Growing rounds

[svalli]

Three weeks ago I planted to containers the small rounds grown from bulbils which [mention]Bower[/mention] sent me 2018. Last fall I planted the biggest rounds of same varieties directly to the field and saved the small ones for container growing. I have kept them protected from frost in the greenhouse and thanks to the sunny days the growth has been quite fast. Now there is no freezing nights in the forecast for next week, so I moved them outside, but I am not sure, if I should have left them in the greenhouse. The temperature outside is still quite cold and ground has not thawed yet, so I put the containers on our deck, which is elevated from the ground. I was just worried that the green growth in the greenhouse can be too fast and the stems become leggy.

planting rounds.jpg

rounds sprouted.jpg

Sari

[bower]

I agree about the greenhouse - I think they're better off outdoors. Last year when I compared those grown outside, it was obvious that the excess heat inside was not good for the garlic, and produced smaller not larger bulbs or rounds in most cases. It was stressful to see them flopping over as well, and hard to know if you are watering too much because of course they need that water in the heat....
I read somewhere from a grower further south, that they need to get a certain amount of growth on the garlic before temperatures reach a certain high, because at the higher temperature they will stop growing and will be stunted if it comes too soon. It's possible my greenhouse conditions caused the variation in producing small bulbs vs rounds - some really splendid rounds - but overall it was not a helpful stress. They tolerate cold better.

Last fall I had a great selection of both rounds and small bulbs of the same varieties from the bulbils you sent me, so I planted in ground and made a detailed map, with cloves and rounds in the same row. And when possible I did the same thing in more than one bed, in case location had an effect - 6 beds in all so about double the ground I had in garlic before. I was lucky to have lots of prep time and all the beds got mulched properly and covered with wire to keep it from blowing away or inviting voles. We had "excellent" snow cover this winter as well, but by now I'm quite impatient to see it gone! (we just had more snow last night). This time last year I had garlic sprouting up, it's quite late.

[pmcgrady]

I dug some rounds yesterday for some green garlic

[bower]

That is some good sized green garlic, pmcg! Looks delicious...

[bower]

Germidour-rounds-up.JPG

Well, a beautiful day today, I made some efforts to hammer together the snow-crushed wooden frame of my beds and removed the wire where garlic is coming up. My main porcelain bed is slow, but there was enough up in the mixed bed that I got my map out to get a rough idea of who is coming first without removing the mulch, especially the first row which looked so cheerful... they are Germidour rounds! So glad to see that beautiful garlic coming up again!
Thermidrome and Messidor rounds are not showing yet through the mulch. But two rows of Alexandra mixed cloves and rounds are all up, including the rounds. Kolkja Red Russian looks like cloves are up before the rounds, Tallinn cloves are all up, one large round is not up yet. And it looks like Early Purple cloves are up before the rounds in the same row. Will be fun to watch when I take the mulch off - we're still having all nights below freezing so I don't want to remove it too early.. However now that the wire is gone, birds wasted no time in getting in to disturb the mulch. We'll see how long it lasts.

[Paquebot]

One thing to know is that garlic does not transplant well. It is more apt to immediately go dormant rather than make a larger bulb.

Martin

[bower]

Now that the snow is gone from these beds, I was able to repair the moose rails and then take off the wire and mulch from the last two beds. (A moose had been through already and walked over them, but the chicken wire prevented it from making a deep and devastating print!) The garlic in other beds is far ahead of these by now, and came up faster with the mulch removed.
So far I am not seeing any notable difference in the emergence of cloves vs rounds. The main difference that is noticeable, is that whichever is largest tends to come up sooner and taller. With the exception of one really collossal round (Tallinn) which came up last in the other bed.
So here is a pic of this mixed bed when I uncovered 2 days ago - the smaller stuff is barely green because the mulch was covering it, but they are coming up. I checked it against my map this morning as we were discussing creole, such as the Lautrec shown below, I believe. This made some large rounds and some tiny cloves last year. All 9 rounds are fully up today and as tall as any others, but only 5 of the 15 small cloves. So in this case, the size seems most important - or perhaps those cloves were a bit small for the depth planted, IDK.
Not all rounds (and cloves) have come up (yet?). But all varieties have come through.

