potatoes or garlic from seed?

[Liz 89]

i've only ever heard of potatoes and garlic grown from seed potatoes and cloves from a bulb. is it not possile to grow either one from seeds? is this a silly question? i really like growing everything from seed and would like to try these two things, but i've never seen potato or garlic seeds anywhere. thanks in advane for any help. xxxx

[Geordie]

If you let garlic go to 'seed' some types will produce a head that will eventually produce mini bulbils which is the garlic 'seed'. You can plant this next year but it may take two years to produce a bulb of sufficient cloves to be worthwhile. remeber that as garlic is asexual any 'seed' will be a clone of the bulb producing it so any weakness present in the original clove will be present in the bulbil. This is the main reason people grow from new cloves every year.

As for potatoes, many commercially available varieties will not produce seed as there is no need to. If you do manage to get seeds, which are held in the round fruit just below the flower, from the plant they will almost certainly not stay true to type, so who knows what you'd get! The first year will yield only a few very small potatoes but size will increase in subsequent years.

Personally both of these ideas seems like a lot of work for variable results but by all means have a go!

[Demeter]

That's interesting about garlic being asexual.

Obviously it is when you use cloves, cos it's vegetative propagation. (Which has got me wondering now, about how garlic can "adapt" itself to local growing conditions, I'm sure I've read that somewhere that if you save your own garlic over a few years then it becomes adapted to conditions in your garden, but how can it if you are growing clones??)

Anyway - I thought seeds were by definition from sexual reproduction. But I know chuff all about plant biology, obviously, so - off to google with me and I might learn something tonight

[Demeter]

Oh wow, I found out some really cool things.

This article is very interesting
True Seeds in Garlic - Rina Kamenetsky
This one is a bit longer and more general, worth a look though
Vegetable Crops Research Unit : Simon: Garlic Origins
This is just an abstract, but gives you a bit of a clue about seed production
ARS | Publication request: FLOWERING, SEED PRODUCTION AND THE GENESIS OF GARLIC BREEDING

Apparently garlic fertility has been lost by centuries of selection (ironic, huh) as farmers have essentially selected plants that don't set seed in order to get bigger, better bulbs, with the result that garlic plants we grow today are hardly or not even fertile at all.

The bulbils are not seeds at all, just an alternative source of material for vegetative propagation. But some people have had success getting seeds - apparently you have to remove the bulbils and then the seeds can set. It's still more in the realm of science labs rather than garden centres and GYO plots, but does anyone else feel a home experiment coming on? From the sound of it, the first generation is likely to be crap so it'll be a 2-3 year project...

What are you going to call your new garlic variety?