Mutant garlic
Last fall I blogged about planting garlic. We’ve now harvested about 200 bulbs of garlic, so that ought to last us for a few months.
This here? These garlic cloves grew half way up the plants’ stems. How weird is that?
None of our Gabriola Garlic plants did this, but a garlic variety called Tal gave us quite a few of these oddities.
Filed in Gabriola Island,gardening 4 Comments so far
4 Responses to “Mutant garlic”
cheryl on 15 Aug 2010 at 8:10 pm #
Too Weird!!
Andrea on 17 Aug 2010 at 1:07 pm #
They are really very pretty, don’t you think? Were the below-ground ones the same colour?
I had never seen this so I did a bit of snooping on the web for an explanation and came up with this link
http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/allium/msg0617383320529.html
in which it is suggested that this is a stress response of some softneck garlics to an unusually severe winter. I’m not familiar with this Tal variety – was it a softneck? and maybe it was less cold-tolerant than some of the other ones you grew, that didn’t develop these odd bulbs.
specialk on 18 Aug 2010 at 3:23 am #
Andrea: Didn’t you read the post months and months ago about the Gabriolan’s bees? He was keeping his bees in the ‘fridge with his beer! I’m guessing it was either too much beer for the bees to handle, or perhaps he was using the wrong brand. I mean, look at that garlic!
Andrea on 18 Aug 2010 at 4:33 pm #
Well, Specialk, now I’m picturing blue, pie-eyed bees reeling about the Gabriolan’s yard, slurring their buzzing, and seeing double garlic…..no wonder the stuff is growing in the wrong place!