I am fairly new to growing garlic and have only grown softneck and a few heads of elephant garlic. Are you sure that this is not elephant garlic? It makes small bulblets at the base. I imagine that commercial growers remove the bulblets and ugly heads (where the bulblets are under the wrapper) to sell separately. There are many different types of garlic that you might enjoy growing more than store-bought - check out the allium forum for a lot of information. Best of luck! Here is a link that might be useful: http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/allium/

I wouldn't think diseased. They are nice, firm cloves, just not the pure, creamy white you expect. I get this in nearly every clove of garlic. Some will be white, a few turned this color. Perhaps I have the terminology wrong...the entire bulb isn't brownish, just a few sections of it. Doesn't anyone know what causes this and if they are still good?

chloe, How did you raise these? Soil amendments? Personally, I would enjoy for mine to be this size with only two cloves! These would be super for roasting as well. I am one of those folks who tries to avoid al foil and roast peeled garlic in a covered heavy clay pot with a bit of bacon fat/lard/oliveoil/butter. Think of time saved...and less stress on the finger joints... On the other hand, if you sell garlic and folks only want a 'taste' of garlic in a dish, someone here may have had a similar crop behavior or explanation. OR, advertise your garlic at the market as timesaver garlic...cut a few open for proof. Call it 'gourmet's delight!' Good luck! Please report back on how well these 'two cloves only' store compared to the multicloved crop. So far, with our variable weather, my garlic varieties have been similar to earlier years, despite the heavy clay former tobacco farm soil.

This is an interesting thread. I am going to guess that there are several "single clove garlics". I think I have one, too, but it is a standard garlic that stays single clove by apparent culture. I planted very small cloves off full bulbs at the beginning of June this past summer. This particular type seems to produce scapes and cloves very easily if fall planted to winter over, but the cloves I planted in June never were cold treated. They were last of the previous years harvest of a feral I collected in Iowa. Original bulbs were tiny with very tiny cloves. Proper spacing and fertilization has increased the size for fall plantings very nicely. Bulbils are about the size of a pea; so they are nice sized, too. Back to the June planting. Every clove sprouted very quickly and grew to about foot to 14" tall. Not one ever sent up a scape, and the plants never went dry. Nor did any of them ever divide. Just this past week I dug a few and found two distinct types, both still very well rooted by the way - I couldn't pull em I had to dig em up. About half looked more like scallions with very little bulbing and these had the thicker stems. The thinner stems had singleton rounds up to close to an inch and a quarter, larger than even the first true bulbs I originally collected. Not one of this planting has divided nor scaped and the plants are still normally green going into winter. I am leaving about half of the original bed in place to see how they handle the Minnesota cold from a summer planting. They took care of themselves just fine in the zone 4 of NW Iowa for almost 30 years; so I am not too worried their hardiness. This seems to be one of several ways to grow solo garlic (I hope). I definitely expect that different kinds of garlic respond to vernalization differently or require different types of vernalization and probably respond differently to day length as well. I am going to try spring planting on some spare tulip bulbs, too, next summer. A little more size going into autumn would be nice for my Appeldoorns, hoping I can add bulb size, if I sacrifice the vernalization needed for the flowers.