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Old July 6, 2018   #54
bower
Tomatovillian™
 
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Join Date: Feb 2012
Location: Newfoundland, Canada
Posts: 6,793
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FD, if you're growing up rounds from a porcelain, I think you'll find it well worth it.
When I first started growing from bulbils, I thought that varieties with bigger bulbils would get to full size quicker, but that is not the case except maybe for Rocamboles which are really large bulbils but had the poorest survivorship for me here in the bulbil stage.
Porcelains have the smallest bulbils and my rounds were only the size of marbles or smaller for the most part. However there is a big jump in size from the round to the clove of next generation bulb, because of only having 4 cloves per bulb. Many of the bulbs from those first cloves would be considered full size, although they did produce even bigger bulbs the next year.
By comparison, it is taking a really long time to grow out full size Persian Star and Chesnok Red, which had larger bulbils in the first place but much smaller cloves in the first bulbs because there are 8 or 9+ per bulb.
Here is a pic to show how the porcelains grow up. The row on the far left is full size cloves left over from my main beds, so you can see an exact comparison in the same conditions (these beds were planted at a tighter spacing and were snow covered longer so came up later than the main crop). The next rows to the right are Music from the first divided bulbs. The stalks are not quite as thick but they are getting close already. They will certainly be big enough to eat... I'll post a pic when these are dug and show the size.
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