Channeling Sophie's Garden

Carol's garden is in Port Hope MI, in a rural, lakeside community. She has lots of space and expertise. Laura' garden is located in Centralia WA, in a small suburban yard challenged by access to sun and space. Debbie's garden is in Deckerville MI, in a smaller rural yard, where rules are ignored.

Each of us is applying what we learned at at our mother's and grandmother's knees in space once owned by Sophie Mayer Birg Harter on Rangeline Road. Sophie immigrated to Detroit in 1908 from Heufeld, a once German (Donauschwaben) community of Hungary. Her hope lives on.

Monday, June 27, 2011

First garlic harvest - purple Belarus

We pulled our first batch of garlic this week - the Belarus. We've tied and hung them to cure (dry).

Measuring bulb size, the bulbs with cut scapes are clearly larger. The bulbs where the scapes remain, are smaller. So my husband begs the question - some sources say to always keep the larger bulbs for planting, but the direction we are using this year is to keep the scapes on seed cloves until cured, which result in smaller cloves. 

What I haven't found a good explanation of what keeping the scapes on do to enhance the seed cloves.

I've seen many posts advocating for keeping the scapes but not one that does a technical job of explaining why. I"d like to know. Help me out if you have the answer.
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2 comments:

  1. CLYJuly 2, 2011 at 5:14 AM

    I have never saved the scapes for seed, we always just separate a few bulbs but am leaving a few on the wild garlic. Looks like I will be pulling our soon.

    ReplyDelete
  2. LRJuly 2, 2011 at 6:24 AM

    We will be pulling more this weekend, but not all of it is ready yet. Promising batch. :)

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