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Red Toch Garlic

Red Toch Garlic

This garlic is an Artichoke type.

I’ve been slowly working my way through the garlic I’ve harvested over the last month or so. I’m not going to make separate posts of all the garlic I grew, but I thought I would point out what I think are some of the more interesting ones.

It’s my habit not to clean the bulbs until they have cured, so while many other people have been posting pictures of their cleaned garlic, I haven’t had any to take pictures of until now. I find if I clean harvested garlic with water, it risks making the bulb wetter and the curing process more difficult.

My garlic was wet enough this year when it came out of the ground! It was a very wet year here. About 1 in 20 bulbs formed single cloves, and many fell victim to rotting or mildew. Not a great year for growing garlic!

Anyway, Red Toch is a variety from the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Toch is short for Tochliavri, the name of a city. Many really outstanding garlics come from Georgia!

The Seed Savers Exchange reports this is the most commonly requested variety by it’s members.

I like this variety very much, and it grows very well in my garden. It is a good all purpose garlic. The one major drawback is it has one of the shortest storage life of all the varieties I grow, so I have to make sure I eat it first.

The bulb on the right began to open in the ground, exposing the cloves.

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Silver Rose Garlic

Silver Rose Garlic

You might be wondering why I am posting a picture of a cured garlic bulb at this time of year. Most of us are busy harvesting and curing our garlic. What’s particularly interesting about this bulb of garlic is it’s from last year! That’s right, this garlic has been sitting around for a full year now.

This is what the inside of the cloves look like:

Silver Rose Cloves

Okay, perhaps it’s not the freshest looking garlic, and ever so slightly soft to the touch, but still very edible! None of the cloves are rotten. A month ago there wasn’t even any sign of sprouting.

This bulb didn’t actually come from my garden, rather it was leftover planting stock from an order. It’s possible what grows in my garden will have different storage properties.

Now that I have fresher garlic from my garden, this bulb is going into the compost bin.

For anyone who wants to eat home grown garlic all year round, this is a very interesting variety to consider!

This is a Silverskin type garlic.

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Garlic Colors

My garlic bulbs just finished drying and curing the other day, and I have been cleaning them up. I grew 20+ varieties of garlic this year. Most of these I have never grown before, and I have certainly never grown so many at one time. I was really surprised at how pretty some of them came out after I rubbed all the dirt off.

Garlic

From left to right, these are Chesnok Red, Vekak Czech, Guatemalan Ikeda and Garlic Seed Foundation #65 garlics. The bottle cap is for size reference.

Garlic

Here are Persian Star, Susan Delafield and Russian Softneck (which was kind of a strange name for what looked like hard neck garlic to me).

Garlic

Finally Sweet Haven, Rosewood, Georgian Crystal and Gypsy Red.

I haven’t tasted any of these yet. It’s plants like these that strike me as such a shame, because only the gardener can really appreciate the beauty in something like this. Once it’s cooked into food you don’t see it anymore, and it’s not something that anyone would really buy in a store even if you could find it for sale somewhere. It’s a bit like swiss chard, that can look so pretty in the garden, but by the time you remove the stems and cook it, it just looks like cooked green leaves in the end.