Garlic... pah :-(

[FBI]

Last year I had a great year with garlic courtesy of Sainsbury's veg department; so much so that we're still eating it. This year I thought I'd do it properly and buy proper 'seed' cloves. I got a load of Germidour from Wilko and they went in in plenty of time for the winter to do its work.

An unusually mild winter, rust and now white rot... grrr.

Some have made it but most not. Luckily I have enough room to avoid that part of the garden (so far as alliums are concerned) and I'm going to try watering with garlic powder to see if I can fight it off a bit, but it's flipping annoying. Gardening, eh? Bloody hell.

[martinmo]

i planted my garlic last october,and now it has rust and is bolting so im going to have to freeze or make lazy garlic.even with feeding with garlic fertalizer. its just the way it goes .you win some you lost some . not my year for garlic

[Mr Bones]

i planted my garlic last october,and now it has rust and is bolting so im going to have to freeze or make lazy garlic.even with feeding with garlic fertalizer. its just the way it goes .you win some you lost some . not my year for garlic

Hi Martinmo and welcome to the Vine. It's usual for softneck garlic to bolt (can't say about hardneck, never grown it), the flower stems (scapes) can be eaten and are considered a sought-after ingredient by chefs. Chatting on the allotment site it seems to be shaping up to be a bad year for white rot.

[ameno]

Hi Martinmo and welcome to the Vine. It's usual for softneck garlic to bolt (can't say about hardneck, never grown it), the flower stems (scapes) can be eaten and are considered a sought-after ingredient by chefs. Chatting on the allotment site it seems to be shaping up to be a bad year for white rot.

You've got that the wrong way around. It's normal for hardneck garlic to bolt (that's where the hard neck comes from: it's the flower stem), whereas softneck garlic usually doesn't. Even softneck will bolt occasionally, though, and as long as you remove the flower head it shouldn't reduce the crop.