2020-rounds-cloves-emerging-Sbed1.JPG

[Whwoz]

[mention]Bower[/mention] Trying to get my head around your garlic planting sequence before the snow arrives, do you plant it more or less as the snow arrives so that it shoots with the snow melt, or do you plant it well before so that it grows for a period, then goes dormant with the snow arrival and reshoots with the snow melt.

[bower]

Whwoz, we plant early-mid october, where the first sign of a snowflake is usually around halloween, which is also our last day of ten hours of daylight until February 10. We have frosty nights and some frosty days through November but lots of days above freezing and rarely any snow accumulating before December. It's a bad year when the snow is on the ground already in November. December snows often melt a few days later, with the real snow setting in at New Years Eve. Most winters we have thaws on a regular basis but a good bit of snow piles up in February. The ground is warm enough and usually bare by mid April when garlic shoots appear. IDK if they grow a lot (or any much at all) under the ground in that time. I had a clove pulled up by a bird early last spring, and it was not even sprouted. I pushed it back in, and it came up with the rest. I mentioned this to my farmer friend but she assured me they do normally grow roots or something, and maybe was due to late planting for the winter that closed in early that year. It seems that they likely do develop the roots and shoot at least in late winter, because they are ready to be up before anything else.

[bower]

Here's another of the beds with a mixture of cloves and rounds in it. These were up earliest as the bed was first to be free of snow, without mulch for about a week now. They all have 100% survival or close, except for Kolkja Red Russian which is missing about half which were mainly rounds, but they may come up yet. Still very early.
In the back rows of Tallinn, there was one really large round in the middle. When I moved the mulch the cloves were all up but the round was missing. It came up a few days later and it is a nice fat shoot - I was so glad to see it, and I bet it will produce a bigger bulb even than the cloves. Same goes for the big rounds in the Early Purple row. It's easy to see how much bigger they are than the cloves, alternating one of each across the row.
A big round has the potential to size up quickly since the divided cloves will always be a good bit smaller. So I am actually pretty stoked about getting a round from a round in some of these.

2020-cloves-rounds-Ncornerbed.JPG

2020Tallinn-NCornerbed.JPG

[Hatgirl]

How do you grow rounds instead of cloves

[bower]

[mention]Hatgirl[/mention] normally you get rounds in the first year after planting bulbils. Then when you plant the rounds, they usually produce a divided bulb, but it's smaller than the mature size bulb. If you get a bulb, you replant the cloves, and the next year you get a bigger bulb, and so on until you reach full size.
IDK exactly what conditions produced a bulb vs a round, because it would be great to be able to manipulate the garlic, and get a big round instead of a divided bulb the same size, which could take several more years to grow up to full size. It would be great to figure it out, but so far, I just find it unpredictable.
The first time I found a big round - a round as big as a clove in a large bulb - it was some scrawny and neglected garlic that was left where it was planted and missed when it died down. The bulbs were left close together and a couple of them, the cloves separated from the bulb in close quarters and grew into rounds instead. The biggest round I planted the following year produced a nice large bulb, and all my seed stock of Bonavista came from that round, which is now one third of my porcelain crop.
So one possibility is to plant small bulbs close together or leave them in the ground, and they may go to rounds.
Then last year I planted some rounds and bulbils in the greenhouse and let them grow and finish in there, and several of the varieties produced a mixture of rounds or small bulbs. I was excited about that possibility, but the same varieties outdoors also produced some rounds and some bulbs. The ones outside were stressed by a wet winter and a season blowing hot and cold, while the ones inside were stressed by heat, and late planted (January). There were more rounds in the gh than outdoors but it also depended on the variety.
So there are too many variables for me to figure out how to make it happen, I'm only glad it did. Stress seems to be a factor.
Bearing in mind, IDK at what point does a round or a bulbil decide, I'm dividing and making a bulb, or I'm not dividing, I'm making a round. It has to be early on, do you think? Those decision points are pretty certainly before the shoot breaks ground, I'm thinking. But i don't know for sure...
I haven't had the good luck to find any science that explains it.

