Heirloom Gardening, Food and Other Thoughts
This garlic is Asiatic type.
This is a great garlic to compare with Pyong Vang. This variety has much larger cloves, that are frequently long. This picture doesn’t really do justice to how large the cloves are. What you see in the middle, across the tape measure, is a bulbil stem. This variety also has unusally large and red bulbils.
The firery red color looks spicy, but I haven’t tasted it yet.
This garlic is Porcelain type.
Honestly this wasn’t one of my favorite garlics. At least so far it’s not very acclimated to my garden, but even keeping that in mind the plants don’t seem very productive. Many bulbs of this variety seem to form only 2 cloves. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it’s a little odd.
What I like about this garlic, is the name. For whatever reason the garlic growing community decided not to update it according to the new name Leningrad has. There’s nothing wrong with this, after all we don’t go into a Chinese restaurant and order Beijing Duck do we? We order Peking Duck!
This garlic is a Porcelain type.
This is a nice all around garlic. Rebsie on Daughter of the Soil recently mentioned this was her favorite variety. One of the advantages of this garlic for those of us who live in Europe, is that it is often sold by garden centers making one of the only commonly available heirloom varieties.
It is very similar to other porcelain varieties, and likewise has very nice flavor. It’s certainly worth considering growing this variety.
This garlic is an Artichoke type.
This variety has yet to really acclimate in my garden yet. It also has a lot of variation in colors, you can see the bulb on the right is almost completely white. The ‘blue’ in the name appears to come because the cloves are more purple than red and so seem to contain more blue color than usual.
This garlic is Purple Stripe type.
You might be wondering where the purple color is on this purple stripe garlic, me too! This is a very bizzare garlic. This is my second year growing it, and last year it had very nice purple stripes on the skin. I’m pretty sure the cloves also had a bit of color. This year it’s bone white.
I would think I was going crazy, but fortunately I have proof to the contrary. Last year I gave Rebsie from the Daughter of the soil a bulb, and she noticed the same thing! Last year it had purple stripes, and this year it’s bone white.
In spite of it’s changing colors, this is a nice garlic that grows well and has a nice taste. That is if the taste isn’t changing too.
