Our garlic is looking good. We had some of our Music variety get a late germination, but for the most part, everything overwintered fine.
Things to look for when inspecting garlic after winter: color, size, leaf shape, germination, and uniformity.
A healthy seed stock in the fall will prevent issues in the spring. If your garlic is misshapen, curled, gnarled, is very yellow or burnt, or maybe did not germinate at all, these are all effects from a possible bad stock.
For example: We had an old, rare ‘Pennsylvania Heritage’ variety that looked weak from the farmer we bought it from. We suspected Allium Maggots after finding some damage on cloves. At risk of infecting some of our other stock, we decided to plant the garlic in 2013. The next year, the crop underperformed as expected but we had harvested more healthy stock to plant again by using a natural fertilizer for commercial use.
A good thing to do in the spring, as we’ve found, is provide garlic with more nutrients than it actually needs. Garlic is understood as a plant that likes to be in really fertile soil, but uses little food. A good start goes a long way.
More on this later in the week,
-Cam
