Neck rot of garlic

[svalli]

This is my eighth season to harvest garlic and still I am learning something new. I have seen these sunken areas on stems also during previous years while cleaning the garlic after harvest by removing the dead leaves and damaged wrappers before hanging the garlic to dry. When peeling off the dead looking area from the stem, there is mold looking stuff on one or more layers under it.

Botrytis porri on stem.jpg

I just ripped off the bad looking spots and hung the garlic on bunches of dozen to dry in the garage. Now the leaves are dry and I started to clean the garlic to bring indoors to finish curing. I like to leave about a foot of the scape, so I can tie the varieties on bunches to prevent mixing them. That time I can also inspect the scape in case of signs of onion maggots, which may have gone unnoticed earlier. What I have now found that some of the scapes have that mold on them and if it goes all the way to the bulb, the bulb may have already started to go bad with cloves rotting.

Botrytis porri on bulb.jpg

In some the mold has not yet reached the bulb and I hope those will be OK, but I have still separated them and cleaned the stem with alcohol rub

Botrytis porri on scape.jpg

I do not have many with this problem, but still enough to annoy me. I searched the web about what awful disease this could be and found that it is Botrytis porri, which is quite common problem in garlic. It is more prevalent on humid summers and our summer was dry. But because it was so hot, I did not weed the beds diligently. The other one of my two beds had thick layer of chickweed between the garlic stems during harvest. That must have kept the dew on the stems and prevented air circulation. When I look my planting map, I noticed that there are more of the moldy stems on the garlic, which was growing on that weedy bed.

Rasa Creek Farm website has good description about this type of grey mold http://www.rasacreekfarm.com/how-to-gro ... tis-porri-

All of this peeling and inspecting the scapes is a lot of work, but I hope that this way I can find the ones, which would go bad in storage and sort my seed stock to the ones without any signs of the mold. Luckily the varieties, which I got from Bower were in the weeded bed and none of those bulbs had signs of mold. I have still half of the bulbs to clean, so that takes many nights sitting in the garage to go through them.

Cleaning garlic.jpg

I now made decision to start limiting the planting quantity to one 1 x 20 m bed so that means about 500 cloves. I have also decided to limit the quantity of different varieties by the KonMari method and will stop growing the ones, which are available from the commercial garlic growers in Europe, because I could easily get them again, if I want to grow them. This way I will be able to put more effort and energy to grow the more interesting varieties.

So Botrytis porri was the lesson I learned this season.

Sari

[pepperhead212]

Sorry to hear about your garlic, [mention]svalli[/mention]. I do that potassium bicarbonate spray as a prophylactic, for garlic, and many other plants, to try to prevent fungal diseases. I just got 2 more lbs of it, getting ready for next year!

[bower]

My early garlic have already been through the trimming and inspection process too. I think the greens dried faster due to the hot weather, and it was a good excuse for me to sit in the basement keeping busy instead of melting in the worst heat upstairs in my house.
One thing this year which was new, I saw some signs of damage above the bulb like something was also feeding on the stems. I was worrying about the leek moth we talked about on another thread, so I peeled off another layer on those stems to check. Did not find any sign of insect frass between the layers, so it was not the dreaded moth, at least. The bites on the bulbs are not really different from other years, although I didn't see any wireworms when digging them. I have read that wireworms are temperature sensitive though, so they may have moved deeper in the soil because of the unusual heat.