The past two seasons I've had problems with overwintered elepahnt garlic. About 1/2 of the crop has developed some sort of rot and eventually just rotted away. They were planted from separated cloves which were in good condition, sprouted and grew normally till mid-winter, but as colder weather set in the problems began. Last winter was very wet, so i thought it was a fluke. This winter I put them in a fairly dry spot and we had a much drier winter, same problem.

One strange thing, though. This year I separated out all the elephant single bulbs(rounds), and rather than plant them in the fall, these went in in December, and were ina fairly moist spot, came up in January, and have shown absolutely none of the rot problems.

Has anyone else experienced higher mortality with clove-planted elephant garlic compared to 'rounds'?

Now that I've found out how to plant a 'nursery' crop of elephant bulbils which grew me a good amount of 'rounds' for planting, I suppose I'll sell all my cloved heads and use the rounds for planting, since they worked so well.