Pacific Northwest Gardening: Growing Garlic, 0 by mauryhillfarm

mauryhillfarm wrote:
Last year, my garlic bed somehow got infected with a fungus. I think the long, cold ,wet Spring made the problem worse. I lost all my early maturing varieties (Asian Tempest, Xian, Chinese Pink, and Early Italian). My latest maturing varieties were fine (Armenian, Kenyan, and Chesnok Red) and did not appear to be affected. Since I want to replant these this year I am taking extra precautions in case they are harboring any spores of the fungus.

I read about a method of prepping cloves for planting to avoid spread of diseases (sorry don't remember where I found it or I'd provide a link). As follows:

Soak the cloves in a bowl of baking soda water for several hours or overnight. I didn't measure, just sprinkled in a liberal amount of soda until the water felt a bit slippery. This allows easy removal of the clove wrapper. Then dip the cloves in rubbing alcohol for a few minutes before planting. This is time consuming, but I did find a few cloves that had little black specks under the wrapper. I'm not even planting those.

i don't think you need to go to all this trouble under normal circumstances.

This message was edited Oct 28, 2009 8:55 PM