Single Clove Garlic
Single clove garlic has appeared in the shops of late, all the way from China, it looks great, taste good, you can roast it whole in it's skin and scoop it out to eat with a teaspoon, or slice into coin sized discs and fry crisp, a pure delight.
To Grow your own you need 'Bulbils'
If you want to grow your own it's going to take you two seasons as
far as I can work out from my research on-line.
Getting 'Bulbils'
What to do with the 'Bulbils'
Plant them as you normally would in November and leave them
Getting 'Bulbils'
It's not that hard, plant some extra garlic now, let it grow, don't remove the scape/the flower head that forms, as one normally would do to force growth energy into the bulb, instead leave this to grow and let the flower-head fully develop, you'll notice that it's made up of tiny cloves or 'Bubils' let the plant run the season and yellow out. At this stage cut the flower head and store the 'Bulbils' in a dry place. Harvest the bulb as normal or leave it in the ground where it'll produce garlic grass for you to enjoy in Spring
Nb. If you leave the garlic bulb in the ground over winter by Spring it will grow flat leaves like Grass this may be handy for those of you that don't have 'Wild Garlic' naturally growing in your area, like on a rooftop in Manhattan.
What to do with the 'Bulbils'
Plant them as you normally would in November and leave them
to grow as one would, and single clove garlics will/should be produced.
I came across references to growing single cloves while researching availability of 'Wild Garlic' in the Philadelphia area in March for a demo I was doing there at the International Flower Show. Luckily I was neglectful of some garlic last year and out of curiosity I kept the little tiny garlic cloves' or 'Bulbils' as I now know them to be and have them planted. I have the ' Garlic Grass' growing,stage one is complete! See below for updates.
RESULTS IN!
July 16th 2012.
I planted a few bulbs of shop bought garlic in a patch on the allotment early April, not the normal recommended planting time, one would usually plant October -November for the next seasons crop. I paid no particular attention to them and let nature take it's course, the weather has been terrible in many senses this year mainly wet and the slugs rampant, by early July the tops had disappeared and I thought I'd lost the garlic to white rot or something. At the weekend I proceeded to dig the ground over to make way for a sowing of lettuce and was delighted to find though the tops were gone there was garlic there and that most of it was single bulb, a result, true, though not by by my proposed method. Most of it is small only a couple of them making size of the store bought grade, but then they always use standardised selections for sale.Some of the bulbs had started to divide into cloves also suggesting a randomness in growth stage has something to do with getting a crop of single bulbs. Indeed the single bulbs for sale in the shops maybe a bi-product as opposed to being a specific target crop. Approximately 85% of the the harvest were single cloves. So for a crop of single bulbs the easy thing to do at the moment it seems is to wait until late March /early April ,buy a couple of regular bulbs from any greengrocer and plant them and crop them in July.
Single clove garlic grown 2012 in Ireland, not a lot, not massive but a result and they
taste fantastic! Fresh Irish Single Clove Garlic.
Nb.I'm Still waiting for results from the ' bulbils' I planted and currently letting my one of my Elephant garlics go to flower in anticipation that the 'Bulbils' method works as Elephant garlic cloves are expensive to buy. .
i have read that someone who has a friend in China said to cut the shoots off and let the garlic continue to grow and thats how you get the Solo clove...but not sure how long so i`m guessing its experimenting time this year for me...lol
ReplyDeletethanks Jean, I will have to give that a try next season.
DeleteThank you so much for blogging about this, I am testing it as well in Denmark, look forward. To more about solo garlic experiments!
ReplyDeleteThanks Didde,hope your experiments go good for you. Just planted some on the 4th of June to see how it gets on.
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting this. I bought Lidl's solo garlic today. Three of them i put in the ground and wait and see. Although time of year isn't right i trust mother nature to take it's course.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your interest André, unfortunately you need to plant regular garlic cloves, dig the others up and eat them, a regular bulb of garlic should give you 8-10 cloves- plant these, you should in theory get single cloves growing by September.they won’t be as ‘perfect’ as the supermarket ones -they are all graded anyhow. You will get growth, your garlic may end up looking like a fat spring onion given the space of growing time, but it will be still be very Tasty, Good luck!
ReplyDeletei purchased single clove garlic from himachal(palam pur) and sown in normal winters of rajasthan.i got the sinle clove garlic,but i do not understand that when a person growing single clove garlic and in turn getting the same one.then what is fun in growing the same
ReplyDeleteGrowing single bulb garlic takes 2 years, first year you put clove into the soil which gives you flower stem which produce small bulbies.You plant them next season and they grow into proper size single garlic to eat.
