This is my 3rd year growing garlics and still learning. From what I have read here on GW, you shoul always plant the larger cloves, and use the inner small cloves for cooking. Small cloves will produce smaller garlics and might even produce a round single clove garlic. But other than the seeds, certain growing conditions and care can make a difference in garlic size. Also the variety is another factor. So, here I am. I also want to know how to grow bigger garlics.

Hi, I have several suggestions.... I am 100% organic. I have made every mistake there is.... 1) Use big cloves. 2) Plant early Oct.( zone 5) 3) Take soil tests, make amendments, use huge amounts of well composted organic matter. Add worm casings to your soil as well as sand...You want a rich well drains very loose soil... 4) Space about 8 inches apart. Plant a little deeper 3 to 4 inches.. 5) Use a slow nitrogen release fertilizer which includes bone meal.... I use Epsoma Plantone as a base and add 30% feather meal for the nitrogen ( feather meal also has a large amount of dried blood in it.) I put about 1 heaping tea spoon in the hole when planting. 6) Add Mycorhizzae fungi to your hole... Ideally mix with soil and fertilizer a little so roots will grow into it...They claim there is a 21% to 50% increase in size with this fungi alone. 7) Water 1 inch of water per week.. Very important.You will not have large garlic if you do not do this. 8) Mulch heavily.... I found the ground leaves work nicley as well as straw but the best is wood chips! Yes Wood chips at about 3+ inches in thickness.. Do not let anyone tell you different.....The disadvantage is that you have to rake them back once you have harvested the garlic if you intend to replant that bed.... 9) Put 3 applications of fish emulstion down begining in March, one in April, and the final in mid May. If you make your own make sure to dilute about 1 cup per 3 gallons of water. If possible use rain water to water with. Remove all scapes as soon as they make their first curly cue. Harvest when you still see two green leaves and the rest is brown and yellow..Do not wait till the plant is totally brown and fallen over. Choose larger varieties . Please email me with your results, I am very interested. johnjohnc@att.net

I could send you some garlic,it is smaller,but grows well, can be braided, and taste good. I am looking for bulbs, seeds of flowers that will bloom in June for my daughter's wedding. Zone 7 outside of Lynchburg.

Robert, Thanks for finding and linking that thread from a while back. I'll add just a couple more comments on top of what I said in the linked thread. OkieTexan, It is getting kind of late to plant seed potatoes even if you found some. (I have a tip about that which might help you more next year than this year.) The OSU-recommended planting time for fall seed potatoes is August 1-15th, with the August 1st date being for northwestern OK (where cold weather arrives earlier) and August 15th date being for southeastern OK (where cold weather arrives later) and all the rest of us in between those two extremes can plant pretty much anywhere within that time frame. We have less flexibility with fall planting dates because the plants, except for the most cold-hardy ones like cabbage, spinach, turnips and collard greens, for example, are on a tight schedule to produce a crop before the weather gets too cold and the daylength gets too short. Potatoes perform better here in our climate from a late-winter/early-spring planting harvested in late spring/early summer because the soil temperatures are in the range they need at that time, and the daylength (for agricultural purposes, this is the number of hours of sunlight the plants get daily) is slowing increasing as we approach the summer equinox. When we try to get a second crop of potatoes from a fall planting, we generally get a much lower yield and the timing can be tricky. That's because, at the proper planting time as recommended by OSU, the soil temperatures usually are still very hot and potatoes are not enthusiastic about growing in hot soil. So, they tend to sprout slowly and get off to a slow start. As the weather (and soil temperature) cools down, the potatoes began to grow better, but by then the number of hours of sunlight per day is falling at a fairly rapid rate as we move towards the winter equinox. With less sunlight per day, plant growth and tuber production drops. I'm in southcentral Love County in between Marietta and Thackerville, so my growing conditions are very similar to yours. I generally don't even bother with fall potatoes because I've found the yield just isn't large enough to make it worthwhile. We just do not cool down early enough down here and we usually are starved for rain in August and sometimes in September. I just plant a very large crop in late winter or early spring and store the harvest in the best conditions I have, and we usually have potatoes well into fall or winter, depending on how many we harvested and how quickly we've been eating them. For many of us in southcentral OK right now, it has been 56 days since we received meaningful rainfall and the soil is very dry and the soil (and air) temperatures remain very hot, so this is a good year to skip planting fall potatoes here. In a year with better summer rainfall and without drought conditions in late summer, fall potatoes will produce down here, but not as well as they might produce further north in OK where it rains more and cools down earlier. Last summer and this summer as well, while in a Tractor Supply Store in July or early August I noticed that they had dragged the leftover seed potatoes from spring out of the backroom, had them marked down to practically nothing and had them on clearance. The potatoes, having been in a storeroom for months and months, were very dry and shriveled up and looked awful, but they did have little leaves sprouting from the tiny little eyes. So, I think if someone had bought them and planted them and was able to keep the ground cooler than what it was here in early August (by, for example, shading it with a bed sheet tied to some poles or something---I have shade cloth to use for things like this) and was able to keep the soil moist enough for them to grow, then a fall harvest from those leftover spring seed potatoes might be possible. I saw the clearance spring seed potatoes in August (possibly even in the last week of July) at the TSC stores in Gainesville, TX, and Ardmore, OK. So, you might want to check the TSC store in Durant for the same thing, though I suspect that if they had any and did put them out in late July or early August, they probably all sold already. Usually by the time fall potatoes are starting to look like they'll produce a good crop down here, a freeze hits them and freezes the foliage back to the ground and that is that. Any attempt to regrow usually results in the next round of freezing weather getting the regrowth, so the plant is using up all its energy trying to produce foliage after each frost and that leaves little energy left to produce tubers. If you can keep fall potatoes covered with frost blanket type material and get them through the first early frosts, the odds of getting a better harvest go up, but the yields of fall potatoes here, as grown in my garden back when I thought it might be worthwhile to grow them, was less than half the yield I get from spring potatoes. Your mileage, of course, may vary. If you have a greenhouse, and you can keep it shaded and cool in the sunny weather, then you might be able to grow fall potatoes for a winter harvest. I have a greenhouse, but I haven't tried fall potatoes in it because it stays insanely hot in there during the daytime until late autumn. Dawn