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Old June 26, 2018   #43
bower
Tomatovillian™
 
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Join Date: Feb 2012
Location: Newfoundland, Canada
Posts: 6,793
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PH, what other varieties are you trying?

I love Music and Argentina for the all purpose great taste and large cloves - and early plants well adapted to our short season. But the downside of porcelains, you need 25% of your crop to seed the same amount again.

Marbled Purple Stripe garlics also seem to have as large cloves, and size up quickly so I'm optimistic about them, but maybe have as few cloves as well, so the same problem re a large percentage of the crop is needed for seed stock.

Both of those are easy to grow up from bulbils to full size though. Even though the bulbils are small they size up fast. Some farmers are routinely growing seed stock that way instead of digging into the main crop.

Spanish Roja and other rocamboles are great from a seed perspective, with 11-13 cloves per bulb you can easily maintain enough seed without digging into the crop too much. The big bulbils also size up fast. Purple Stripes like Chesnok Red and Persian Star have plenty of cloves too. You can easily increase your seed stock with bulbs. They actually take longer to size up from bulbils, because the cloves in the small divided bulbs are many and small.
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