Garlic Guru USA

Exploring the wonders of garlic

Where do bulbils come from? – Growing Garlic Bulbils 2022-2023, series – part 19 (28-June-2023)

Scape flower head, where the bulbils start to form.
Garlic plants with scapes curling over. We cut about half of the scapes to let the underground bulbs grow larger and will let the other scapes grow to harvest bulbils in the late summer/early fall. We have about 75 garlic plants total and will probably cut some more scapes and leave about 25 scapes to go to flower.
Bulbils looking worse but still alive. We haven’t checked the underground growth of the bulbils yet but we did for the below green plastic flower pot.
Looking very sick and some of the shoots don’t look like they can recover, however I decided to dig deeper.
This is a bulbil that had a shoot almost completely withered away but the underground growth looked solid and I’m thinking that this and others in a similar situation could either be left in the ground or harvested, cured then replanted.
Roots are still somewhat intact, I wonder if similar to more mature cloves this can be replanted later in the fall. I’m interested to find out and will be saving this for later. Last year we only harvested about 3 scapes for bulbils and planted over 70 bulbils in pots, raised beds and the ground. Next year we are looking to harvest bulbils from at least 20 scapes and will have a larger dedicated area to grow the bulbils. We will continue to order seed garlic from Johny Seeds and other dealers to have a steady crop. The hope is to have a sustaining supply from harvesting bulbils and still have flexibility in buy new seed garlic from various dealers. Looking forward to the future progress and happy with the results so far (even though a fair amount of the bulbils were lost in one transplant, but lesson learned).

Related Blog Posts: Everything you need to know about garlic bulbils

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