[Image description: a perfectly round peeled bulb of garlic on a cutting board, with unpeeled normal cloves behind it.]

  • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    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.

      • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        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.

    • Pheral@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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!

  • Dojan@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    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!

  • rjthyen@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    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.

    • feedum_sneedson@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      bulbils

      not always, but yes

      this is a mutation though, and I’ve seen this kind of “single clove” garlic in the shops

    • DinosaurSr@programming.dev
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      4 months ago

      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

      • rjthyen@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        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

        • DinosaurSr@programming.dev
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          4 months ago

          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:

  • ben_dover@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    there’s also a breed of garlic which always grows like that, you may have a “mutant” there

    • thrawn@lemmy.worldOP
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • Pheral@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        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!!!

        • thrawn@lemmy.worldOP
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          4 months ago

          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.