True Garlic Seed

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Two varieties of the garlic appear to be sick, or mal-adjusted to my garden, or something. These are varieties that I imported into my garden for the first time last fall. They are part of my project to try and get true seeds. They are the only varieties that are acting this way. [Sural and Mt. Ukraine] We are getting snow and below freezing temperatures routinely still, but I'd think garlic can thrive in those conditions.

So I'm writing to ask for input in how to deal with them:

Pull and burn?

Wait and see what happens?

Something else?

[caledonian]

It's hard to tell from the picture, but it looks as though they're experiencing one of the various kinds of nutrient deficiencies.

If they're new to your garden, they haven't begun the process of adapting themselves to your conditions - and if they haven't built up backup stores of some substance that isn't plentiful in your soil at this temperature, they'll be running out.

Unless they clearly have a disease, I suggest leaving them in place to determine if the problem corrects itself. I've often noticed that the first garlic leaves of the year become streaky and odd-looking in my gardens, but my plants are fine.

[12540dumont]

Joseph...check very very carefully...are they spores? If so pull and burn immediately. Garlic rust. Garlic rust is caused by the fungus Puccinia allii, also called Puccinia porri. Get out the microscope. You can find photos of the disease on-line.

I sure hope it's not rust

[billw]

The pattern doesn't look like rust, although even a close look without a microscope should be enough to know for certain.

Might be one of the yellow stripe viruses.

[oxbowfarm]

A lot of garlic was lost in the mid-west to Aster Yellows last year, don't know if that carries over in the cloves from year to year.

I've read that onion yellow dwarf virus is a bad one if the garlic is already virus infected with other stuff, like most garlic is.

I doubt rust would be a problem in Joseph's climate.

[caledonian]

It's so frustrating to try to diagnose things from a single picture. :c(

Joseph, are these yellowing garlics isolated in any way from the rest of your plants? If not, can they be moved easily?

[caledonian]

The suspense is killing me. What happened, Joseph? Is it rust after all? Did you destroy the plants?

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Thanks for asking.... They are still in the bed.

There weren't any lesions on the leaves to indicate rust. And yes, just to show how nerdy I am, I carry a high power loupe with me at all times. I figured that we don't have any leaf hoppers yet to spread "yellow asters"... The same varieties planted in the field are fine, so I'm attributing it to the compost I added to the bed before planting. I found a bag and read the label... It doesn't claim to contain manure, but it came from the company that owns the local feed lot. Ooops! I don't know if the issue was caused by herbicide residues or by manure, but I'm blaming one or the other. The damage is typical of what happens when I add manure to my already overly alkaline soil. I was mixing one bag of compost at a time and stirring it into the bed. The yellowing plants start where I went back for a second lot of compost. I planted some radish seeds in samples of the compost, and the bed, but it's too early to report results.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Ivan W. Buddenhagen of south-west Oregon has been working on growing true garlic seeds for more than a decade. His web site listed cultivars for sale in 2011, but hasn't been updated since then. He places his garlic into the Rocambole group.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

As a follow-up to the problem with yellowing leaves on my garlic. The leaves on radishes that I planted in soil taken from the garlic bed have turned yellow. The controls are fine. So I am attributing the yellowing problem to the compost I used in bed preparation, or to how it interacted with my soil.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I want to add a word of caution regarding bulbils. Last summer as I was removing bulbils, I dropped the bulbils in the garden where they fell. What that means to me this spring is that tens of thousands of little garlic plants are growing in the garden in addition to all the large garlic weeds that originated from cloves that I missed harvesting because the scapes were left on the plant for so long. It's my intention this year to collect most of the bulbils and eat them in stir-fry or share them with collaborators.

Garlic weeds could be a good thing, or a bad thing depending on how much you like garlic weeds. We are harvesting them as scallions, but once the other weeds get going strongly, we'll have to till them under. It's just too hard to weed randomly scattered vegetables.

[oxbowfarm]

This is the first season I've ever grown garlic from bulbils. In my bulbil plantings you can really see how much benefit the plants receive from the size of the bulbil. The plants of Spanish Roja, which has huge bulbils, are very large, looking almost like a regular (small) garlic plant. Music and Russian Red are small and grassy. The tiny plantings of bulbils from Joseph are all tiny wisps, I'm sure it will take a few years for them to form true bulbs.

[raymondo]

May 13, 2013 8:39:18 GMT -5 oxbowfarm said:

...I'm sure it will take a few years for them to form true bulbs.

Two years I've heard, though from your experience it may take three for the tiny bulbils to form a decent head. I grew from bulbils once several years ago. I got small round bulbs that season. I decided against further experimentation and ate them!

[steev]

Poor little bulbils! Scarfed ere they grew.

I've got grassy/wispy garlics from Joseph which I will not eat because I am so nerdy/geeky that I want to see what they do and I don't care that much how much space they take.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Today I took photos of the garlic plants grown from GRIN bulbils. I'm also including photos of what the bulbils looked like.

Bulbils	Plants