Planting Cloves from Small Bulbs
There has been a fair amount of talk on Facebook etc about the need to only plant cloves from large garlic bulbs so I thought it was time I added my two cents worth.
When I started out planting garlic in 2010 I follow the golden rule and only planted cloves from the larger bulbs. Each year I kept the largest bulbs and replanted from these. After a few years of planting exclusively from large bulbs I started to question the logic since every year I ended up with a good percentage of small and medium bulbs in my harvest.
Further investigation and experimentation showed me that moisture and fertilisation (at planting) made far more difference than the size of the clove that I planted. From that point on I only kept the medium sized bulbs for my planting stock and sold the best and biggest to my customers.
This year I decided to perform an experiment and plant a full row (50m) exclusively from small bulbs - that is bulbs less than 25 grams. Described below is the steps that I followed and the results I achieved.
Source Garlic
I used Rojo garlic as my test crop since I had more of that to play with. Every year I have a tray or two of small bulbs and from this I selected a quantity of particularly small bulbs.
I separated these bulbs into cloves in the usual way and only discarded the cloves that were very, very small. Since even the small bulbs of Rojo garlic produce reasonably sized cloves I did not have to throw too many away.
Planting
I planted the small cloves in the third row of my standard planting area. The row was not treated differently in any way - it was cultivated with all of the other rows and fertilised in the exact same way and then covered with weed mat.
Growing
During the growing phase all rows of garlic were treated the same; which is to say they got watered and weeded. The two storms that we had blew away half of the weed mat so half of the "normal" crop ended up covered with straw but there was sufficient still under weed mat to provide a fair comparison.
Harvest
The row of small bulb garlic was harvested in the same manner as all of the other garlic (after row 2 and before row 4) and hung up to cure by itself, in the same place as all my other garlic.
To my eye the resulting crop looks very similar to the crop I harvested from rows planted from medium sized bulbs (30 to 40 grams) and the quality is at least as good.
Conclusion
From my experiment this year and my past experience I am sure that planting garlic from small bulbs produces very similar results to those achieved by planting cloves from large bulbs.
If you are setting garlic aside for planting the you get far more cloves from a kilo of small bulbs than you would get from a kilo of large bulbs.
Given my conservative nature I will stick to planting from the highest quality medium sized bulbs but it is my firm belief that if you are in a situation to give your crop special care and attention then you will receive commendable results using cloves from small bulbs.
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