Today we are going to talk about growing garlic from garlic bulbils or rounds. We briefly discussed growing garlic bulbils when we had a video about harvesting garlic scapes. Now let’s go a little bit deeper and actually look at the garlic bulbils as they have grown in the garden. As you can see we have a flower at the top of the garlic scape.
So we want to show a live growing version of what these bulbils look like. If you’re interested in greatly expanding the amount of garlic that you have growing, a single scape garlic flower will have many many bulbils in it. The problem with this method however, is that it takes a long time for garlic bulbils to grow into garlic bulbs. So let’s walk through the steps of this process. The first year we are going to allow a scape to go to flower. Then we are going to take the bulbils from the scape after it has flowered out.
This will be hopefully midsummer early July. You’re going to plant them the next fall, at the same time you would normally plant normal garlic. You can plant bulbils fairly close together, because the actual growth that is going to come is relatively small. After the first year you will harvest the plant when the growth begins to die back. When you pull it out, what you will have this first year is what is called a round. It is called a round because that really is the shape. It is almost a perfect little sphere of garlic.
It has not yet actually bulbed up. Depending on the size of the little that you planted, as well as the growing conditions, you may have different sizes of the garlic rounds. If you happen to have a larger around, it might almost be the size of a regular clove of garlic. In most cases, however, your rounds are going to be a little bit smaller. If this is the case, you’ll have to go through an additional year growing that small round and getting what would be a smaller bulb of garlic. Although it will have cloves, it will probably have pretty small little cloves. You will have to plant those small cloves for what is actually a fourth year, and then finally in that fourth year that small clove will turn into a full-size bulb. So that is the process for growing garlic from garlic bulbils.
Check out our video about it here:
