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 Anyone any ideas/ answers please. I dug 2 of my GARLIC bulbs up that i planted in November, well what a waste of my time they are small. They were well looked after & of course plenty of rain.  What am i doing wrong?.

Maybe they just need a bit longer? ???

My garlic is very poor this year compared to last year.

Any number of things have done it: the lack of sun, the rust that has destroyed the foliage and also I reckon because I have not fed it: last year I was watering with Miracle Gro all the time, this year the rain meant I never had to water.

Still, there is always next year.

My garlic is suffering from rust so I dug up a couple to see what's going on. They looked quite good, knobbly in the right places, but when I went to pull off some cloves for cooking I found they hadn't split. Why is that? Will they improve if I leave them in longer?

Harvested my Iberian White yesterday, and was very pleased with the results.
Although they had very bad rust I let them grow until the tops had started to die back and had no green showing on them. Good sized bulbs, slightly larger than most you find in the shops.
Took 2 straight into the kitchen for use this week, and the rest are drying off in the shed.
Especially pleased as it's my first year of growing them!

Any advice on varieties? I saw the excellent American website and have bookmarked it and have ordered elephant garlic to be delivered in September but wondered if people who have grown many varieties have favourites for flavour or yield or resistance to disorders.

Rosebud,
I don't think you're doing anything wrong. Many growers have suffered severe rust this year (yours truly included) and mine are small also. I didn't think it was worth leaving them in any longer as some were rotting, so I've lifted the lot & left them in the GH to dry off.
Best of luck!

Mine have done well this year, sunshine in March then the rain to swell them. No point in leaving them in longer, they need to be lifted by the end of June. The commercial crops on the Isle of Wight have done really well too from one I here - thats where I get my seed cloves from, they do quite a few varieties suited to our climate. http://thegarlicfarm.co.uk/

Thanks, I have bookmarked the Isle of Wight growers site too. I'm still open to hearing about preferences from experimenters here.

my garlic suffered badly from rust but I left them until foliage drooped. To my absolute surprise I do have good bulbs and have already roasted a few. They are gorgeous like this, in the green. It was a variety I bought two years ago called jolimont so I am hoping to re-plant some more cloves. Last year was so comparatively easy

Jolimont is good and keeps well. I like Purple Wight though mine do not get very large. I grew Sprint for the first time this year - the supplier sent me it as a substitute for what I had ordered - and it has done very well, larger bulbs than any other variety I have grown. My garlic always get rust but this does not affect quality, just means they have to be harvested perhaps a couple of weeks early. the rust came a bit later this year for me than usual.

I was late planting my garlic so I'm still waiting for the tops to go brown before I harvest.
Is that the right thing to do?

A couple of questions:

My friend gave me some purple garlic bulbs a few years back and I have been using their cloves  for replanting.  This year they came up WHITE with a few purple stripes.  They are hardnecks.  I have also been growing white garlic (soft neck) from bulbs given me in the same bed. Would they cross?

Also why oh why do all my garlic bulbs never look like "proper" garlic.  I invariably have massive cloves on the outside of the papers.