In article ,
songbird wrote:

starting
from bulbules it takes two years to get to
decent stalk size.

Well, perhaps.

I bought some Spanish Roja a couple of years back as my mutt garlic was
in a slump. The mutt garlic gets "pregnant stems" where Spanish Roja is
a scape-forming hardneck. Still growing the mutt, but also growing the
new stuff - A more adequate supply overall.

After some casual internet research I opted to leave the scapes be. Some
(quite a few, actually) of the resulting bulbils were about as large as
a clove. The resulting plants are not quite as big as the "from clove"
SRs, but they are pretty good-sized plants for all that. If they make a
uni-clove I'm betting it will be a pretty good-sized one, and I'd not be
surprised if they actually make cloves their first year out in the
field. On the other hand, I don't mind growing some uni-cloves if they
turn out a good size - less peeling per unit of garlic used, so it's no
guarantee of getting replanted if they choose that route ;-)

Some of the smaller SR bulbils went out in the woods. One patch of 25 or
so is doing well, the others are less impressive. That experiment was a
direct result of the surprising success of a clove or bulbil that exited
the porch into deeply shaded pine/myrtle country and came up to make a
respectable volunteer plant, and having way more SR bulbils than I knew
what to do with.

Also growing someone's heirloom garlic - I gifted a couple of
seed-quality heads of SR in return [which, I later heard, got pickled -
ugghhh. Different priorities.] Thus far it looks pretty similar to the
SR. It was an impressively large head, but I'll find out if that was
nature or nurture at harvest time.

I may try a 50% descaping experiment myself - at least one person who
tried it found a reduction in yield on the de-scaped side, and most
found no meaningful difference, which was why I left them last year.

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