Grass clippings can harbor rust and infect your garlic crop with that disease if they are used for mulch. Both myself and a friend had this happen. No rust after we stopped using the grass clippings. Also, yes, it is normal for the feeder roots to seek out heat, moisture and nutrition in the top layer of the soil. Here where the winters are relatively mild, I believe that the roots grow all winter. My early, soft-neck varieties get pretty sad looking without a good dose of high nitrogen fertilizer in late winter or early spring. I have already fed and mulched two times this year. All-in-all, it appears that I will be having a good harvest this year if we don't have late rains as we have had the past two or three years.

Music. Hardy, widely adapted, dependable, stores very well for a hardneck, large easy to use cloves, bulbs can get large, strong flavor (so easy to cook with). I still have some usable bulbs from last year's July/August harvest. VietNamese Red makes a nice, milder companion variety, but does not store as well; so does Siberian. I also like Japanese, also large cloves and seems to be also very dependable. Big robust plants, seems to be a bit earlier than Music. These all have the added feature of scapes for early summer cooking. Those are my favorites, but zone 8 suggests that the Creoles might be just what you would like, even though they are not so well adapted to my Minnesota garden.

I just ordered some very nice German extra hardy. I bought from the same place last year but I am still trying to bring my numbers up. There are varieties I used to have that I no longer can find. This year I am growing German, Killarney, Khabar, Russian, Brown and Asian Tempest. I am interested in other varieties, clean specimens, that are hardy in zone 4. I have German to trade and very small numbers of the list above.

I'm up on the Caprock, just east of Lubbock. I grow lots of alliums. Chives, garlic chives, elephant garlic, Egyptian walking onions all do well for me, though I rarely eat the garlic chives and elephant garlic. My experience with potato onions is that they produce lots of very small bulbs that we don't really use. Other far southern growers have reported the same results. Kind of the same with every shallot variety that I've tried. In the onion department, I do very well with the intermediate day onions from Dixondale Farms, especially Candy and Superstar. Even the long day Red River performs well for me. We have such intense late freezes here, sometimes onion killing single digits the first week of March, that I have to plant the short day onions too late to really get a good harvest, though I do plant Southern Belle for a very early and tasty harvest of mid-size onions. I used to plant two varieties from seed in the fall for overwintering; Desert Sunrise from Johnny's and the widely available Walla Walla Sweet. I was usually successful with overwintering them, but I gave it up in favor of the ease of using the more expensive transplants from Dixondale. Garlic is one of my favorite things to grow and eat. I have been growing and saving my own planting stock of a locally grown California Early for over eight years. It is very productive here. The rest of my lineup is Cuban Purple ( a beautiful purple red wrapped Creole with larger cloves than the other Creole I tried-Ajo Rojo); Mild French ( a Texas heirloom silverskin with larger cloves than the first silverskin I tried-S&H Silverskin); and Early Red Italian-very similar to California Early, except a few days later and a red tint to the wrappers. These last three came from Filaree Farms up in Washington state and after three years are beginning to settle down and adjust to their new home. Several years ago, I abandoned Inchelium Red, but I didn't give it a fair trial. When I started growing garlic, I planted the last week of September following the advice of Bob Anderson at Gourmet Garlic Gardens in Bangs, Texas. All went well for a few years, but then we had a series of winter in which we had a very cold spell (lows in the teens or single digits) in November or early December and it badly damaged the California Early that sprouts early and makes a lot of vigorous top growth early. I changed my planting date to the first week of November and no problems since. The earlier date would probably work for you. I like Forever Yong's selection of garlic. Another way to find locally adapted garlic is to go your local farmer's market and sample what is offered and get a start of what you like. As for the native, Allium drummondii, I find the bulbs small, hot and bitter-basically inedible, though it is a pretty wildflower or garden subject. Good luck with your allium adventure. Many are very well adapted to this area and they provide a lot of interest before the typical warm season vegetables get ready and year around flavor for the kitchen. KH