"The festival has a policy stating that all vendors must test their product and it must be proven free of GBN in order to be able to sell there." Who performs the testing? Private labs? Does Minnesota have state-sponsored testing? I hope to see the USDA & state extension offices become more active in fighting GBN. It would be in everyone's best interest if that testing is made available & affordable to gardeners and collectors as well, since some of those are unwittingly spreading the organism through trades. I am no fan of Federal intervention in commerce, but since infected stock is being sold across state lines, this is a case where a USDA "GBN free" certification program should be initiated for all garlic sold as seed stock. "I have some Artichoke types but I generally shy away from softnecks because under my growing conditions most of those plants are weakly bolting and create bulbils in various locations - at the top of the the bulbs in the wrappers, just above the bulbs, halfway up the pseudostem, etc." While I have read of this behavior, mine have only rarely produced stem bulbils. I wish that was a more frequent occurrence, it would offer some hope of salvaging a variety, should GBN infect the bulb. It is the artichoke & other softneck garlics which are most at risk from the spread of GBN; my fear is that we could lose some heirloom softnecks completely before this infestation has been dealt with. "I too have noticed a general decline in size of what is being grown and offered out there. It was a goofy growing season in many parts of the U.S., wondering if that is the reason. I also suspect that a lot of bulb/clove stock is infected with viruses which can affect bulb quality and size, especially when combined with the stresses of a poor growing season. IMO people would be wise to break the chain and replace their entire stock by planting bulbils every five years or so, at least with types that produce bulbils. Not a complete solution but it is helpful." On that topic... correct me if I am wrong, Tom, but the use of bulbils as planting stock would only offer protection against GBN and other soil-borne organisms. Diseases tend to be systemic, and any part of the plant - bulbils included - would be infected. I have read comments from several garlic growers who believe that if they grow bulbils from stock infected with aster yellows, that the resultant crop would be free of the disease. It would be wonderful if that were true, but I doubt that would be an effective remedy. I do believe that hardneck garlic offered as seed stock (both commercially & through trades) should be more available in the form of bulbils. When I again offer garlic through SSE, I will make a statement explaining the threat of GBN, and encouraging more growers to offer bulbils. I will be doing so for all of my hardnecks. Spreading knowledge to other gardeners is key to getting a handle on GBN... my sincere thanks, Tom, for bringing this to our attention. It sure opened my eyes, especially as I begin to rebuild & expand my collection. I hope the "goofy season" is the reason for the predominance of small bulbs this year. Several of the growers that I obtained stock from ascribe to this theory, and I hope they are right. Looking back, I had several years with small bulbs, followed by years where bulbs grown from that smaller stock returned to their full size. Obviously, I hope that will happen with the stock I am planting now. It seems odd, though, to see this phenomenon occur on a national level. I don't necessarily suspect a virus, but that is a possibility... and if true, it might be yet another threat that is not being tested for. If there was one good thing about the aster yellows outbreak, it was that it generated awareness of just how fragile our garlic industry really is. Any vegetable which owes its continued existence to vegetative propagation is vulnerable to disease buildup... think Irish potatoes. " I focus instead on hardnecks, Rocamboles in particular. To me they are the best and are the focus of my attention (although I think most growers around here focus on growing Porcelains). Rokes are very winter-hardy plants. Their clove size, ease of peeling, flavor, and roasting attributes put them in high demand, even if they do not have the best storage attributes." Rocamboles are my favorite hardnecks as well. They tend to have larger bulbs than my porcelain garlics; one of them, "Special Idaho", had bulbs almost as large as my artichoke types. Additionally - and importantly - rocamboles also have especially large bulbils. Those of "Special Idaho" were often marble size. This means that it is realistic to propagate rocamboles from bulbils in a short time frame. I had been meaning to test that large-scale in 2012, but aster yellows put a halt to that. Sadfly, I have been unable to find sources for some of the rocamboles I lost... including "Special Idaho" and "Chrysalis Purple".

