All cured and cut and cleaned. I left one that “split” while in the ground to continue growing and see what would happen. It wasn’t going to produce a good bulb for eating, so I thought, why not. Now it’s two little scapes (one from each stalk) are fat and round and the outer paper is starting to split. I’ve never seen the “flower” of a garlic bulb before – have to remember to take pictures for my blog. The “flower” is really a bunch of tiny “bulbils,” not real flowers, and in theory, you can plant them and in several years you will have harvest size garlic. Still, they look like flowers, so people often refer to them as flowers.

• Siberian still the no. 1 producer
• Polish also did very well, as well as Georgia Crystal (from the state of Georgia in Russia)
• The non-hard neck “bonus” that www.thegarlicstore.com sent me did OK (Kettle River Giant), but not as well as any of the hard-necks

Looks like I’ve found my two types of garlic to grow: Siberian and Georgia Crystal. Both hard-necks from Russia that can take our cold and my “mostly neglect” method of raising them. Siberian has purple striped wrappers and the Georgia Crystal is white papered, so it will be easy to tell which is which. So, for the fall 2008 planting season, I have finally determined which varieties to specialize in. So, I will go ahead and buy my planting stock for this fall, but after that, I should be able to just continue to perpetuate these two varieties from my own stock. I’m really looking forward to this tiny bit of self-sufficiency.