Garlic & Onions

This cool wet spring has my garlic is looking really good and the scapes have been part of my meals now for about two weeks and nearing the end.

Garlic 20 June 2019 - a few scapes left

I love the scapes just wrapped in tinfoil with salt and oil on the BBQ or lightly fried and sure I can be smelt from at least 100m currently. My main garlic crop I think is called "music". I bought a few types of garlic online and had various degrees of luck growing it. Then one day at a farmers market, I asked the farmer about some great looking garlic he was selling. He said he did not know what type it was, but the family had been growing it for 20 years on a nearby (now organic) farm. I bought about 10 h

If you don't remove the scapes, you will get bulbils. The head also tends to be a bit smaller. I have not tried growing and eating from bulbils, but have experimented with a wild garlic patch. I simply leave a small patch of garlic, without harvesting or removing scapes and it is has done well, looking much like grass.

This season I have about a dozen plants for a second type of garlic planted. It's also a hardneck and very red, bought at an organic food store. It has smaller cloves with perhaps 10-12 per head. It's growing rather well, and I will try to remember to give an update on the harvest and tasting. Will this become my second variety???

French grey Shallots, with topset onions behind

My french grey shallots and topset bunching onions are also doing well this year.

I am still growing. I plant about 80 cloves every year in early November and land up with about 70 head of garlic, each with only 4 or 5 cloves. The remaining is used till early spring and I never buy it from the store anymore. The taste of my grown garlic is much stronger and far more to my liking store garlic. The shallots are grown much the same as garlic, except that the smallest shallots are replanted each year while the largest cloves are.