds because that's about as much as my fridge can
hold over winter, and still leave enough room to keep one person fed. Also,
that kind of poundage requires about as much growing space as I can single-
handedly stay on top of. Also, if everything was 100 percent successful (and
I accept there’s little chance of that happening), 20 pounds of spring sown
seed pieces averaging maybe only 2.5 grams apiece could mean I'd wind up with
something like 4,000 seedworthy rounds and cloves. That's more than enough
for a quasi-recreational family garlic operation, where volunteers closely
related to me start gasping anytime any fool proposes we go way bigger than
our current limit of maybe 6,000 main crop plants per year, whether grown
from cloves, as traditionally, or from the fruits of our spring sow tests.

No matter whether starting with rounds or cloves, and no matter what size,
and no matter what variety, I found that sow dates from April 18 to 25 did
not do it for me in New York State. In 2019, I brazenly thought I could

17 -- Hardneck Garlic Bulbils

cheat the system by putting my smallest sized test groups in the ground that
early. But too much of it cloved. How much cloving is too much? I'm
assuming this project is not all that practical for the goal of sizing up
individual seed pieces, if I can't even get at least half of the harvest to
form rounds, as hoped. I make at least one new mistake every year, and
sowing so much so early was my big mistake on this cycle.

However, I did have some success sowing the first week of May.

Here's the stats for a group of small cloves, selected after cracking heads
in spring so that each weighed at least 3.1 grams apiece after storage,
sowing May 6: Among survivors, about half went to rounds and half cloved.
The rounds ranged from 13.3 grams to 37.4 grams (a new record on the high end
for me), averaging 24.3 grams per, weighed fairly fresh. For the cloved
half, the heads formed only two to four cloves per head, averaging 2.5 cloves
per head. Average weight per clove was estimated before breakup, again
fairly fresh, as a tad less than 14.5 grams per clove, which is still
respectable for seed-making purposes.

Unfortunately, I cannot say with certainty what the variety or varieties were
for this group above (or, for that matter, for any of my most successful
groups this year). This is because my stored-over-winter supply of small

18 -- Hardneck Garlic Bulbils

cloved heads was drawn, after a last-minute decision, from my prior spring
sow failures -- after they'd been all mixed up in a basket originally
intended to salvage for food. The ones that cloved seemed very Porcelain-
like, in terms of setting out big honking cloves, but maybe they just behaved
like a Porcelain due to the late spring sow treatment.

Here's the stats for the next size range downward, small cloves that weighed
between 1.9 and 3.0 grams per at the point in time of late spring sowing,
which was May 5. A larger proportion of those that lived (86 percent) went
to rounds, rather than cloving. The rounds, as you might expect, ranged
smaller, running 5.3 to 30.8 grams apiece, averaging 20.8 grams per, again
weighed fairly fresh. The cloved heads again formed a disproportionate
number of "two's," or "bulls' scrotums," compared to regular garlic.
Counting clove bumps, I estimate the 14 percent which formed cloved heads
carried an average of only about 2.5 cloves per head, and these will average
a tad less than 10.6 grams per piece, after fuller curing and deducting some
for the stem. For our garlic team, those heads are still worth saving for
main crop seed, culling out any small cloves discovered upon cracking heads
later in fall.

19 -- Hardneck Garlic Bulbils

The stats for the smallest size range, small seed cloves that weighed between
0.5 and 1.8 grams per at the point in time of late spring sowing, May 5:
Nearly all survivors (93 percent) went to rounds, rather than cloving. The
rounds as expected ranged smaller still, running 2.5 to 20.3 grams apiece,
averaging 10.5 grams per. I did happen to notice that the rounds, though
smaller, looked and felt tighter and denser than the mega rounds achieved
from bigger seed sizes, which could help fend off mortality in the
intervening weeks of storage before using them on a traditional fall sow. I
wouldn’t say all these rounds wound up seedworthy, as our current goal for
fall sow main crop seed is usually at least 5.0 grams per piece. But
possibly the bigger half of the rounds came from the bigger half of the
original set of spring sown cloves, pointing to 1.0 grams or so, spring
weight, as the minimum size for anything that anybody would want to monkey
with on a complicated procedure.

20 -- Hardneck Garlic Bulbils

So, Bottom Line Findings to Date

The fridge chill -- whether it’s 2 months, 5 months, or (hopefully) longer --

seems to put the plants on the right, tight, and typical schedule of bulbing
up and shutting down for the year, a month or so after solstice in NYS.
Lewis K. Mann and my own prior years of laborious trial and bitter error have
proven that, if the seed pieces experience nothing but room temperature all
winter long, too many of them will fail to “bulb up” at all, forming instead
fat leek-like plants from multiple leaf layers, but with no energy stored,
and still growing green as late as August or September (photo above).

The difference between success and failure on a late spring planting really
can be a matter of only a few days or weeks on the sow date. I don’t really
know whether this is a soil temperature thing, or a day-length thing. But I
know that if I sow too soon -- say, anytime in April in New York State --
it’s mostly a waste of effort. But if I wait to sow until after the end of
the first week of May, this really does seem to trick many of the plants into
an even tighter schedule. Upon sprouting into the sun and immediately
discovering fairly long and lengthening days, or possibly discovering soil
temperatures that are already getting toasty, these conditions seem to "force
a decision" to decline cloving entirely, or to limit it.

