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Susan Delafield Garlic

Susan Delafield Garlic

This garlic is Porcelain type.

This garlic is mostly white, but occasional bits of purple show up on the cloves and bulb skins.

Last year, this was probably my favorite garlic from the point of view of taste. It has a really outstanding taste. The cloves are big, really too big for most purposes, but this has it’s advantages! Having extra big cloves, means you end up using more than you would otherwise, to avoid wasting any. This means your dishes have even more garlic flavor! I think this makes this garlic nice to cook with. It probably means a bit more wastage, so you need to keep this in mind when considering plant yields.

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Georgian Crystal Garlic

Georgian Crystal Garlic

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.

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Gazebo Grande Garlic

Gazebo Grande Garlic

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.

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Chesnok Red Garlic

Chesnok Red 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.