The benefits of soaking are a quick energy boost for the rooting bulb and growing larger,healthier plants with a better chance of survival and more uniform plants.Bulbs under 1 1/2" just don't sell well,but over 2" move well and for a much better price.The 2 1/2" plus sizes are in great demand for culinary uses.People just don't want to clean teeney tiney cloves and most importantly it takes just as much work to grow small bulbs as it does to grow nice big bulbs that get all the oohs & aahs.

Anecdotal advice is good. For me, other kinds of advice are good too, since I've had to grow in containers, and have had both failures and successes. I'd like know I will be questioning again next year. Four years ago, I got some great feedback on this thread. https://www.chowhound.com/post/peeling-garlic-week-planting-1041941 Specifically; "Glad to hear you got them back, but as for that fungus control advice, I have to say "hmm". While I've been growing plants one way or the other since I was a kid and have done a fair amount of (preferably technical) reading on plant diseases over the years, I'm certainly no "expert", but for whatever it's worth, honestly, it questionable to me, based on over-generalizations and to some extent, misunderstandings. Not harmful, but of questionable utility. To sart with, seaweed extract is great stuff, but has no fungicidal properties, and for that matter doesn't provide much if iany sort of "energy boost" either. It has very little in the way of simple carb content, which is the only source of "energy", other than sunlight, that growing green plants can utilize. (And beside, "energyy" is the last thing plant propagation material like garlic cloves need, since they bulk of the clove exists "for that every purpose" (so to speak).. If fresh, seaweed extract does however have useful amounts of (both growth and rooting) plant hormones. and a fair slew of useful micronutrients. As for the baking soda and rubbing alcohol, that's where I really start to wonder... Frankly, it sounds pretty dubious, but in this specific instance (with unsprouted garlic cloves), I don't think it'll hurt either, as long as you thoroughly rinse after the baking soda soak and don't let them soak in the alcohol for long. Large amounts of sodium are NOT something most plants even tolerate well, and while sodium bicarbonate does appear to have limited fungicidal properties, at least against some, particularly foliar, fungi but , one has to be very careful to balance the effective "dose" against the potential toxicity of the sodium, and it's certainly not something you'd want to ever water in to soil, rather than using it as a foliar spray in carefully controlled amounts to avoid an excess being taken up by plants' roots (in this case, of course, there aren't any roots to soak it up, which is why I don't think it'd be harmful). As for the alcohol. I really don't know anything about that as an antifungal agent. I've certainly never heard of it being particularly effective against fungi, nor widely used for that purpose (although it is a very common, if only moderately effective and potentially deleterious ingredient in homemade "bug spray"). it would certainly be harmful is allowed to soak long enough to really penetrate the cloves, and I'm really not sure just a few minutes will necessarily be effective against fungi, especially one that, at a brief glance, anyways, seems pretty tough like the one that causes white rot. Seriously speaking, I think you'd be much better off searching ag extension websites, or maybe doing web searches using the specific word "fungicide" as well as the scientific name of the white rot fungus (Sclerotium cepivorum) for the most up-to-date, effective treatments and preventatives. If the answer really were as simple as baking soda and rubbing alcohol, I don't think the world's garlic growers would have an impending pandemic on their hands..." Thanks Mike G! Couldn't find any double blinded studies but her are some other opinions supporting some form of prs-soaking. https://keeneorganics.com/garlic-fertilization-soak/ https://www.themarthablog.com/2017/11/planting-garlic-at-my-farm.html https://www.garlicana.com/resources-links/growing-instructions/ https://www.gourmetgarlicgardens.com/planting-and-growing-the-garlic.html https://www.groeat.com/soaking-garlic-before-planting There are some nice ideas from Pam Dawling, author of Sustainable Market Farming, in a link entitled "Organic Growers School › P.-...PDF Growing Great Garlic - Organic Growers School" but its a PDF and I can't seem to link it. This is part of it. Sustainable Market Farming Among other things, It says "Many of us do nothing special with the cloves before planting, but if you have pest and disease problems, use pre-plant soaking treatments, usually done the night before planting. Some growers find they get better yields from treated cloves even if no problem was obvious."

Hello! This is my first time canning cucumbers to make pickles. I followed one recipe which told me to soak the cuces in salt water for up to seven days in the fridge before canning. I soaked them for maybe about 15 hours and then canned some. However, when I took them out of the cold salt water they were bloated and softer than when I put them in there! I am using field cucumbers from my garden (not dill pickle cucumbers) and I had also cut off both ends of the cucumber before soaking them (as the recipe suggested). I know I only need to cut off the blossom end but wasn't sure which was which so just cut off both ends. I would think that cutting off the end(s) would leave the cucumber open for more salt water to get inside (and hence the waterlogged result I got). But reading online a bit I see that the idea is to get the salt into the cucumber so as to draw out the liquid - moisture. I think that my result was just the opposite. I washed them off and cut them into spears and canned them. They sure seemed mushy though. I still have 6 medium/ big cucumbers salt soaked but now washed sitting in a collander in my fridge. Might can them or may just compost them....or ??? A shame really bcs straight out of the ground they are really yummy. I watered regularilly and we had a sunny summer. I just cant eat so many of them raw! I am thinking next time just to skip the salt water brine and pickle them straight from the garden. Thoughts and ideas welcome please and thanks :) Jade in Vancouver Island,BC, Canada. Pacific Northwest.

Well, using overstatements is one way to try to persuade others to follow your particular view, but it does leave you open to being dismissed outright. Gardengal48, congratulations on your success growing fruiting plants. May that continue to get better and better for you. But....12 hours soaking in water has yet to kill any of the many, many plants that I have been soaking in nutrient-rich water prior to planting or repotting. My goal was not just to get the roots soaking wet, because that would get done pretty quickly. Instead, I want the whole plant to get fueled up with the nutrients from head to toe. Some get soaked only a few hours, and some didn't get pulled out to plant until 3 or (gasp!) 4 days later when I got to it. They have been coming out of the container with thickened happy roots. No rotting. No stench. No withering away. A guy donated a bucket full of 4 ft tall pomegranate suckers clipped in Winter, and I babysat them for more than a month for another guy who would in early Spring cut them to length, dip one end in Dip-N-Grow, and plant the cuttings to get them to root both in pots and in his field. With no room to refrigerate those, I just put some beneficial nutrients in a few inches of water in that 5 gallon paint pail packed with pom suckers and parked it in indirect light. Well, they not only survived the long term dunking, they eventually started to leaf out on top with healthy new leaves and shoots. When the Winter cold became less of a threat, the other guy picked up the pail of healthy suckers, clipped off the bottom few inches that got waterlogged ,clipped off the leafed out top,, and used the remainder of the suckers for rooting. If a "desert" plant like a pomegranate could make it so well while standing in this 'ankle-deep' water, then I would say that I will do the same exact thing next time this pom situation comes up. I won't buy a tall fridge to put them in. Remember the grade school experiment putting a stalk of celery in a glass filled with water that had been dyed with red food coloring, and the stalk gradually wicked up the red water towards the stalk top. Well, I want many of my plants to wick up lots of fertilized fluid all the way up prior to planting/repotting. I sure would not soak succulents like cacti in water like that, or magnolia trees, but it is a non-issue for many fruiting plants. Otherwise, the first time that rainy weather keeps fruit tree roots soggy wet in 100% soggy mud, they would die from what you described as the roots being deprived of oxygen for 12-48 hours. Sometimes soggy, muddy, rainy weather lasts for much longer than that, and somehow the fruit trees don't croak. Maybe you could rephrase the time period to fit the field evidence. No offense intended, Thank you for sharing from your experience. Don't stop.