Again, for seed pieces that are worth working with, 1.0 grams seems to be
about the lower limit. But keep in mind that’s a partly dehydrated weight in
spring, and my best approximation is to name 1.5 grams and up as the fairly
fresh weight to save in fall to get roughly that kind of minimum by spring.

Both Curzio Caravati of Kenosha, Wisconsin, and myself have learned over
recent cycles that some of the main crop seed rounds formed by this procedure
will prove to have multiple growth points hiding inside. And you won’t be
able to distinguish them beforehand by feel, instead only discovering the
multiples when you grow them out, and then see the doubled or tripled stems,
all fighting from one spot. But, so far, it’s been a small enough percentage
that I have not been dissuaded.

21 -- Hardneck Garlic Bulbils

We happened to notice for the first time that plants forming rounds, as
desired, tend to eventually flop over in the field, though still green for
another week or two or three longer. Those that both cloved and scaped will
stay erect longer, which stands to reason, as the scape is a fairly stiff
stalk helping hold things up. The point is that all that flopping over can
cause an impatient garlic farmer to harvest a bit too early. Instead -- even
though the hot-weather weeds will, by then, be absolutely on the verge of a
coup -- giving these prostrate garlic plants extra time in the field helps
the rounds tighten up their fleshy external skin layers. This moves the last
fluids and energy to the internal storage organ, the single round clove, and
creates a dormant round that’ll do better for those months of storage
necessary before being deployed again on a traditional main crop fall sow.

All That We Still Don't Know

I still don't really know what the upper spring sow seed size limit should
be, and certainly not variety by variety. For all I know, for certain
varieties, we could make absolutely gigantic single-clove seed rounds if we
somehow happened to do everything right with 4 or 5 or 6 gram seed pieces,
possibly holding off on the sowing until very late May.

I also don't know how to guess beforehand, without testing each, between
varieties that behave, and varieties that don't. Is there a pattern between
Porcelains, Rocamboles, and Purple Stripes? Or are some of each type
workable because they happen to be adapted for especially northern, cold
conditions? Or, the opposite, for more southerly zones? What if these
seemingly non-cooperative varieties simply need to be sown later, or chilled
colder? I just dunno.

22 -- Hardneck Garlic Bulbils

I also don't know if what I'm doing is what certain Asian or Peruvian farmers
do when they grow single clove garlic. The Internet is full of all kinds of
sketchy information about certain special types of garlic, grown in certain
special areas, that wind up making “solo garlic” that sells for a premium,
per pound, for some sort of human reason of novelty or aesthetics or mystique
or supposed ease of kitchen preparation. If they are sowing various forms of
small garlic seed in late spring, after some kind of consistent chill in
storage, they seem to be keeping that fact pretty quiet.

Similarly, is there really any common, cookbook-style denominator, or are

there actually several ways to skin this cat? Megan Palmer in the ocean-
modified climate of New Zealand routinely harvests large rounds from Turban
garlics, sometimes out of smaller rounds, sometimes out of cloves, and
seemingly without any special treatment; her current record stands at 45
grams. Commercial grower Letetia Ware of Tasmania regularly gets 40-60 mm
rounds from a reputed Softneck Artichoke variety, seeded by small cloves from
her smallest bulbs, intentionally reserved, then sown into the Southern
Hemisphere’s late winter. In 2019, Nina Ulmer of Alberta, Canada, showed off
a photo of a stunning, purple, 51-gram round -- variety uncertain, grown from
a small clove, May sown, reputedly no chill. And Geoff Shinkle of
Newfoundland, Canada, reported having stumbled upon seedworthy rounds two
years previously from May-planted Softneck Silverskin cloves.

And here’s another stray question: Maybe the easiest way to prevent drying
out, and to get the chill in, would be to go through the whole fall and
winter at the -3 degrees C. recommendation of Gayle M. Volk et al. 2004,
which is colder than a typical household fridge, and warmer than a typical
household freezer. To get storage at that temperature -- which the authors
advocate for seed dealers wishing to extend sales to gardeners who never seem
to get on the stick until spring -- one would have to borrow some technology
from home brewing buffs in order to rig up a single-purpose freezer to
maintain such an odd target temperature. But, if it works well, it could be
done, and possibly on a much more ambitious scale.

Literature Referenced
Mann, Louis K., 1952. Anatomy of the Garlic Bulb and Factors Affecting Bulb
Development, Hilgardia 21(8):195-251.

Mann, Louis K., and David A. Lewis, 1956. Rest and Dormancy in Garlic,
Hilgardia Vol. 26(3): 161-189.

Mann, Louis K., and P. A. Minges, 1958. Growth and Bulbing of Garlic (Allium
Sativum L.) in Response to Storage Temperature of Planting Stocks, Day
Length, and Planting Date, Hilgardia 27(15):385-419.

Volk, Gayle M., Kate E. Rotindo, and Walter Lyons, 2004. Low-temperature
Storage of Garlic for Spring Planting, HortScience 39(3):571-573.

23 -- Hardneck Garlic Bulbils