Mary Mary quite contrary, how does your garlic grow?

Harvested the garlic last Wed.  It's so humid out - in the 90% range - that I had to immediately hang it in the basement with the fan blowing instead of leaving out to dry for a while.  I grow hardnecks - CA White  and Bavarian Purple, but I can't really tell which is which anymore.

I love the scent that wafts thru the air with each pull and strip while harvesting garlic! 

Friday night I bought 3 locally grown CA garlic at the farmers market. The grower said to put it them in the frig for September before planting them Oct 1. My questions are: does anyone else in southern latitudes do this with their soft necks and do you leave them in an open plastic bag or in a brown paper bag? TIA

Scorpio Rising wrote:Gonna do a scape and eggplant skillet tomorrow!  They keep really well!  And are super yummy!

Makes me hungry thinking about the taste of it!  Oh, those scapes.... 

So do I put them in plastic or paper bag?

sanderson wrote: So do I put them in plastic or paper bag?

I know I do not qualify,,, but do the same for your garlic bulbs as you would for tulips you are forcing. Put them in a paper bag or a plastic bag with lots of air holes and sawdust, other wise they will mold and not do well.

I don't have bulbs! I will put them in a paper bag in the refrigerator. Hopefully a southerner will come along and answer my question on refrigerating soft necks during September.

Ahhh, but garlic cloves are bulbs of the Lily family, species garlic and you are trying to provide them a false winter so they can grow properly in your garden.

sanderson wrote:  I don't have bulbs!  I will put them in a paper bag in the refrigerator.  Hopefully a southerner will come along and answer my question on refrigerating soft necks during September.

Sorry, southerner here but I have never vernalized my bulbs at all.  Maybe I should, but I have no information for you on the viability of using this method.

sanderson wrote:  I don't have bulbs!  I will put them in a paper bag in the refrigerator.  Hopefully a southerner will come along and answer my question on refrigerating soft necks during September.

When I lived in southern Georgia, I put the bulbs in a paper bag in the refrigerator for two or three months, before planting them. One time I left them in the plastic bag in the fridge, and they molded - never did that again.  One thing that would complicate that, though, is the new frost-free refrigerators - they pull all of the moisture out of the fridge and I don't know what that would do to the garlic bulbs.   There were only two softneck garlics that did well for me in the hot & humid south Georgia - one was Lorz Italian (my favorite), and I don't remember the other name, it was something like Teradrome and it stores better than the Lorz Italian.  One thing I had to do in southern Georgia was mulch the garlic heavily to keep the soil cool during the long hot summer months.

But, since we now live in the northland, I plant hardneck garlic and it is a completely different schedule and process.

Thank you, all. I may do an experiment Oct 1 by planting both the vernalized and some non-vernalized garlic. I do cover the bed with straw to keep the soil as cool as possible.

Gosh,  it's nine years that this thread has been running . 

I've had some fantastic results in pure MM & home made compost topped up beds . 

 I've found a better growth of bulb if the bed has been enriched with my home made compost the previous autumn  & then  had cabbages grown then the spring after the cabbages were harvested planted my garlic in the mid to late autumn.  Done like this to get the richness of the bed down otherwise they just  galloped away with a bit too much top and not quite enough bulb.

 I've been putting aside the biggest three bulbs eachyear for my new clove plantings & vernalizing them in the fridge for three weeks at 3 oC . 
Earlier this year I was harvesting garlic almost 2 & 3/4  inches in diameter .  I seem to think my initial garlics came from a supermarket greengrocery counter  . 

I have purchased a few bulbs from garden centres but none of them did much good,  so the "Nationalizing of  the original immigrants "  into the garden definitely seems the right way to go for developing a good strain that wokrs well in your garden & to get good crops year after year .  Don't over water them,  they get leggy and go rusty .

 I also discovered that for me I needed to alternate the garlic bed around the garden,  no two years in the same bed and no return to the same place in three years  instead of having a permanent bed suggested in my initial garlic growing research that said the French have permanent garlic beds some 100 or more years old . ( could be their sandy free draining  warm soil annually  animal based heavily manured beds ) .

plantoid wrote:Gosh,  it's nine years that this thread has been running . 
. . I've been putting aside the biggest three bulbs each year for my new clove plantings & vernalizing them in the fridge for three weeks at 3 oC . 
Earlier this year I was harvesting garlic almost 2 & 3/4  inches in diameter .  I seem to think my initial garlics came from a supermarket greengrocery counter  . 

I have purchased a few bulbs from garden centres but none of them did much good,  so the "Nationalizing of  the original immigrants "  into the garden definitely seems the right way to go for developing a good strain that works well in your garden & to get good crops year after year ..

Interesting way to put it but I get your drift.  I wanted to try this but I don't seem to get bulbs big enough to save.  Still working on it after 6 summers and 5 winters!

sanderson wrote:

plantoid wrote:Gosh,  it's nine years that this thread has been running . 
. . I've been putting aside the biggest three bulbs each year for my new clove plantings & vernalizing them in the fridge for three weeks at 3 oC . 
Earlier this year I was harvesting garlic almost 2 & 3/4  inches in diameter .  I seem to think my initial garlics came from a supermarket greengrocery counter  . 

I have purchased a few bulbs from garden centres but none of them did much good,  so the "Nationalizing of  the original immigrants "  into the garden definitely seems the right way to go for developing a good strain that works well in your garden & to get good crops year after year ..

Interesting way to put it but I get your drift.  I wanted to try this but I don't seem to get bulbs big enough to save.  Still working on it after 6 summers and 5 winters!

Last October, I planted mostly home grown garlic (from the previous year) and only a few store bought. The home grown did much better. I will repeat that exercise in the next few days.

I've been planting only home growns after purchasing them the first year.   Their health and flavor are so wonderful that I can't imagine using anything else.  They have certainly morphed though.  The CA Whites, which started off as softnecks, were planted along with the Bulgarian purple hardnecks.  Now they are all white hardnecks, some with tinges of purple sometimes.
So yummy!

I checked the garlic I put in the refrigerator bin sometime in early September and it doesn't look healthy. So hubby bought me 5 more from the grocery store to plant without chilling. What will be will just have to be with the garlic.

I have never put my soft necks in the refrig. Hmmm

Refrigerating the softneck was just an experiment, thank goodness.  I did manage to get 8 squares planted and composted today, huffing and puffing, but getting it done.

Baker Creek Heirloom posted a video on How to choose the right garlic.

I planted the soft neck garlic cloves early October.  Here it is early April and they already look like this.  No bulbs, just some dying leaves. They are 2 1/2' tall. ??