Edible ornamental alliums

[katya]

I would really like to find out what the one-clove garlic is. Allium ampeloprasum, that is to say elephant garlic/pearl onion? They don't seem to fit the description "one-cloved garlic".

[steev]

Elephant garlic (a leek) makes 5-9 cloves and a pearl onion is a small onion, not a garlic, at all.

[trixtrax]

One-clove garlic is a type of ancient ampeloprasum from China. It is a hexaploid unique from the other tetraploid ampeloprasum elephant garlics.

[blueadzuki]

Technically true, thought nowadays you'll see some people selling true garlic "rounds" as one clove garlic, and making it sound like something rare and obscure, rather than what it is (ordinary multi year garlic that was pulled before the clove "split" into a head).
Personally (if I find the room for it) I have seed for a fair number of odd alliums I picked up from Sacred Succulents (I basically made a list of all alliums they carried (they have a lot), crossed out the ones I already had and everything else went into the order (well I think I had to cross out Allium jepsoniiwhich they were out of, but i think I got everything else. I'm particualry interested in the ones they have from the Trans-Caucasian-Trans-Sibreian area, since I hope that one of them is the one National Geographic mentioned in thier article about the Kyrgz of the Hindu Kush reagion (in the article they mention that a wild allium with a pea sized bulb is the only vegetable the people of that region have. So I am sort of curios what that onion tastes like.)

[trixtrax]

I had this One-clove garlic ampeloprasum for a number of years but it died of disease two years ago. Someone I know found a bulb in the store from China that had not been ringed properly and so grew out fine. It reproduced very slow here with only a few new bulbils each year, but the round cloves became huge - almost 3in in diameter.

[trixtrax]

Exciting work blueadzuki, have you found any with good greens or bulbs yet?

[blueadzuki]

Not as of yet. Last year was mostly growing those things that I got as actual plants, seed stuff doesn't start till this year. Of waht I grew then, some tasted okay, but there was nothing that I liked enough to replace those basics I already had Plus since I started with such a small number, most of what grew had to be reserved for propigation (basically I could eat all the old stems I wanted, but all the bulbs has to be kept as did any bubils or seeds and any leaves died (since I couldn't yank them off without risking the flower or bulbil heads dying early. The Neopolitan garlic was tasty enough but no better than regular green garlic (slighty worse, in fact, since it is fuzzy and hard to clean). The twinleaf onion (not intentional plating buy there was a mixup and they sent me one twinleaf plant mixed into my rosy garlic) had pretty flowers, but the stem taste was quite acrid (plus the leaf growth dies back really quickly, so basically you can leaves or bulbs/bulbils, but not both.) The rosy was again pretty, but a bit too small and slow to be much of a viable crop. Moly was again pretty, and fairly tasty but up here the bulbs have a tendecy to split as they grow, and let rot get in. Keeping them long term requires peeling the bulbs down to the first complete intact layer, which results in about a 50% bulb size reduction. The stuff I think is A. canadense is again tasty, but tiny, and doesn't reproduce rapidly for me (plus it doesn't keep all that well over the winter, by mid march most of them have either rotted or dried out; And it's usually not until mid may to june when it get warm enough to put smaller bulbed alliums out for the spring and have a resonably chance of them surviving (plating thme in the fall to overwinter in the ground IS theoretically possible, but only works if we have a pretty sharp break between the winter freeze and the spring warmth. In year where we have a long period of alternate freezing and thawing plus wet weather (like the last few years) most of the outside stuff just rots.)
On the whole I havent found a green that is good enough to make it preferable to simply planting extra garlic for garlic greens. And even THAT is usually less effective than simply planting extra garlic chives. To put it bluntly, I don't plant alliums becuase the do well for me, they do horribly. It's just that pretty much everything else does even worse.

[diane]

I grow a patch of cernuum and use the leaves and flowers. I have never tried the bulbs, as I figure they would be too small to fiddle with.