Every garlic clove planted this fall is a clone of the bulb it came from. Garlic is largely sterile and grows best from cloves rather than seed, and viruses and other pathogens can build up in clove-grown garlic over successive crops. Where the cloves come from matters, and the supermarket may not be the best place to get them.
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Cloves are separated from the bulb no more than a day before planting. Roots start forming in fall, and growth pauses over winter until spring soil warms. A layer of straw or leaf mulch helps protect the cloves over winter. You can buy seed garlic from garden centers and mail-order sellers, or use the previous year’s bulbs.
Garlic also produces a second kind of planting stock above ground. Hardneck varieties send up a flower stalk called a scape in late spring, and the stalk ends in a cluster of small aerial bulbs called bulbils, each a clone of its parent. Planted the conventional way, bulbils need at least two growing seasons to become a marketable bulb. A recent trial cut that to one season by first raising bulbils into seedlings in a nursery. The transplanted seedlings yielded 17.7 metric tons per hectare at the highest potas...