garlic misses and runts
Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2020 6:49 am
A few weeks ago I was musing about the 'misses' in my garlic bed. Not that there were a lot, but those empty spaces always leave me wondering what went wrong. This year the number of rounds vs cloves that missed was at least even. I also was missing a few full sized garlic from cloves, and some of these finally came up later but clearly not catching up with the rest.
So I did a search and found this explanation:
https://www.gov.mb.ca/agriculture/crops ... 00s10p.pdf
"Green mould disease, caused by the fungus Penicillium, attacks cloves which have been dam-aged prior to planting. Affected cloves may fail to emerge in the spring, or may produce weak, stunted plants which soon die."
and what to do:
"Plant only clonal cultivars known to be vigorous under (local) conditions. Avoid damaging the seed cloves, especially during the cracking proce-dure. Many mechanized cracking devices cause excessive amounts of clove damage. Crack the seed immediately before it is to be planted. Cracked cloves may be treated with a fungicide treatment."
I decided to rogue the garlic runts and examine for penicillium - I didn't find that, but there is certainly some type of rot which could be explained by damaged cloves. This first one somehow managed to emerge out of a nasty rotten clove! It's a porcelain. Seeing that decided me to rogue a few others. The Chesnok runts actually looked fairly healthy, just small. But since all came from the same sized cloves, the smaller size must have an explanation... Sure enough, the same brownish rot could be seen at the base.
So I have no regrets about pulling these, which would never produce a normal size bulb, and perhaps might spread disease to the healthy plants. Do you rogue your garlic for runts or diseased plants?
So I did a search and found this explanation:
https://www.gov.mb.ca/agriculture/crops ... 00s10p.pdf
"Green mould disease, caused by the fungus Penicillium, attacks cloves which have been dam-aged prior to planting. Affected cloves may fail to emerge in the spring, or may produce weak, stunted plants which soon die."
and what to do:
"Plant only clonal cultivars known to be vigorous under (local) conditions. Avoid damaging the seed cloves, especially during the cracking proce-dure. Many mechanized cracking devices cause excessive amounts of clove damage. Crack the seed immediately before it is to be planted. Cracked cloves may be treated with a fungicide treatment."
I decided to rogue the garlic runts and examine for penicillium - I didn't find that, but there is certainly some type of rot which could be explained by damaged cloves. This first one somehow managed to emerge out of a nasty rotten clove! It's a porcelain. Seeing that decided me to rogue a few others. The Chesnok runts actually looked fairly healthy, just small. But since all came from the same sized cloves, the smaller size must have an explanation... Sure enough, the same brownish rot could be seen at the base.
So I have no regrets about pulling these, which would never produce a normal size bulb, and perhaps might spread disease to the healthy plants. Do you rogue your garlic for runts or diseased plants?