[Hatgirl]

Ah, that's very interesting.
Part of the reason I was curious is because in Ireland we get this thing in the shops commonly called "Chinese garlic" and I was wondering how it grows.
https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/small-r ... 175896.jpg

[bower]

[mention]Hatgirl[/mention] I've seen that discussed at Tville, but I don't recall what conclusion was reached. Pretty sure somebody tried planting it though.

[svalli]

@Hatgirl I've seen that discussed at Tville, but I don't recall what conclusion was reached. Pretty sure somebody tried planting it though.

Few years ago I got couple of the Chinese solo garlic to sprout after refrigeration, but I lost those to onion maggots. I was going to try if those would grow to regular garlic with cloves. I have heard that those may have been treated to prevent sprouting, so I did not experiment second time.

Sari

[bower]

Just wanted to show you the big Tallinn round is the first to show its scape!
The stem is quite as large as any of my full size garlic, so I expect a full size bulb from this one.

Also on the subject of rounds, TomNJ reported from a book he read, that warm weather just after planting in the fall, and dry weather in spring, were conditions that were said to encourage rounds to form instead of bulbs.
That could explain the higher number of rounds produced in my greenhouse experiment last year, but doesn't explain the number of divided bulbs that also grew, directly from bulbils. This colossal Tallinn round grew outdoors - the weather after planting was very wet and cold, a wet winter, and spring weather was cold and wet as well. All the others made bulbs, but why this one made a round, is anybody's guess.

Tallinn-earliestscape-359.JPG

[ponyexpress]

I was harvesting my purple glazer garlic today and there was one bulb that had a side shoot next to it. Harvested it and found a regular bulb and a large round. Never saw that before.

I do have some bulbils that planted themselves in a different bed. I think they were very small and they did develop into rounds, probably the size of a large tapioca that you might find in boba tea.

[mention]Bower[/mention] How big are the bulbils from your Tallin garlic? I've found that the bulbils are either very small or they're large like Egyptian Walking Onions. Not sure which garlic produce which kinds. I think porcelain garlic produce the larger bulbils.

[bower]

[mention]ponyexpress[/mention] the bulbils of Tallinn and other Marbled Purple Stripe garlics which Svalli sent me were quite large, and those from her softnecks were large as well. The MPS type are new to me, as I have only one Marbled PS I've been growing up that is getting to full size now after 4 years (Kostyn's Red Russian). IDK if I will ever produce as large bulbils as she did, because of our short and cool season, but hers were really magnificent! The bulbils I got from KRR (and the ones I started from) are on the small side.

In general, the Porcelains produce the smallest bulbils, and standard Purple Stripes and Glazers a bit larger but still fairly small. Marbled PS seem to be quite a bit larger, but maybe depends on variety, and Rocamboles are quite large and fewer.

Ironically it is easy to grow up porcelains to full size from a tiny bulbil, just because they only have four cloves, so the gain in size every year is only divided four ways. Kostyn's RR also grew up like a porcelain, with immature bulbs having 4-5 cloves. I have two Purple Stripes, Persian Star and Chesnok Red, which are finally coming to full size after six years! I almost gave up on them, because they have so many cloves (10-13) that you barely get an increase in size each year, but I love that they are such long keepers. But last year, which was wet and harsh, the conditions for some reason caused them to produce fewer cloves although bulb size didn't increase at all. The larger cloves have produced some good sized plants, which I think for sure will have full sized bulbs.

One of the Glazer types that I got from Sari produced some small bulbs as well as rounds last year, and it looks like they also have many cloves similar to standard PS, which can make them take longer to size up. So I'm really excited about the larger rounds from these, as they will really give a jump start on bulb size. Also very excited to see early scapes on both Glazers, as well as all the MPS types, as early as our porcelains. So they will size up earlier in the season, and won't suffer as much if we have a bad year.