[Image description: a perfectly round peeled bulb of garlic on a cutting board, with unpeeled normal cloves behind it.]
When the recipe calls for one clove of garlic.
Delicious compliance
Spoken like one who has not experienced the travesty of over-garlicked food 🥲
garlic is amazing until the point where it curbstomps me with a migraine
That’s not done yet. Garlic looks like this when it hasn’t ‘split’ into the clove parts yet. This will be bland and only have a mild flavor.
That makes sense, he was really undersized compared to the rest.
So some of the inner flesh toward the middle transforms into outer skin?
So you’ve got two modes of reproduction with Allium. Allium like this typically follows a biennial habit, so this years garlic will split into cloves around the fall, in preparation for sending up a flowering stalk next spring/ summer. The cloves are vegetative propagules; just another way to get more garlic other than seeds. Hence you can just plant a clove and get a garlic next year, or, you can plant seed and also get garlic.
Now for your actually question, I believe the segmentation is probably exogenous, technically yes, however, I am by no means an expert in Allium morphology (although I have done graduate coarse work in plant morph, and worked in a plant morph lab), so don’t quote me. However, it wouldn’t appear like you are describing. Think of the ring at the base of a clove of garlic as a bunch of ‘stems’. The branching would originate there.
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Me too please
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Believe it or not, straight to jail.
I’ve enjoyed your wisdom so much lately! Thank you for sharing it!!! I’m learning about plant propagation in general… Is that ring at the base of a clove the same thing as a rhizome?
Good for cooking as is?
This is amazing info to me. I’ve been growing garlic at a hobby level for ages and never knew how the bulbs develop. Thank you for sending me down a garlic education rabbit hole!
bih that’s a onion
On taking a closer look, I agree that this, indeed, is probably an onion.
The fabled ultra clove! It’s real!
THE ONE PIE-
There’s a particular variety of Chinese garlic that grows as a singular bulb. It originates in the Yunnan province, I think. I remember my mother growing it back when I was a child. It’s really nice!
All garlic looks like this if its been harvested too early.
Ah cool! I only recalled the name “Kinesisk luftlök” but I wasn’t sure if it was the same thing. Thanks for the link.
Hade aldrig hört luftlök! Det brukar stå supersolo där jag bor.
Jag är inte helt säker på att det är samma sak, heller. Min mor odlade en hel del olika grejer, och jag minns specifikt en hel del lökar och kål från Kina.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but a garlic plant grows some form of a “seed” head, that will have miniature round bulbs in it if they aren’t clipped off that, it’s my understanding, when they are planted they’ll grow like this in the first year and into a normal garlic bulb year two. I’ve never experimented enough to know if I’m correct, but if my info is correct I’d guess either one of those got mixed in by mistake, or if your planting in the same spot as the year prior one might’ve just fallen off.
I got one of those this year. I grow hard neck and must have missed the scape on this one.
The bulb and the “seed head”(?) in the pic are the same plant, just bent in half so both are visible
Missed the whole scape not just one individual bulb I’m guessing? My brain was struggling to piece together what i was looking at lol
Haha yeah sorry that’s a bad pic. The scape is the curly thing that grows off the top of the plant in the spring, and then and flowers. If you’re growing garlic, you’d normally cut the scape so that the plant puts more energy into the bulb instead of the flower. Here’s a pic of the whole thing:
ate the onion
there’s also a breed of garlic which always grows like that, you may have a “mutant” there
Peak mildly interesting content
Reinventing the onion let’s go
Like a garlic bath bomb
looks like an onion to me.
That looks like Elephant garlic!
It might be! That was one of the varieties I planted this year, though the cloves I put in the ground looked like normal shaped cloves, just scaled up a bit.
I’m actually second-guessing my elephant garlic thought… I planted my first clove this year and it took a month and a half to sprout!!! I thought it had died due to heat, but I finally saw its thumb-sized sprout coming up a couple days ago. My normal garlic only takes a week or so to sprout over here in AZ. The elephant garlic seed leaves look more like an iris or tulip coming up. That one commenter was probably on point, saying the bulb was too young to start segmenting into cloves. That was news to me and I’m over the moon about it! Thank you so much for posting about this in the first place!!!
I had the exact same experience with the elephant garlic, they took forever to sprout, long enough that I actually dug one of them up to check that they hadn’t been eaten or something.
Wow. My best so far was a bulb with three cloves.
