Dr. Ivan Buddenhagen just sent me the 4 bulbs of garlic and the 121 seeds you see in the picture above. I’m really excited about this. He’s been working for years developing garlic varieties that produce real seed — without human intervention!
Collecting real seeds from garlic plants has always been theoretically possible, but a lot of work. It’s always been a lot more practical to just grow garlic from cloves, with the resulting plant being a genetic clone of it’s parent. In fact, this is how we’ve been growing garlic for centuries, meaning the plants have more or less ‘forgotten’, through evolution, how to produce seeds. Dr. Buddenhagen has succeeded in bringing back this trait, meaning it’s now possible and practical to breed new garlic varieties. In the picture above, you see 4 of his new varieties.
In my case, here in western Europe, garlic rust is a serious problem. Together with others, I’ve been looking for years for a resistant variety. This sheds a whole new light on this search effort. Now, hopefully, I can work with a population of garlic plants exchanging DNA and reproducing sexually. I understand these plants need a long season to develop seeds, and of course the rust may still kill my plants before I have a chance to gather seed, but now there’s hope…
That is exciting, rust prevents me growing successful crops of garlic, the polytunnel is helpful, and might provide that long season of seed saving.
I’ve been looking for some of this treasure for years. I don’t suffer from rust as much as you seem to, but degeneration implies regular cloves purchase and dependance on laboratories for acceptable yields. Moreover, diversity is lacking in this crop.
I contacted him today in hope I can get some too.
Interesting, I knew for years that garlic was only propagated only asexually through cloning by planting cloves, but it’s only recently that I’ve become aware that some people are trying to get back to garlic propagation (and then probably selecting new varieties) through seeds.
There’s a very interesting conversation on True Garlic Seeds on the Homegrown Goodness forum, with some of the people there trying to get TGS as well. I’ve posted this blogpost there too.
It’s great that you have bring all this good genetic stuff to Europe !
If i understand right, the cultivars you get easily send a flower stalk with fertile flowers.
To fight against degenerescence and virus built up, one solution may be to propagate vegetativly while cloves are still healthy and fertile, and to switch to seed propagation to clean up and keep the fertile seeds habit in the stuff. The question is how many years the vegetative propagation can be done is this system.
hello Patrick, how did your true garlic seeds go – did you grow any of them out?
Hi Megan,
I ended up without a garden that year, so I had to pass the seeds on to others.
I gave half the seeds to someone who had access to a lab, in order to try embryo rescue, with the understanding it would be a sort of learning project for a student. None of these developed into plants.
I gave the rest of them to a fellow gardener in Denmark, and didn’t hear back from him. He is very skilled, so I think he probably did everything possible for them. I guess these probably didn’t succeed either.
sorry to hear that, good luck with the battle with rust and hope you have another garden now.