Wash or not wash Garlic when harvesting?

Garlic will naturalize and multiply. Thats probably what happened to yours. You were seeing the ones that had multiplied from an earlier planting. Whatever you don`t need for cooking just leave them alone and in a year or two you will have more than you and several families need.

 

That may have been what happened bt this was the first planting there was nothing else. I bought the garlic out of a catalog and planted the cloves and each one made a bunch of seperate plants that looked like cloves. I will leave some and see what they do.

 

Do you remember the variety they were? If so you can look up the growth habit of that particular variety. I would be curious to find out if they naturally grew that way.

 

it sounds like you planted the whole garlic bulb instead of separating the cloves and planting each of them separately. if so, you can divide the plants up and plant them each. this happened to me when i missed a few bulbs one year. they came up the next in groups of several plants. they divided and replanted easily, tho.

 

LOL..no I didnt plant the whole bulb I seperated it into the cloves and planted each clove by itself. I pulled some yesterday and I can see that each plant is making its own bulb....so with each clove I planted I am getting several new bulbs instead of just one. They are small yet but I can see they are making new bulbs. They have been in the gournd over a year now but I am going to leave them because for whatever reason they grew like theis they need extra time.

 

Gosh Bunkie,,I didn`t even think about that since RR said that "cloves" were planted. Could have been that they planted the "bulbs" instead. The bulbs indeed would have made what they describe.

 

No I didnt plant the bulbs, I planted cloves. I only had one bulb.

 

that's really interesting riverrock! if they've been in the ground for over a year, then they must have made some plants after 10 plus months or so. i'm going by the fact that we plant cloves in October, the plants come up in spring, then we harvest by July. we've had oddities before like instead of a bulb with cloves we've had just a hard ball of garlic. i can't remember the reason for it now, but it waas something in the cycle. never heard of the mass plants instead of one for each clove. where did you get the seed?

 

If you leave the garlic in the ground it will indeed make next year. Some varieties do not produce the multi-cloved heads till the second year. The garlic that looks like an onion is an immature bulb that hasn`t divided yet. They have a great flavor though !! I just grate them into whatever I am cooking. They are a bit milder that the mature heads.

 

By "too warm" I mean that the weather is too warm and there's no place cool enough to keep the garlic from going bad before I can use it all. Winter storage isn't a problem. I can go out to the garden and dig up some green garlic if I've used what's in the freezer.

I like garlic. And, I cook with it almost daily.
There's a lot of garlic in my freezer. I only use garlic powder when I'm feeling lazy or making a seasoning mix.

I probably don't use as much garlic as many of you.