Leaving garlic alone for a few years?

[eastex]

Has anyone done this?  Results?  I've left multiplier onions alone for years just fine, but I am curious if there is a loss in the garlic vitality, size, taste, etc. if they get planted in the ground and left alone.  Soft neck v. Hard neck?

[khoomeizhi]

i would expect size to suffer in the second year, regardless of variety.

[blueadzuki]

I only speaking from pure guesswork (my soil gets too cold in the winter to allow me to pull off leaving anything even something as winter tolerant as garlic in the actual outside soil over the winter, but I'd say how your weather works could be a big factor. In keeping the garlic in the ground perpetually what your are mostly saving it is the energy it would need to re grow the roots and (some of) the leaves it loses in the harvest. However depending on how your climate goes that can be easily offset by conditions. I always like to think of garlic (indeed, any bulb crop) as "breathing" over a year long cycle. During the warm parts of the year, the garlic "inhales" (sends food produced by the leaves into the bulb) in the early spring it "inhales" (pulls food out of the bulb to give the plant a head start until it has enough leaf cover to be self sufficient again. So long as you have a climate where the winter is in the golden zone (where it's not so cold the bulbs freeze (like mine do) but cold enough the upper leaves eventually succumb to frost and the plant goes into a rest mode) you're golden.

The problem comes when you get a winter that is really really mild, too mild to kill the tops off. In that case, the plant usually goes straight from "inhale" to "exhale" with nothing in between (or never gets to inhale at all) In either case, the plant begins using up it's stored food waay too soon (or never lays and down) and as eventually dies of starvation (either through a cold snap finally coming when the plant has laid down little or no food or it reaching a level of leaf mass unsupportable by the reduced amount of sunlight it gets in the winter.) In these cases, taking the garlic out and curing it is essential, since it artificially forces the garlic into going into rest mode (or to keep the metaphor going putting a hand over the garlic's mouth mid-exhale.) I've lost a lot of garlic over the years this way.

I suppose that there might be other ways of getting around this (say cutting the tops off the garlic plants at the time they would normally be harvested, but leaving the actual bulbs in the ground.) but I don't know how well any would work.

[ferdzy]

We have feral garlic all over town. It tends to survive as a couple very small cloves to the head, and you can find anything from a few scattered heads to practically a lawn of garlic they are so close together, depending on the conditions. This is hardneck, in a climate that has been compared to the steppes of Asia (original home of garlic).

[paquebot]

You would start out with one clove which would become a large bulb with multiple cloves the first year. Each clove would become a separate plant the second year and a few may become small divided bulbs. Each again would become separate plants the third year and most would only be a small marble-size round. By then there would no longer be enough nutrients left to support such a crowded mass and they would develop no bigger than green onions.

Martin

[castanea]

Feb 29, 2016 21:06:13 GMT -5 paquebot said:

You would start out with one clove which would become a large bulb with multiple cloves the first year. Each clove would become a separate plant the second year and a few may become small divided bulbs. Each again would become separate plants the third year and most would only be a small marble-size round. By then there would no longer be enough nutrients left to support such a crowded mass and they would develop no bigger than green onions.

Martin

That is exactly what has happened with mine when I have let them alone.

[steev]

They just can't be trusted on their own; they need supervision.

[reed]

My main garlic is one I found by an abandoned home site where it had survived on it's own for a long time. If I separate and replant cloves I get decent sized garlic, otherwise the are very small. It's a pain to peel and clean the little ones but mostly over the years I have just put up with that rather than cultivating it like I should. It spreads from top sets so the patches kinda move themselves around as older ones die out or get harvested. You can get somewhat bigger cloves just by thinning the volunteers, they are good to eat kinda like green onions.

[blueadzuki]

I wonder if the process can also be controlled by the degree of "break count" (the average number of cloves a single planted clove divides into) the garlic has. A lot of what I have left has a very very low break count. Quite a bit is sort of longicuspus level (where four is about the max you can get) and a fair amount is "geminii garlic" (divides into two and no more). One one hand this sort of puts a pretty low max threshold on my stuff (a two clove head just can't get all that large; this isn't elephant garlic we are working with) On the other hand, I wonder if those low counts actually would extend how long the garlic could be left to it's own devices, since it seems to me that the more cloves a head divides into, the faster that reduction to "too small to make a bulb" comes (by that logic the olive sized head one I have is doubly useless, the small break size (the size a garlic plant has to get to make a head instead of a round) and high break count (about 16) means that a year left on it's own would probably result in no plants having the capacity to make bulb.)

I also imagine clove arrangement might give some changes. While not common, I have seen softneck garlic that seemed to have a "calving" arrangement (the kind wild garlics like vineale have) where you get the biggest clove(s) in the center and the smaller ones bud off of it going outward). If you were looking for a garlic to leave on it's own, that's probably the ideal form. The size of the central clove once it is dividing size tends to stay pretty constant (that is the central clove of a head from a central clove tends to be the same size as the clove you planted so it can keep putting out further calves as the years pass without diminishing itself. Meanwhile the calved off cloves increase in size until they reach that threshold and then begin to calve themselves. So you get the same division, but with the center of each division still as strong as it was before.

[paquebot]

Blue, you don't know garlic very well! There is no way that any garlic will do anything except revert to tiny single bulbs no matter where the original clove came from. In fact, not many varieties even have a center clove as there are far and away more hardnecks than softnecks. Softnecks would be the most apt to become nothing but garlic scallions since they have more cloves. Hardnecks may have as low as 4 or 5 large cloves which may at least each produce 2 cloves the second year, one on either side of the stalk. Third year, only rounds and no stalk. Fourth year, maybe nothing.

Martin

[blueadzuki]

I said central cloved ones weren't common. And that was the ONLY case where I thought it would work, one where the founding clove is ALWAYS as big as the one it came from. For all I know the one I saw WAS a very large wild garlic (I've seen a wild garlic plant once reach a bulb size comparable to a domestic*) Though how a wild garlic bulb made it into a basket of garlic being sold at a supermarket would be beyond me.

*For someone suggesting that that plant WAS a domestic garlic gone feral; it was growing in the weeds under a statue at my railroad station. It being a bizarrely large wild garlic plant seems more likely than a domestic getting there.

[paquebot]

All artichoke/softnecks have a central clove usually larger than other cloves in the bulb. Some growers don't like to plant them back. Since all initial cloves are formed off that one, they will often continue to split when planted and the result is a double plant with basically two half-bulbs.

Martin

[robertb]

I had some mysterious alliums passed on to me by a neighbour; they were so crowded they were just grasslike leaves growing from minute bulbs. I planted them out and after two seasons' growth they proved to be garlic.

[coppice]

Size decreases. I had an overlooked bed, that by year three the bulbs were much smaller.

[jocundi]

I agree, size decreases over time if left completely alone for years. However, I've had a bed where every 5th head or so was left for the 2nd year and the harvest I got from this weedy zero-work bed was decent. Each 4-5 clove head resulted in a cluster of 4-5 new heads (4-5 clove each) that were of decent size.
Planted some of these cloves separately to see how they'll do and also left a patch just like that for this year to see what happens.