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Now for the garlic:
If you don't recall, I have two lines of garlic going right now. The first one was a hardneck cultivar to begin with, and I have acquired seed from it in the past. That is what is in pic related.
Notice the greenish parts starting to show up in the flowers. Those are ovaries, and they are getting swollen. I probably have 15 or 20 other plants like that. This means that I should be getting seed from this batch.
The question here, is since I have gotten it to produce seed in the past, will it produce more seed this time around, or do I have to grow garlic from true seed to get that to happen. There is probably a lot of epigenetic stuff going on here, but there is also the issue of chromosomal damage that has built up over thousands of generations of cloning that would get fixed by sexual reproduction. I'm not sure which is going to win out here, but I will probably find out in a few weeks.
(For those of you who missed the last time I posted a flurry of pictures, garlic has almost lost the ability to produce true seed. Myself and several others are trying to reverse this, because cloned plants cannot be bred for more hardy cultivars, viruses can build up in your "seed" stock, and chromosomal damage also accumulates.)
