sprouting garlic

[tjg911]

Originally Posted by bloosquall

TJG, you should have taken me up on my offer to sell you some Nootka Rose last fall, I still have a bunch of them and all rock hard still. As I recall you got it from somebody else closer to you...or maybe not as it sounds. Music being a porcelain is not a long storing bulb, you want an artichoke like Lorz or most any of the Silver Skins

-bloo

my nootka rose kept very well bloo, the longest storage garlic i've grown. the problem was the tiny cloves and they are very hard to peel this is why i switched to an artichoke type. i'm hoping the chamiskuri does well. i know they store well cuz i have all the bulbs i tore apart for planting and most cloves are single pieces and they are hard and no sign of sprouting and that's having tore open the bulb. as a bulb i'd expect them to store longer. they'll be the last to eat and i expect them to store at least another 2 months.

my music store until late february but around then or early march they start to sprout. i have over 60 bulbs still in the basement and those don't show any sprouting. i check them a couple of times a week and either eat or freeze those sprouting.

i need to check my garlic, it's time to remove the mulch and put back just 1". i suspect they've sprouted in the garden but it's been raining here since friday, tomorrow it is supposed to stop.

tom

[bloosquall]

My loss of storage ability Is most likely my taking the bulbs down to three layers of wrapper to clean them up after harvest and to speed up curing. I'm glad you're able to keep them (Music) that long...I need to learn from you on how to do that. ;-)

[tjg911]

from what i have read, music is one of the longest storage garlics if not the longest i'm not sure exactly. i dig my garlic about 7/25 to 7/28 and my music lasts this long each year. it was so sopping wet last summer i was concerned how well all the garlic varieties would store but they all did fine - for each type. i really did not see any reduction in storage in fact my german white and german red both stored a bit longer than usual.

tom

[tjg911]

what a difference 2 weeks makes!

i did not see many bulbs with green shoots breaking the paper so i assumed there was no sprouting happening with the music. wrong!

most of the 60+ bulbs of music were sprouting. about a week ago i filled a 1 pint canning jar with minced garlic. in the past 2 days i chopped and froze 60 bulbs of music! now in addition to the pint jar i have 6 "books" of music in the freezer. there's about 10 bulbs and about 30-40 individual cloves from bulbs of music that are not sprouting left in the basement in addition to dozens of tiny cloves of chamiskuri that are left from the bulbs used to plant.

tom