[Carmen7878]

Hi all,

On doing a bit of weeding this afternoon, I noticed that 4 or 5 of my garlic
(the purple variety) has suddenly got hard lumps in the stem and one has split and little pods are protruding, almost alien like! So ...whats all this then? I have never grown it before and have pulled 2 bulbs last week that seemed to be ahead of the rest and they were both perfect, not massive, but still fine.

Any ideas?

[Dragonfly]

Hi Carmen,

I had this last year on a number of my garlic stems. They appeared to me to  be little cloves but as you say growing from the flowering stem. They reminded me of Egyptian? onions that have baby onions on the flower head. It certainly didn't effect the crop last year and I still have a few of last years garlics still with the little hard lumps on their stems.

regards
Dragonfly

[Trillium]

Garlic is grown from either splitting the actual heads into cloves and planting the cloves, or, from allowing plants to go to 'seed' where tiny garlic cloves are produced. These seed cloves, after planting, take about 3 years to come into a useable size. So, the majority of us prefer to simply snap off the seed head as soon as you notice it coming up so that all the plant energy goes back into forming larger bulbs. Seed heads are inevitable as nature must reproduce itself.