Stem cloves are a common occurrence in "soft neck" garlic varieties, in response to less-than-ideal growing conditions. Because of this, the presence of stem cloves usually signals a smaller than normal bulb. Stem cloves were widespread in my Artichoke garlic varieties during very wet years... garlic does not like waterlogged soil. A raised bed can improve soil conditions & reduce the likelihood of stem cloves. With a raised bed, I had only one plant out of 150 form stem cloves this year. If you get stem cloves, they are worth planting, since that may be a way of shedding diseases & organisms which can accumulate in the ground bulbs & be passed on.

the odor poses no problem for me, only for others....the oil gels produce unbelievable "garlic burps", so if the smell is an indication of how much allicin you're getting, then they seem fairly potent...i think i'll press on and keep adding it to my diet as well...one thing i've tried is to put it into foods just at the end of cooking, so that it's still mostly uncooked when served....seems to work, as long as the person eating it enjoys garlic....if they don't, then it's their loss.....

First of all it is only tentative that the feral I collected is a rocambole. I was going by one set of scapes that seemed to have multiple curls. That was a guess and probably not a real educated one. Secondly these were very small bulbs; I have been able to size this variety up much better with rich beds and better spacing,but what I was working with are the tiny remnant. Thirdly it is not the bulbs that have kept well. It is only an occasional clove in a bulb where the rest of the cloves have dried out into hard little kernels. These bulbs have been stored at very close to room temperature; so they dry out rather than sprouting. Last year I worked the remnants (generally the smallest bulbs) in early June and found quite a few more plump cloves among the dried up ones, but never a complete bulb with plump cloves. I also planted a bed of them, which did not either scape or actually go dormant last winter, but did scape and bulb up this spring after being left in place, although every clove planted grew almost immediately last summer. I did not see anything special about what they produced this year even with the extra time they had to do so, in fact bulb size was somewhat smaller than the same variety planted from larger cloves in better prepared beds. In the past couple of years this variety has sized up pretty nicely to over an inch and a half, from initial sizes that would not have covered a nickel. I have some bulbils from 2015 that oddly enough look like they may still be good... Right now I have some space; so I think I will put in a stub row to see if they sprout. Other than that I have a decent stock of this feral variety to play with in normal beds for next year, and some baby bulbs that developed from last year's bulbils. Virtually every bulbil planted last fall went directly to tiny scapes and baby bulbs, with quite literally no rounds. BTW the tiny bulbs are very tight and hard to break apart into their cloves which are extremely tiny, but the bigger bulbs come apart much easier and their cloves peel pretty easily. Also even though the dried up cloves seem to be completely desiccated, they apparently are not, because they do not grind up into powder but rather almost a paste, that clumps up, and needs additional drying and regrinding. I air dry, which is way slower than a dehydrator or the oven. I am having a blast playing with this variety.

Peter, I left a few garlic plants alone and let them grow scapes and remain in the ground until all top growth died. I wanted the the bulbils to grow as long as possible. The below ground bulbs looked very similar to the picture above when harvested. I think they were lifted in September. I harvested the "normal" ones in July. I planted some of the "old" cloves for next years crop since they looked to be healthy and of good size. I was surprised at the large size of the cloves since I figured leaving the scape on would yield a smaller bulb. Perhaps if I harvested plants with scapes left uncut when about half the leaves had died back the bulb would have been small...I don't know. But by time everything had died back on the scaped plants, the bulbs and cloves were good size: falling apart, but good sized. But they were not anything I'd want to store. I also did not enjoy cleaning all the soil off ones I wanted to use in the kitchen. Anyway, the subsequent bulbil growing was a fun experiment. As expected, many of the plants yielded small rounds. I was surprised to see some develop into tiny little miniature bulbs with super mini cloves. These minis were very cute, but kinda useless. It was an interesting grow out, but not something I plan to do regularly. So, long story short....that is why I know what bulbs left in the ground far too long look like :)