Growing Hard Neck, or Rocombole Garlic
Garlic is a very nutritious and delicious plant. Growing garlic in the home garden is not difficult. Different varieties of garlic grow better in different climates. Some are very hardy and some are subjected to diseases while still others can not take drought.
There are two main types of garlic. One type is soft neck. Soft neck garlic sends up only leaves. The propagation is done underground, by the splitting of the bulb into cloves. The individual cloves then send up new plants in the spring.
The other main garlic type is hard neck garlic. Hard neck garlic sends up leaves like soft neck garlic. It also sends up a scape and forms little garlic bulbs on the top. Most varieties of hard neck garlic do not have viable seeds. The seeds are sterile and so do not produce new plants. However, there is one strain of hard neck garlic that does produce viable seeds.
The garlic variety that produces viable seeds has a bluish cast to the plants, so it is called blue garlic. It is a hot garlic with some purple on the paper that surrounds the mature cloves. It is very similar to Italian Rocombole garlic.
Hard neck garlic is more tolerant of adverse conditions than soft neck garlic. It will take extremes of weather better and will grow in poor soil. Hard neck garlic will produce under very poor conditions. The harvest may be very small, but it will work.
Soft neck garlic is subject to fungal diseases that hard neck is not subject to.
In summer of 1997, I discovered some hard neck garlic growing in a small patch of woods in Warrenton, Missouri. The garlic was growing in the shade and it was an extremely dry summer. The weather had been very hot yet humid. All the soft neck garlic in my garden had rotted off from fungus. I had tried several types and had no success with any of them.
I reasoned that the garlic in the woods must be hardy or the garlic would not have survived in the wild. I harvested the bulbs since they were mature. I took them home and began to select for larger heads. The bulbs in the woods were very small and only had two or three cloves per bulb.
The garlic was the type of garlic that had the viable seed head. It also had a blue cast to the plant so it was blue garlic. I cultivated the garlic in Missouri until 2000 when I moved to the coast area of Oregon. The climate in Oregon is radically different than the climate of central Missouri. The temperatures are not as extreme but the rain comes in vastly greater volume.
In Oregon, the majority of the rain comes in the winter so the soil is waterlogged for months at a time. The summer has almost no rain. The garlic had continued to do well here. Through continual selection, the strain has been totally rehabilitated. This year, the garlic bulbs were of full size and had up to nine cloves each.
| Winter Lake Pages |
| Campus Description |
| Contact Information |
| Renewable Energy |
| Financial Thoughts |
| Blogs |
| E-zine Articles |
| Research Summaries |
| Ongoing Research Projects |
| Water Systems |
| Wastewater Systems |
| Home |
| Links to other good sites |
| Site Map |