Hey everybody, I’m a relatively new grower and seed producer. I’ve potentially made a mistake by undertaking a very difficult crop but I’m young so I figure I have my whole life to figure this out. I’d love some advice from anyone with more experience!
What are some garlic growing tips, both from bulb, bulbil, or seed, I should know as I go into my first year of growing out over 50 varieties of bulbils. I figure I have about 3 years before the project of attempting to get seed actually starts. Do you have any advice on variety tracking, I feel that will be the hardest part. I’m planning on sowing them soon as 2 bulbils together planted 1-2" deep with 4" spacing between bunches and little to no mulch for this first year as well as no irrigation.
Hesitantly looking forward to this project
Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.
First thing that comes to mind is that if you want to make adaptative growing with garlics (allium sativum), you have to use specific varieties since most commercial ones are not planted from true seeds but their bulbils. Commercial garlic is developed to not produce open-pollinated flowers, and though they can be modified with patience, it’s a job for the experts. True seeds are very small and black.
Another tip is that garlics are bad companions, they want room for themselves. I think they don’t handle well in moist soils, best to let the soil dry before irrigating.
Be it true or false seeds, choosing the largest ones is supposed to give larger vegetables. False seeds can be “started” by moistering them in wet paper, or in a glass jar (water and rinse daily), they will develop the green stem when they are ready to plant and will develop roots in short time. Even then, try not to use the ones that are sold for consumption since they are usually treated for preventing sprouts.
For true seeds I like to sow more than the recommended number, five to ten seeds per slot, then cut the worse sprouts. It may seem a waste of seeds, but there really are more seeds in the bag than I can possibly grow, so I may as well invest them in choosing the best ones.
Clarification: Here I am referring to allium sativum, where their true seeds cannot happen by themselves. There are other allium species that make their true seed on their own, as I am talking about in the following post.
Clarification 2: The seeds I have are not the sativum species, they are the wild ones. I have more than I can grow since I cannot grow more than ten plants at the same time in my small terrace. (but I let the wild bulbils in place so new plants grow in the land next spring).
Thanks Abraham, I’m surprised you have a bag of true garlic seed, perhaps they are more common in Spain, I cannot find any in North America. I’m hoping at least one of my 56 varieties will produce bulbils that are easily brushed off and flowers that are attractive to pollinators, free of male sterility, and readily produce viable seeds. I’ll look into starting the bulbils in spring as well, rather than winter sowing all of them.
The only true seeds I have is from a wild species: allium ampeloprasum. It produces very small bulbils and rather big flowers. The taste is softer than the usual garlics but the texture is rough.
I found this resource online about growing garlic from seed. I’ve emailed them before in the past and they were pretty responsive. They also sell some of the varieties they’ve developed (as in, not from bulbs or bubils, which are clones, but from seeds which are sexually reproduced).
One important thing to consider if you want to grow true garlic seed is day length. The mechanism is still relatively unknown, but somehow day length affects the production of bulbils vs true seed. In my Northern climate it means it will almost be impossible to grow true garlic seed as our growing period have very long days. I have given up for now trying to do it.
Some articles to read on that topic:
Atif, M. J., Ahanger, M. A., Amin, B., Ghani, M. I., Ali, M., & Cheng, Z. (2020). Mechanism of allium crops bulb enlargement in response to photoperiod: A review. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 21(4), 1325.
Mathew, D., Forer, Y., Rabinowitch, H. D., & Kamenetsky, R. (2011). Effect of long photoperiod on the reproductive and bulbing processes in garlic (Allium sativum L.) genotypes. Environmental and Experimental Botany, 71(2), 166-173.
Hi @AbrahamPalma , I think the thread here is about Allium sativum (the species commonly grown as garlic). There are closely related species you can use as garlic and Allium ampeloprasum contains some of them. If your approach describes A. ampeloprasum, I suggest you edit your first post to make that clear. If people read it as about A. sativum, it would contain several false statements.