hi mark, glad to hear you did well, but i am not surprised, you are a genius at growing anything! now how's that money tree going? get any seeds yet? :) i am NOT a fan of mel bartholowmay (sp?) and his square foot gardening. i know people swear by it, i swear at it! for some things it's ok for others it is a disaster. maybe i did it wrong, any guess what a 4' X 4' square of bush string beans planted 2 or 4" on center looks like? it's a horror show. that said, i'm a big advocate of using 4' sq beds for some things. my garlic did fantastic! i grew garlic in '95 and '96 and it was a small amount, 1st year ok the 2nd was not good so i gave up. this past fall i allocated 4' X 12' for garlic (same as onions). i used my 6" onion planting guide to plant the garlic. i had 10 or 11 rows of music, 5 or 6 rows of german white, 2 rows of georgian crystal, 2 rows of an unknown hard neck i got at a health food store and 2 rows of softneck from stop and shop, the cloves for the sn were HUGE. of the hardnecks, 3 or 4 plants grew funky, maybe 2 or 3 never came up. of the sn, 1/2 did not come up and compared to the hn it did poorly tho ok. i dug it all about 7/25 and dried it in my shed. i trimmed the roots and stalks on friday. i did very well! i did have a problem (only with german white and only 8 or 10 bulbs with about 30+ that are fine) so i went to the farmers market looking for the farmer i bought my garlic from to ask about it but he was not there. so far i have not been able to get him on the phone. i did ask a few farmers why happened and the concensus was that i watered too much. my problem was that only the german white had 8 bulbs that had a white mold or fungus around the stalk within the bulb. the cloves were firm but looked water logged, a sort of translucent pearly grey color. the other 30 or so german white were ok. all the other garlic was ok from what i can discern. i did mulch with 5-6" of 1 or 2 year old shredded leaves, removing all but 1" in late march (which was too late but that did not harm anything). i thought that the leaves introduced the problem but then all the garlic should have had it. these guys told me they do not water their garlic, it rains enough here in the spring and summer to suffice. all the sources i read always said to keep it evenly moist but i 100% discount that now. unless we go for 3 weeks without rain, i will not water garlic again. however, if you saw the size of the hardneck bulbs they were selling you'd laugh. my german white has some cloves that are so huge that 1 clove is 2/3 the size of their entire bulb! i am not kidding you. my music cloves are just about the same tho i think the german white has larger cloves while music has larger bulbs, more cloves per bulb. my bulbs are about 2.5 to 3" in diameter, theirs were about 1.5 to 1.75"! so like i wonder about watering, you know :)! still, one guy told me garlic originated in siberia and they have wicked dry weather so the no watering does make sense. i harvested about 160 bulbs out of about 175 cloves planted. i used 48 sq feet of garden. to compare, i used 120 sq feet for potatoes. i grew 13 superior and 13 yukon gold and got a WHOOPING, SIT DOWN, HOLD ONTO YOUR HAT, 15 pounds of superior and 16 pounds of yukon gold and i use a soaker hose around the seed for adequate water. prior to that, my potatoes were often hollow or very small, so the soaker hose helps. garlic requires only cutting the scape and virtually no weeding with 1" of mulch. digging is easy. potatoes require work to plant, 2 or 3 hillings which is a lot of work in the heat, usually a lot of work killing colorodo potatoe beetles tho i saw only 12-18 this year and no larvae and the digging to get the potatoes is really hard work especially with a soaker hose in there. so i wasted 120 sq feet again! this fall i plan on planting at least 100 sq feet of garlic, NO potatoes, i may plant 125-130 sq feet. i plant 6" on center. i know from experience that if you crowd onions you get small bulbs. my red wings and copra are much larger now that i space them 4" on center vs the 3" i used to use. i suspect garlic is the same. i gather you used 6' too using the crw? storage is something only time will tell. i don't know what to make of the taste of all my garlics. georgian crystal is mild. the others are not like grocery store garlic which is HOT and SPICY. it is what i am used to. some of my cloves have been hot but most are so so. not sure what to make of this. but it is organic, it will be free once i grow enough to plant and eat for the whole year. this is why i need to buy garlic cuz i'd have to plant too much of the harvest based upon the amount i want to plant/grow next season, maybe 3/4! the guy i buy from charges just $4 a pound and he is organic!!!!! one of the guys i talked to at the farmers market told me he wholesales his to whole foods and he is organic and he gets $6.50 a pound, wholesale!!!!! so i gotta find the guy i dealt with last summer for about 30 pounds of garlic and that'd be $120! but i think that would allow me to have enought to plant and eat all year. yes, it was very successful and i am very pleased with the results. garlic is easy to grow. the hardest part is cutting the scapes when it's 90 and humid but anything is difficult under those conditions! as a side note, ever grow grandfather ashlock (i'm on tomatoes now)? i tried it this year and it is 1 heck of a fantastic tomato rivaling earl's faux! tom's yellow wonder was the only other new variety i grew this year and it too is quite good. i am not a fan of yellow tomatoes but tyw is very good. the 1st 1 i ate i would have thought it was a red tomato it had such good flavor. they are huge too 1 to 3 pounds. tom

