Growing big garlic

 What's the secret? Mine never come up bigger than a slightly smaller golfball. Planted late last autumn in fertile soil.

Me too - golfball size sounds very familiar :-)

There are varieties that naturally grow larger.  I hate peeling fiddly little garlic cloves, so have searched around myself for these types.

My favourites are Provence Wight, which is pretty widely available and is a soft neck type, plus Rocambole, which needs a bit more searching out and is a hard neck.  Both give you fewer cloves, but really good sized ones.  Rocambole is noticeably larger than the Provence Wight and you get 4-6 massive cloves per head. It is really garlicky as well and produces large edible garlic scapes as a bonus.  I've just picked these - piccy here.

https://chat.allotment-garden.org/index.php?topic=129358.msg1516589#msg1516589

The Rocambole usually comes as first year cloves, which you have to grow on to make the big cloves for eating.  Then you can save part of your own crop to replant, so you get harvest sized heads of garlic every year thereafter.  It is a bit of a labour of love, but there is a good pay off to spur you on

One of my plot neighbours got part of my seed crop last autumn and planted it up.  He's pretty thrilled by the size of cloves he is growing and calls it his rock and roll garlic 

Sorry - edit as I don't think I made the growing sequence for Rocambole clear - seed to first year clove, then 2nd year these grow on to large cloves.  2nd year cloves that are replanted make more 2nd year type large style cloves, so the grow and wait bit is only at the start 

Thanks all, some things to think about there in terms of feeding and choice of variety.

Interesting how much feed they are getting at planting, and before December, in sunshineband's post; I've not been giving them any extra feeding then, thinking that the main thing was just to get them growing then so that the roots got a period of cold over winter. It's very rare that the ground is frozen solid here, so I could feed them right through most Winters.  I normally just feed them in March.

Harvested some of mine today, the leaves have gone yellow and have quite a lot of rust this year, and as ever they are slightly smaller than a golf-ball...

G&R