Heirloom Gardening, Food and Other Thoughts
This garlic is Porcelain type.
Did I already say I liked garlic from the former Soviet republic of Georgia?
This one also has small bulbs, like the Chesnok Red, but otherwise is a productive variety. I don’t find the small bulbs a problem. The tightly skinned bulbs have a good storage life, and an excellent flavor.
I don’t know for sure what type this garlic is, but I think it’s porcelain.
The important theme of this garlic is ‘grande’! The plants were huge, in fact the biggest in my garden this year. The bulbs are mostly huge. The one problem I had was they seem to have a hollow cavity at the top of the bulb that collected water. This cause a number of the bulbs to rot during curing, and in particular I lost many of the larger bulbs this way. I hope and expect this is a trait I can select for as I continue to grow this in my garden. I didn’t have a spare bulb which I could split it open to take a picture of the cloves, but they are large with an off white color to them.
The bulbs all have 4-6 cloves each. I got this garlic from a Seed Savers Exchange member who lives in Wisconsin, USA. She tells me she has been selectively breeding this garlic in her garden for 10 years now, and got it from a local friend who doesn’t know where it is from.
Søren of In the Toads Garden got a similar looking garlic, also from someone in Wisconsin, called Martin’s old Heirloom. So far, the main difference seems to be the number of cloves per head is higher in his garlic. More investigation is needed here…
I have not tasted this garlic yet, but it has a really delicious and sweet small. If it tastes as good as it smells, it’s going to be a really exciting garlic. So far, this is really a promising looking garlic.
This garlic is a Purple Stripe type.
You may be wonder where the ‘red’ in the name of this garlic comes from. Me too! Last year there was a little bit of red in the cloves, but this year they look mostly white to me.
This garlic comes from the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Did I mention how much I like the garlics from Georgia? This is really another very high quality garlic from there. The bulbs are always a bit small, even the planting stock I originally got was small. The cloves are a reasonable size for cooking with, and the plants are productive, so the small bulb size is not very important in my opinion. In fact I think the small bulbs are very attractive and practical in their own way. These bulbs store well, and the taste is very good.
This garlic suffered a bit from the mildew visible in the picture.
This garlic is a Rocambole type.
With dark reddish brown cloves, and speckles of purple on the skin of the bulb, this is a very attractive variety. It is also strong growing and productive. The taste is also very good.
I made a previous post about the unique foliage on this tomato.
This tomato came from Søren of In the Toads Garden.
This plant turned out to be very interesting in many ways. First is was a very compact plant, that worked well grown in a container. While I normally use a larger container, I would say this tomato would probably grow well in 20 liters of dirt.
The unique foliage turned out to be unusually resistant to the usual diseases attacking the leaves of my plants like powdery mildew and the like. This plant showed no signs of infection when some of my other plants had early blight this year. Ashleigh of My Dutch Garden also grew this tomato. She reported that many of her other plants had serious damage from the wind this year, but not this one because the feathery light leaves didn’t catch the force of the wind.
Given the small size of this plant, it was very productive. This is also a determinate plant, giving it’s complete annual harvest within a short period of time.
This plant turned out to be a bit of a challenge for seed collecting, because the tomatoes didn’t have many seeds in them.
The taste of this tomato was only so-so. It was a bit mealy and lacked a very intense flavor. The lack of flavor may have to do with the unusually wet weather this year.
