As the headline indicates, we are days away from selling this year's harvest of seed garlic! For personal reasons, this summer has been anything but routine. So apologies for not endeavouring to keeping all abreast of the developments thus far. And the weather, like life, has been anything but routine either. Whereas last year was wet and cool. This year is hot, and I mean really hot, and dry. After receiving some unsolicited advice from a number of different parties on seed garlic water management, I believe, sadly, that I lost the opportunity to produce much larger sized seed garlic bulbs this year than I otherwise would have.
This is due to the fact that I experimented in not supplementing the seed garlic bulbs this year with additional water from irrigation. Time and again the observation has been made that additional watering of seed garlic bulbs, particularly weeks before harvest can result in soft, poor quality bulbs. With irrigation it should be easy enough to control this, but should it become very very hot, like it did at the beginning of the summer, and one does not have the infrastructure in place, resulted in seed garlic bulbs that would have been much bigger than they otherwise ended up being. What I am heartened by is that the seed garlic bulbs available this year have shown themselves to be resilient in the face extreme heat without supplementary water. This may become a much more valuable plant adaptation as we move forward into the future.
Because of this, only medium and small sizes will be available for each seed garlic variety this year. Unfortunately, Northern Quebec seed garlic bulbs will not be available, as it, in particular, did very very poorly, and thus will take some time to rebuild the stock back up. Let's take a look at what each of the seed garlic varieties look this year that can be purchased:
KHABAR
HOUSE
CHESNOK RED
LENINGRAD MEDIUM
RED RUSSIAN
YUGOSLAVIAN
Lovely garlic bulbs old friend.