How to grow garlic from garlic seed in your organic garden
Why does nobody grow garlic from seed? Why do we always start it from garlic cloves? Ignorance. Or rather, because gardening authors have always echoed each other’s fable, that garlic seed is always sterile. Garlic can only be grown reliably from bulbs, or rather from cloves broken from the bulb, they say. Wrong!
This is akin to the mindset by which, until the late 18th century, nobody ate runner beans because ‘everyone knew’ they were intended to be flowers. Likewise, the first man to eat a tomato in public did so as a risky stunt before an awed audience. ‘Everyone knew’ until recent times that tomatoes were poisonous.
It has taken the Japanese of late to prove that garlic bulbules, the little bulbs in the seed head, can be grown into fat garlic bulbs, as much as ten times more efficiently than using cloves. A typical garlic bulb of the kind we normally break apart to grow into more bulbs may hold little more than twelve viable cloves. But its seed head will have around 100 bulbules. Some varieties produce up to 300. Even if only half the bulbules germinate, that’s a fivefold increase in production.
The method is simplicity itself. Garlic is left to go to seed. The heads in autumn are brought indoors and stored at typical room temperature, around 65oF. In May, they are broken apart to give up to 100 little bulbules. Each bulbule is planted in a small pot in normal potting compost and reared in a greenhouse or cold frame (45oF-80oF), and kept well watered, much as you would any plant.
Those that germinate at all fatten up like onion sets and are planted out in fall. They yield big garlic bulbs next summer, indistinguishable from the type grown from cloves, it’s said. Dry garlic bulbules are far easier to store and transport than cloves. Cloves often rot or dry out over winter. But seeds can be put in the freezer in an air-tight jar, along with silica gel to reduce their moisture, and they will stay viable almost indefinitely.
Not only can they give you far more produce than cloves, they also yield you two crops, because the original mother bulb, though small, can still flavour your cooking.
Garlic has been grown for food since the dawn of Man. So, if the method is so easy, why has the notion of propagating it from seed received virtually no mention in gardening literature since the time of Pliny? (He described the method around AD70.)
True, William Cobbett in 1829 acknowledged that garlic seed was sometimes viable but, with typical perversity, he then dismissed the notion. Many farmers over the millennia must have tried the experiment. Yet it seems, most failed. Or failed to report it. Why?
Perhaps the success of this method depends on two factors which were previously not understood: the selection of the right varieties and the need to vernalise the cloves. Only hard-neck varieties of common garlic Allium sativum will reliably throw up viable seed heads and only after the cloves have been vernalised ie. over-wintered for several weeks at just above freezing point. (Today, we can do the job in a refrigerator.)
If such cloves are set out in early spring, they will often go to seed by summer. Then the seed, some of which may well be viable, can be saved and re-sown the following year in the same manner as onion seed.
The first season’s plants will each set one bulb. This can be left in the soil. Any seed head that emerges the first year must immediately be cut off at the base. The seed will be worthless. The bulb will then divide into cloves of normal appearance and habit the following year.
These cloves can be eaten – or planted to produce seed heads as above.
So how did the myth begin, that garlic seed is always sterile? Soft-neck garlic, of the sort sown from cloves in spring, will sometimes throw up seed heads the same year. But these seeds, like those of most biennials that bolt prematurely in their first year, are sterile.
And it was this soft-neck kind that farmers down the ages invariably favoured, because it stores far better over winter than the hard-neck kind. Had such farmers persisted with the hard-necked kind (or read Pliny), we might today be able to buy true garlic seed, as opposed to cloves, at any garden centre.
Do note: common garlic should not be confused with Elephant, African or great-headed garlic (Allium ampeloprasum) which frequently produces viable seed. It is not garlic at all, but a variety of leek.
Try the experiment, using a hard-necked garlic variety. If only some of your seed heads produce viable seed, you have a new and exciting way of propagating garlic that’s far more efficient than using cloves.
For a free big 6000-word ebook Lazy Secrets for Natural Gardening Success, brimming with new gardening tips, go to: http://www.gardeningguild.org/lazy
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