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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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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.

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Garden Pictures July 2010

It’s time to do a little catching up with blog posts with some pictures from my garden.  The weather has been unbearably hot over the last week or two, and the garden’s been neglected for the sake of avoiding the hot sun.  Please forgive any weeds that may be visible…

Garlic rust is back.  I haven’t been paying close attention, but I think my plants have had it about a week now.  In about two weeks I’m going to begin harvesting, so it doesn’t matter any more.  The garlic will be fine.  Like I’ve posted about before, I sprayed dilute milk on the plants over the last few weeks, and I’m under the impression it help a lot delaying the rust and reducing it’s impact.

Sorry, it’s a little hard to see the forest for the trees in this picture, but this is one of my two corn patches.  This is Golden Bantum sweet corn, in plot number 17, and the plants are now about 5 ft tall with tassels on top.  I got these seeds from Bingenheimer Saatgut in Germany, and this is a locally (Germany) acclimated version of this variety.

Above is my other corn patch.  This is Strawberry Popcorn.  This is a Dutch Heirloom corn.  It may be heirloom other places too, but there was a time it was widely grown here.  Together with the Golden Bantum sweet corn, I’m growing this in search of corn varieties suited for my local climate.

I’m growing popcorn this year in part because I was inspired by Kathy at Skippy’s Garden, who had a good experience with popcorn last year.  Modern popcorn has had so much of it’s flavor bred out of it, then often packaged in microwavable bags.  Most of us (including me) don’t really know what popcorn really tastes like any more.  By growing it yourself, you get a chance to experience the flavor like it’s supposed to be.

Does anyone notice a strawberry theme creeping in here?

I’m really impressed with these white alpine strawberries Alan Bishop bred and sent me, and I think I keep getting more impressed by the day!  This is the second year, which is normally more productive than the first, but wow, these plants are really productive.  Normally alpine strawberries stop producing in the heat of the summer, but we’ve just had a really hot stretch of weather (30C/85F), and these strawberries have just kept going.  I’ve been short on water, and they have been in a dry raised bed, but they haven’t minded.

These strawberries are particularly nice, because the birds can’t find them as they aren’t red, and birds are normally a big problem in this way in my garden.

Finally, Strawberry Spinach…

Never mind the weeds!  Almost everything you see here that’s green in a weed, I just didn’t have a chance to remove them before taking this picture.  Strawberry Spinach is an old weed relative that at one time was widely grown in parts of Europe.  It has leaves that are a spinach substitute, and tasteless red berries that look like strawberries.  The plants have no relation to strawberries.

It’s my first time growing it, and it kind of got lost in the weeds, and I think I planted it a bit close because the plants never got very large and healthy.  In fact the leaves are now too brown to eat, so I don’t even know how they taste.  The red berries are great to look at however!

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Quick Links

My computer is back online after some hardware problems since my last post.  I don’t have time for a full post, but a couple of quick links here in the meantime:

Rebsie has just done a great post on potato breeding!  If for some reason you don’t know her blog, be sure to have a look now!  For the rest of you thinking about potato breeding, be sure to have a look at these instructions.

From Tim Peters, here is a good collection of text and videos talking about various aspects of the Gulf oil spill from the perspective of a medical doctor.

Finally, TZ made a great post in this discussion forum giving a lot of resources for those who want to grow potatoes from TPS.