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Mystery Garlic

I’ve been exchanging emails with Barrett, a reader and fellow garlic grower, and he’s come across an interesting garlic and is wondering if any of you out there have any more information about it for him.

Here are some excerpts (with permission) from his emails:

Thanks for offering to help. I appreciate the difficulty in trying
to determine a garlic variety in this way. On my own, I could possibly hope to narrow to Rocambole vs. Purple Stripe classification. I’m hoping to be able, with your help, to possibly narrow further. I’ve also read the Volk paper, so I understand those classifications are not perfect. A short list of possibilities is probably the best I can hope for. Ideally, I might be able to learn more about the actual origins of this particular cultivar.

I ordered the the garlic, called “H&A” by the seller (Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds) and the description only listed as “rare hardneck”. I contacted Baker Creek for more information, but the grower Merlyn Neidens had passed away, so no further inquiries could be made.

So that is the history. The bulbs I received were medium to extra large. This was my first year harvest, so I only got medium to large bulbs. The bulbs I planted had silvery white wrappers, which tan to brown clove wrappers (to the best of my recall). At the time, I guessed it was a rocambole variety.

After growing however, I’m more inclined to believe PS, possibly marbled subgroup (see photos). The scapes typically did a 270 degree curl, though a couple had the rocambole style double loop. The bulbs had characteristic purple stripes initially. One bulb that I peeled fresh seemed to develop more purple coloration as it cured in my kitchen. The other bulbs when cured tended more toward silvery to white outer wrappers with some purple showing through.

The clove wrapper on many cloves is incomplete/split, as seen in the open bulb photo. The bulbils are still maturing, but look largish and few (approx 15-20 at a guess) from what I’ve read, this indicates a leaning toward rocambole again, but doesn’t rule out PS. There is only a single layer of cloves, 8-10 per bulb, but that doesn’t really help much.

Photo link:

http://picasaweb.google.com/bgreyt/Garlic?authkey=Gv1sRgCKia0MeP2punKg&feat=directlink

I suggested to him that it seemed like it may be a creole type, mostly because of it’s color and clove shape, and I also found a reference to it on the Internet with this link:

http://rpagarlic.blogspot.com/2008/07/2008-garlic-crop-is-harvested.html

This was his reply:

So, I have an update on tracking down H&A origins. Turns out the link you found was the source for Merlyn. So I can trace mine to them. They say they got it from a place called Dakota Garlic, which appears to be defunct. I’m trying to get in touch with the former owner to see if he can tell me where he got it (and so on).

So, does anyone have any more information or ideas about this garlic?

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Artichoke Pictures

I wanted some artichokes for my garden, and there’s no particularly good place to buy these locally.  Perhaps there are a couple of fellow gardeners to ask, but instead I decided to try growing them from seed.  I was placing an order with Baker Creek in the US anyway, so I just added on some of all the artichokes they had in their listings at the time:

Green Globe

Purple of Romagna

Violet de Provence

Violetta Precoce

Except that winter here is a little wet, I have a pretty good climate for growing artichokes as a perennial.  Generally by partly covering the artichoke to protect from direct rain, it will keep dry enough to survive the winter.

I read two important things about growing artichokes from seed.  The first is the genetics are variable, so you should plant several with the intention of selecting the best ones.  The other was they don’t normally produce flowers (artichokes) the first year, but you can increase the chances of this by exposing the young plants to a period of cold, which I tried to do.  In fact we had very strange weather this spring, so not only did the young plants get exposed to cold, they got exposed to all extremes of weather; hot, dry, wet and cold.  They also stayed in rootbound pots too long, because the weather wasn’t cooperating enough to let me plant them out.

Most of my garden neighbors artichoke plants start producing by early summer, but for some reason mine didn’t start blooming until the solstice.  I’m sorry, except for the green globes, I didn’t keep track of which picture was of which variety, but if anyone’s interested, I’ll try to go back and match them up.

Here are two of the green globe plants:

What was kind of interesting, as well as the plants doing well, the plants that didn’t do well.  For example here is a plant that’s doing fine:

but here’s a plant of about the same size and of the same variety sitting right next to it:

This one has it’s own ecosystem on it.  First it’s covered with aphids, but also ladybugs and some other insects, which are eating the aphids.

As far as I know, this is the only plant in my garden at the moment with aphids, and certainly none of the other artichokes have them.  I wonder what it is about it that’s so attractive to them?

Finally a number of the plants never got much larger than this, which is about 5 cm off the ground.

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Garlic Harvest 2010 Begins!

I started today harvesting my first few garlics.  The Asiatic Turban and Creole types always need to be harvested a little earlier that the others, so I started with these.  Even though there are several different varieties of garlic in the picture, they all look pretty similar, with the characteristic reddish skin of the Turban types.

They look really good this year.  They also smell wonderful!  The Turbans are among the most aromatic varieties, and among my favorites.  The only drawback is they do tend to fall apart in the ground if you harvest them too late and they are a little more susceptible to garlic rust.

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Washington State Meetup?

Steph and I will be visiting some friends and relatives in Washington State, in the areas of Seattle, Tacoma and Vancouver August 20-30th.

Anyone in those areas interested in getting together and meeting one another?

Depending who’s interested, and where you are, I’ll try to arrange a date or dates and times.

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TPS Update

I just hilled up the TPS seedlings from Tom Wagner, and so far they are really doing well!  I’m really enjoying the biodiversity in the leaves, as the tubers aren’t visible yet.  The plants are really vigorous compared with other potato plants I’ve grown, probably in part due to the lack of viruses and other diseases.