I could have sworn I commented/responded last fall. Sorry about that everyone. So here's what happened with the bulbils I planted last fall. I used German Red bulbils and sorted them to get them as uniform in size as best I could. They were between 3/8 and 1/2 inch in size. I made the first planting on September 19th. I planted them 1 inch deep at three different spacings: -1.5 x 1.5 inch or 64 per square foot. -2x2 inch or 36/sq. ft. -3x3 inch or 16/sq. ft. On October 27th I replicated the first planting, a week later than I would have liked. I had planned on doing a third planting about a month later but never got around to it due to weather and procrastination (same reason I didn't plant them in the spring of this year). I only planted 1 square foot at each spacing. 108 bulbils per planting date. 216 in total. Hope this makes sense. The bulbils planted on Sep 19 sprouted in the fall. Those planted on Oct 27 didn't sprout until the next spring and these had a lot heave out of the ground that I had to gently push them back in. On June 11th I started cutting scapes. The bulbils planted on Sep 19 had much more developed scapes than those planted on Oct 27. Nearly all of the ones planted at the earlier date were at one curl, some had two curls. Those planted later had scapes that were either still developing (as in only a couple inches long) or were just barely starting to curl. I continued cutting scapes as they appeared. I dug them on July 20th. The amount harvested from the September 19th planting: 64/sq. foot spacing: 63 plants harvested. 36/sq. foot: 36 harvested. 16/sq. foot: 15 harvested. The amount harvested from the October 27th planting: 64/sq. foot: 55 harvested. 36/sq. foot: 34 harvested. 16/sq. foot: 15 harvested. After digging up each section I very thoroughly sifted through the soil with my fingers in an attempt to recover any lost rounds. There were none. ALL of the bulbils that grew produced scapes and were mini-bulbs around 1 to 1.25 inches in diameter. The bulbils planted closer produced slightly smaller mini-bulbs but honestly, the difference doesn't really matter much as they were all quite small. The area they were planted in had heavy soil and due to the weather it stayed much wetter than I would have liked. In fact, I planted shallots near the bulbils and the shallots rotted halfway through the growing season. Didn't mulch them as they were close enough together to crowd/shade most weeds once they started to get some size to them. Didn't fertilize them other than the compost I added to the soil prior to planting. Overly moist soil and lack of nutrients probably explains why the mini-bulbs were so small. But I'm not so sure that these two things were the only reason why I got no rounds. The bulbil size I used as well as the winter weather are certainly other factors. Anyway, I give up with this for now. I've got no rounds to plant this year to compare to the cloves from the mini-bulbs. Plus I cut all the scapes on my main crop garlic because I didn't plan on needing the bulbils this year. And to avoid any potential new diseases coming in I don't want to aquire bulbis and especially rounds or from elsewhere. Perhaps sometime in the future when I've got more space and more resources I'll try again. Rodney P.S. I got full sized bulbs (2.5 inches in diameter) this year from my Carpathian garlic. Took 3 years from bulbils.

Yum...garlic... a subject near and dear to my heart. I guess I fall in the same category with Dorothy and Dawn as a laid-back garlic grower. Our garlic, that originally came from my FIL's garden years ago, grows every year without much thought or effort and we always have a great harvest. This is a hardneck type which sends up a scape shortly before harvest. As the scapes mature, they produce bulbils which I use as seed stock for the next season. They always produce way more bulbils than I have room to plant. Since there are different opinions on using bulbils vs. planting cloves as well as whether to leave the scapes to develop or cutting them off, I did my own experimenting this past season. I planted one raised bed strictly using cloves. I planted other raised beds using only bulbils. As the scapes began to form, I cut the scapes off half of the plants in both the clove and bulbil beds to see if this had any bearing on the sizing up of the garlic head. What I found, in my highly unscientific experiment, was that removing the scapes made no difference on the size of the garlic heads across the board. I also discovered that planting with cloves did give me a larger garlic head but not overwhelmingly larger. Last year I harvested garlic heads, planted from bulbils, that measured 3" to 3 1/2" across. This was from a single growing season and not the two years that some feel starting with bulbils requires (I don't know if the difference is the variety or how to explain this fact). So, call me stingy but if I can get as large or almost as large heads from using the bulbils, which always produce each year, then I'm saving my cloves for pasta. :-) For those smaller cloves that are more of a hassle to use in the garlic press, I dehydrate them and grind into garlic powder. I can say with certainty that spacing really matters. One year we had heavy rainfall right after planting and the bulbils washed toward one corner of the garden crowding one another. I didn't discover this until much later and although I tried to thin the patch, the resulting heads were much smaller than those that remained in their original 5"-6" spacing. Truthfully, I don't pay much attention to mulching or watering in the fall and they always seem to grow just fine. I usually plant in September and harvest in June. Last year I ran out of room and still had a few bulbils left so I just started pitching them in my flower beds, didn't cover them or anything, and several of those grew, lol. I love their no fuss approach -- somewhat like weeds -- only tastier. Hope this helps~ SM, feel free to add these to your "cart" at checkout. ;->