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Once you've done all of this, and then played the waiting game, what does true garlic seed look like? Onion seed! Pic related (sorry about the piss-poor quality of the pic) is some true garlic seed that I produced in 2014, then subsequently lost, only to find again about a week ago.
While it is very late to do so, I am getting it prepped for germination. The reason that I am doing it now is because first generation true garlic seed is barely viable. If you were to just go and plant it in the ground, you would be doing well to get 3% germination, and a lot of those plants would probably die. Being 2 years old, I worry about whether it will germinate now even taking extra steps to raise the germination rate, and I don't want to wait until mid winter.
To get it to germinate, it is recommended that you cold stratify the seeds. While there are various ways to do this, I have put it onto a moist paper towel, placed it into an UNSEALED ziplog baggie, and placed it in the fridge. Most people recommend a month of this before soaking the seeds in a 1% bleach solution for 20 minutes to ensure that there is no fungus. After that, it is a good idea to get some quality seed starting mix that is free of disease and fungus. After all of that, you can expect a 13% germination rate.
I know, that seems like an awful lot of work for 13% germination rate, but 2nd generation seed takes a lot less work to get from the plant, and germinates at a much higher rate. I talked with a geneticist friend of mine about this and she agreed that there was a lot of epigenetics involved. Things get turned off/on and pass that on to the offspring.
Anyway, that is as far as I have made it with growing garlic from true seed. Hopefully in a few weeks, I'll be posting pics of garlic seedlings.
