I have been growing garlic from the same batch for several years now, but this year has thrown me for a loop. I planted the cloves last August (a bit early but our August last year was pretty mild) and harvested the scapes about 3 weeks ago. Leaves have been dying off now for a bit and the bottom two sets of leaves seem to be brown, and about 50% of the plant is dying off. So it's time to harvest but the big bulbs don't have cloves, just layers and layers of leaf base. Am I harvesting too early or is/was it another issue? I watered fairly well, but didn't fertilize much.

garlic does not require much water so i seldom every water it unless we don't have rain for 3+ weeks which is almost impossible here.

lack of any fertilization, i don't know. neither garlic or onions really require must fertilizing. they do require good rich soil, i add bone meal for both and blood meal for the garlic. after that they get 2 or 3 sprays of neptune's harvest and nothing else.

when do you normally plant the cloves? here it is mid oct to mid nov, most of ct is zone 6 but i'm in 5b, i plant about the last week of oct to week 1 of nov. what state are you in? when is your ground starting to freeze. even early september seems way too early and august is just out of the question. when do you normally plant the cloves?

tom

I was out looking around in the field yesterday and saw a couple plants that were dieing down so I dug them up to find the same thing you probably did...just a plant with some roots but no bulb. I don't know why this happens, some sort of genetic flaw in that clove is what I'm thinking. That really shouldn't happen since each clove is an exact replica geneticly of the plant it came from and from the plant that one came from.

Out of 15,000 plants I might get 10-15 of these that don't form a bulb. look up fertilizer requirments for garlic, you might be surprised.