If you check out local farmer's markets you might be able to find garlic that's being sold for eating and it is perfectly fine for planting. It's cheap and it also has the advantage of already being adapted to growing in your climate. Once you make the initial "seed" garlic investment you should be set for life as long as nothing catastrophic happens (like your crop getting wiped out by critters or disease) because you save your biggest cloves to replant (bigger cloves equal bigger bulbs). I enjoy growing garlic. It's really easy to grow and it takes up little space so it's worth the minimal effort of growing. All it needs is water, compost, and time. I plant mine in October, cut the scapes off the hardnecks in June, harvest and cure it in July, and then replant in October. uscjusto- Garlic is a perennial but it's not something that you can just plant and forget about. If you leave it in the ground after it dies down in the Summer it will come back in the Fall as a clump and that clump will produce much smaller bulbs and every year the bulbs will continue decreasing in size. I know this because I have some planted in with my perennial flowers (I think it looks interesting). And yes, you harvest the garlic at the same time and you save some to replant. One clove produces one bulb. Rodney

Woa - Lisa in Golden!!! Chocolate zuke bread sounds fabulous! If you have the recipe, let me know - I'd love it. Otherwise, maybe I just add some melted choc bar? I also thought of adding mini choc chips like I do for banana bread - maybe even adding a banana. And that;s what I suspected, gjcore - no SVB in CO, because I have seen absolutely NO damage from anything (except baby bunnies who squeeze through the tiniest of holes in our 'critter prevention' fencing. Couple of bites out of the almost-red tomatoes. Also - I'll have to see if I can find buttercup squash seeds next year - actually I've never heard of it and I thought I knew everything! I've never even seen it in the grocer's. Looked for pattypan squash seeds this spring too, but no can find. Thanks to all of you! So nice to have friends close by doing the same thing. I guess we are lucky we don't have SVB here but the heat sure is a challenge - and they tell me this is nothing - that this is a great (cool) year - and way more rain than normal. Westy

Okay, I confess I've not done my due diligence in the world of garlic. When I first decided to plant it, it was mainly because my two adult daughters use it all the time and I thought I'd be a source of fresh garlic for them... (along with potatoes, beans, tomatoes, cherries, apples, etc.) and of course we'd use some too, but not nearly as much as my kids do. So in the limited research I did at the time, I was essentially buying the product description relative to comments like this variety "...won this or that taste test" or "...no small wonder how this got it's name" kinds of things. And when they said Softneck would be more like what you get in the store, I thought well.., maybe that's the way to go even though we can get some bitter winters here. But anyway, in that process I thought the kind with scapes were the Hardneck. So here I have 2 Softneck varieties, but they must have scapes too then? So all garlic have scapes, but Hardneck are just different from Softneck scapes. (Scapes, Bulbils, Pesto... brand new words for me..) The Pesto thing sounds pretty good..., but can I get there from here - with my softneck kind? Kinda rambled there. Well, gotta go get some cherries off the tree pronto! Jerry

If it has been outside all this time, I would probably allow the leaves to fall off naturally, allowing it to go dormant. Then I'd place it in an unheated garage where it will remain dormant until next spring, watering only once a month or so, just to keep it from completely drying out.