Thanks! I have them in water now (since monday afternoon). How long will they be ok just sitting in a glass of water? Should I "plant" them in a pot with some potting soil and keep them inside, or just keep them in water?

I leave my purples in the ground as long as possible. They are slower to size up than the orange varieties. I started pulling my sweet potatoes last week. I have dug 25 of 750 plants. I planted one row in plastic mulch and the rest in bare soil. The ones in the plastic mulch have been bigger, but less uniform. The bare soil ones are more uniform. Here are some of the biggest ones. These two weighed in around 4.5 pounds.

Over the course of the summer I have dug a couple to check. The last one was about a week ago and it was about a quarter in diameter. This set were the surviving cloves from a set of hardneck bulbs that had mostly dried out in warm storage. They had not been subject to any cooling period since they were dug in August of 2014, and all sprouted quickly when planted in June of 2015. Not one of them sent up a scape either this year, but all stand up to about 12" to 15" tall with almost no drying leaves nor has that situation changed at all for a long time. They haven't been watered either after they showed good initial growth. The real question in my mind was whether I could get large single rounds out of the small cloves. I think I can at this point but I do not know if I can get them to cure. I may have to use them green. The second question is whether they will winter from an early summer planting, which I think is likely, and then hopefully produce an increased size bulb next summer. edit: garlic almost certainly needs a rest period before it can sprout, but I do not think it needs cooling for that. What it needs cooling for is to start the blooming scape (sorta sounds like tulips doesn't it - same sort of thing IMO). I do not store my garlic cold, but rather at room temperature in a corner of the kitchen. The variety in the summer bed sends up scapes real easily when fall planted and wintered over in the ground. Even bulbils often do. But this summer bed never showed a single bolt. I intend to do this again perhaps on a larger scale depending on what this set of two dozen cloves ends up producing. So far whatever they end up doing they are all behaving very much alike, really uniform to this point.

If planted in July, you should long since be harvesting potatoes and the plants (which should be much larger) should have died back.