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Yesterday, I said that I'd post some pics and information on getting true garlic seed. Here we go.
Garlic is a plant that is typically propagated via cloning. It has been cloned for so many generations that it has almost forgotten how to sexually reproduce. (Poor plant.) While cloning is easy, there are some potential long term ramifications that could put garlic crops at risk. For starters, damage to the chromosomes that would get fixed via sexual reproduction does not get fixed. It builds up over time. Viruses also build up over time, and sexual reproduction can get rid of those. Another issue is that, without sexual reproduction, new cultivars cannot be bred.
One big disadvantage with planting from seed is that you plant your seed one year, and then you harvest the next year. Perhaps this could be overcome via breeding, but people thousands of years ago would have used this is their primary reason for cloning, rather than using true seed. They didn't understand that there were such things as viruses and DNA. We do.
To get on with the explanation of getting true garlic seed, you need to understand that there are two general kinds of garlic: Hardneck and Softneck. Most of the garlic that you purchase in grocery stores is softneck garlic. Pic related (not mine) is hardneck garlic.
Notice the hard shaft, or neck, in the middle of the bulb, as that is missing in softneck garlic. What this is is the base of the scape, which is just another name for the part of the plant that grows up and produces a flowering head.
Softneck garlic has forgotten how to produce a flowering head. That's how badly we've fucked such a wondrous plant, on top of not letting it have sex. We've taken the naughty bits away from a lot of the cultivars.
In short, if you want garlic that is just about guaranteed to produce a flowering head, you need to select hardneck garlic.
