[svalli]

Most commercial garlic varieties are softenecks, which tend to have over 10 cloves per head, so the cloves are smaller than in the varieties which have 4-6 cloves. Size of the head varies a lot too between varieties and growing conditions. It is exactly same as with tomatoes and other vegetables. The supermarket tomato here has average weight between 50-100g, but I grow a lot of varieties, which are much smaller or much bigger.

I think that the average weight of the produce is important factor when writing recipes. Quite many recipes list the produce in counts an not as weight. If I make pasta sauce using my Siberian origin garlic with 20g cloves and the big beefsteak tomatoes, I need to adjust the recipe for the size of my produce. I usually use the recipes only as source for ideas, so adjusting the amount based on my own taste buds is not a problem, but some learning and novice cooks may follow the recipe literally and may get into trouble, if the produce is not in the typical size.

The first garlic variety, which I started to grow is an unknown Siberian marbled purple stripe garlic. It has usually just 4 cloves, but quite many have just two huge ones. I use the biggest 4 and 5 clove heads as seedstock. The ones with 2-3 cloves are eaten, because I want as many uniform size cloves to plant as possible. This is very hardy garlic and it is the one I plant most, but with so few cloves over 25% crop has to be saved as seedstock.
These photos are taken when I starter cracking the cured heads for autumn planting, so this is not the harvest weight.

Sari