ReplyDeleteAny further updates on this Pat?
ReplyDeleteThanks for your interest, Thankfully Wikipedia has the subject covered, interesting and imformative.
Deletehttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solo_garlic
I worked a season on a farm that grew garlic, the way I understand it is that a garlic plant doesnt begin to split into multiple cloves unless it has ample energy & good growing conditions. Essentially each clove that a garlic plant produces has a chance of becoming an entire garlic plant itself, so if there is enough resources for several garlic plants to grow, the garlic will continue to split. It's very similar to other bulbs that will split in good growing conditions, lily's come to mind personally.
ReplyDeleteSo, you can purposefully "starve" your garlic plants to create a single bulb. things like cutting the garlic plant down, infrequent watering, letting weeds grow out around the bulb, ect. can all contribute to this.
Also, because each clove can grow a new garlic plant, you can just split the grocery store garlic into it's seperate cloves and plant them independently! It's easier to "stress" the bulbis', as they are smaller and therefor don't have as much energy stored internally as a full-sized clove would, but you can still do it if you are thoroughly abusive lol.
Great contribution
DeleteThank you so much for this blog, and others' comments.I was looking hard to find an info about this online, and now I will be planting solo garlic soon. I live in Burma, and want to plant my own, for fermentation (black garlic),as solo garlic has much more nicer taste than fermented garlic cloves. Nutrition of this is unbelievable as I was getting some ready made imported from China. I understand from your experiment that I should plant solo garlic in March (Burmese weather 25C/15C and above?) and give it plenty of water since it is dry season. I will try cutting the stems as well, to experiment. I will get regular garlic cloves for planting,but there is also "solo garlic" heirlooms that are advertised on China websites. I don't know how genuine that is, I will have to check with my Taiwanese translater and see what the website says.
ReplyDeleteSo, no much water, and no much compost?
ReplyDeleteMy grandmother had this variety come up out of nowhere in her flower bed. She had started to pull them thinking it was a weed but after smelling it just let them grow. I took a few and planted them in my yard. I just go out after the flowers turn to seed and dig up the patch with a pitchfork and take the biggest bulbs. Smaller ones also form from the sides of the main bulb and I just leave them. It has become a bit of a permaculture experiment and over the last
ReplyDeletefew years they have spread slowly. I just let the flower seed fall to the ground. I never do anything except the yearly harvest. I live in Memphis TN USA
Grandchild in memphis... you are growing elephant garlic . Ist year is a single round , the 2nd year it grows into a bulb that divides itself into cloves .
ReplyDeleteEvery year I plant my garlic later and later out of laziness. I started in November, then the next year it was December, and finally, last year it was March, 2020. I planted cloves from bulbs that I had harvested in the summer of 2019. Lo and behold, I got these single clove garlic bulbs! I think this year I'm going to plant my garlic at the "correct" time (November) and another crop in April, to see if I can get more single clove bulbs. So interesting!
ReplyDeletei planted a couple pearl garlic a couple years ago n forgot about em. as i was digging up weeds n strawberries i started pulling large bulbs as well as many bulbils that have started to sprout. my bigget bul is the size of a small egg,5 1/2 inches round! i now just planted over 50 small to medium bulbs as well as 20 large bulbs and about 100 bulbils. im hoping to get some nice seed heads outta the big ones to do lots next year.#5year#pearlgaric#farmplan
ReplyDeleteWhat is Reason behind garlic clove splitting ???? Please sombody explain it for me ....
ReplyDeleteWe planted elephant garlic seed cloves in fall of 2022, I had to mix our own soil because the local is to rocky. We mixed enough for a 35 foot by 80 foot garden 10 inches deep for 3,000 plants. We mixed 1/3 cow manure, 1/3 local soil and 1/3 is ten year old wood chip mulch. from a local lumber mill. We sprayed emulsion every 10 days for 2 months, Our soil test came in at high optimum levels. The shoots were small and scrawny but all grew very tall and healthy. We started to harvest this week and have a 60% to 70 % return of Solo garlic, many hundreds of them, maybe a thousand. We are at the peak of the Pocono Mountains at 2,200 feet elevation.
ReplyDeleteDoes anyone know why or what caused this ?