Forgotten garlic patch

[Dicthamus]

Last year, I forgot to harvest one section of a garlic bed. About 20 plants. Now, I see a patch of very happy garlic, leaves are over a foot long, looks really healthy.

However! Beneath the soil of each plant, is not just one clove, but of course an entire head, with 4-6 cloves probably still touching each other. If I planted 20 cloves last year, there may be 100 plants there now. I didn't count, I'm guessing.

An option is harvesting green garlic as needed. Another option I'm considering is leaving it alone til July and see how the cloves turn out. My question: For those with experience, will the cloves turn out tiny and not worth harvesting, or will the cloves still end up a decent size, despite the competition from their adjacent siblings?

[Whwoz]

Cannot help you Dicthamus, however I will be following with interest as I had some garlic that the stems rotted on before I got them out of the ground and the cloves have all shot, giving me the same situation. Any information greatly appricated

[bower]

It is hard to predict - okay impossible to predict! what garlic will do. You may get a cluster of smaller bulbs, due to the competition. How much smaller, would depend on your spacing and how rich is the soil. Sometimes I have seen a whole bulb split into a group of large rounds instead.

If you don't want to leave them as is, I've also moved garlic after it's up, by taking as much soil as you can with the roots. These were rounds I moved with a clump of soil because I had a lot of misses and wanted to use the space for something else. They didn't even wilt, just carried on... That might not work for dividing a bulb, but I bet they would come on anyway. You might have to trim the tops, and expect to harvest a bit later, but I think it can be done.

[rxkeith]

my experience is if you leave them alone, you will get a clump of smaller
cloves or bulbs than you normally would. tiny cloves if bulbs form. last spring
i dug up some bulbs that i had missed the previous year, separated them, and
replanted with proper spacing. i got decent size bulbs from most of them. it is
best if you can replant early. i don't know how it will go with foot long leaves.
you can always experiment. leave some in place for green garlic. separate the small
bulbs or cloves and replant in the fall if you wish. it might take a couple years to get them
back to full size, they will eventually. dig some clumps up now, separate them, and replant at proper
spacing. water them in well, and let them go. you may have to do some leaf trimming as
previously mentioned. any bulbs that form will probably be bigger than those left in place.
you don't know till you go.


keith

[Paquebot]

Leave them be and harvest when they begin to go dormant If they were hardneck type, they will be mostly rounds. That's your planting stock for next year.

Martin

[WoodSprite]

I think it's a perfect opportunity to experiment! I'd dig up, separate the cloves and replant them with normal spacing. I'd cut the leaves off of some of those and not cut them on others. I'd leave some as is. And anything else I can think of.

And of course I'd make note of what I did so come harvest time I could compare the results. What I do for things that I want to remember is to take a picture then use software to edit the photo by circling the different areas that I did different things and label them with the software. That way at a quick look at the photo I see exactly what I did.