You mentioned that you think maybe you planted them too early. I don't know when is a typical time for planting for your zone but I am in zone 7a and I don't plant my garlics until late October/early November. What I have read is that if garlics are planted too early there will be too much top growth before winter and this top growth will be killed or damaged by freezing temperature or heavy frost. As result the growth next spring will be slowed or smaller.

I'm scratching my head, too. Last year my onions were rather small but the garlic (rocambole) and shallot harvests were great. Planted this years' garlic LATE last fall by my standards, about the 20th of Oct. but normally I try to get it in by Oct. 1 or the week before. Anyway, this year the onions were super and large but my garlic looks like your garlic and my shallots are puny, too. Go figure...
hortster

I'm not sure what happened to your garlic but one variety of mine was small and one is doing very well. (Could be the quality - I bought from Ebay for the smaller and used my own stock for the larger). I do notice that my onions are doing very well and last year - not so good. Best of luck!

This fall I'm definitely not planting until October or maybe even November. I live in zone 8b, so September was probably too early. I was just so EAGER to get those things started, you know? But that probably didn't help when we got that unusually hard freeze.

I haven't dug up the shallots yet. I should probably do that soon. Some of them died too, but some of them look like they made it, at least above ground. I also got some yellow potato onions from the same Gardenwebber who sent me the garlic, and none of them made it. :-(

The I'itois onions from Native Seeds/SEARCH did great again, though.

I am reading the book Growing Great Garlic at the moment and he says that the smaller heads store better than the outsize ones. (silver lining?)

You don't store the outsize heads (makes big sound bad which is NOT true) you use those for seed and use the smaller (but not wee, you give those away) ones for food.

And, yes, I have noticed that the medium ones do store longer than larger ones, but no one should try for small.