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Old July 24, 2016   #1
bower
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Join Date: Feb 2012
Location: Newfoundland, Canada
Posts: 6,793
Default harvesting rounds early, for big rounds?

So... I did something impulsive today. I had a couple of patches of garlic rounds growing here and there in the garden. Several patches of Persian Star, I had a lot of them last year. I noticed that some of the smaller ones were starting to die down, and so I dug a few... and then I dug up the whole patch.

Aside from being too hot to do anything sensible, my reasoning was that these looked like good sized rounds at this stage, which would produce a full sized bulb next year. I thought if I leave them longer, they will likely form a bunch of small cloves, and those won't get me a full sized Persian Star. Is this reasonable? Is there a reason not to do this, is mostly what I'm wondering. As I have more of these "extra" rounds still in the garden. Is there any harm of harvesting early that would affect the 'seed' quality?

You can see these Persian Stars are nice size rounds, and would surely make a full sized bulb next year. Maybe one or two of them I could feel some bumps, cloves already forming, but the rest are... still round.
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