Allotments 4 All

Quote from: squeezyjohn on December 04, 2013, 21:44:10
The recent replies have drawn my attention to the reply to my post from Jeannine.

I must say that I wasn't saying anything against saving your own best garlic cloves from last year to plant out ... it will work fine and give nice consistent results for many years and if your stock don't get a build up of viruses in the tissue then it could potentially be carried on for ever.

But I cannot agree with the quote given from Foley "by saving some of your own bulbs and planting the cloves, they will eventually adapt to your soil conditions as a new strain" ... that statement is just plain wrong, there is no mechanism by which a new strain could ever be created by propagating cloves of garlic, sorry.  And I'm not just making this up as I go along, my masters degree was in genetics.  If you wished to create a new strain of garlic - you would have to save seeds and plant those instead of cloves.

However - I'm all for saving my own garlic bulbs to divide and grow.

Don't be harsh Squeeze... I think Foley was actually meaning to say in laymen's terminology that they will develop a better suited product that suits the conditions within their own strain. (which obviously cant be changed).  It makes sense that anything will acclimatize and adapt it'self to locale conditions.. We're not all BSC....MST... (GENETICS) people and most of us would use the term new strain rather loosely..

But is it not a new strain that has now adapted to locale conditions and instead of growing puny little cloves will now grow huge big ones... a new sub-strain maybe?

Sorry - I didn't mean to sound harsh ... but Caroline Foley's Allotment Handbook is a published allotment book and stating things that plainly aren't true in the literature is exactly how myths get started ... that's all I was getting at.

As for the cloves of garlic adapting to their local conditions over the years through some other mechanism ... I'm afraid I don't think that's true either because it is a clone of it's parent garlic.  So if you plant it the first year, save a clove, and plant the clone the next year - if the growing season and soil is the same then the results will be the same.  I don't believe it can improve. 

Much of the success with garlic that I have had has come through only planting the big cloves and eating the little ones as that gives the plant a better store of energy to get going with when you plant it and it establishes quicker.

Anyway ... I'll stop now ... I could become even more boring on the subject if you can believe that!

You obviously won't change the genetics, but how malleable is the expression of those genes? I'm not sure plants are that programmed.

Quote from: Robert_Brenchley on December 05, 2013, 10:00:23
You obviously won't change the genetics, but how malleable is the expression of those genes? I'm not sure plants are that programmed.

Squeezyjohn,  How many micro-changes (tiny mutations) are happening every season?  Will they be passed down the generations?  Is a garlic clone really ever a 100% clone?

If the expression of the genes can be altered to adapt to a particular circumstance (which is often the case) - then the cells will behave in that way the first time you put a clove of garlic in those conditions.  But the adaptation will not be any different in any following years of planting the same strain.

And Galina ... I don't have the numbers for mutation rates in garlic specifically - but I have read that mutation rates in bulbs are significantly lower than in other types of plant tissue.  Spontaneous mutations will occur in normal cell division at rate varying from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100,000,000 depending on the organism.  A garlic clove is made up of many cells and undoubtedly a few will mutate on division - but basically it would take much longer than a human lifetime for this to show itself in the plants themselves - and other factors such as build up of viruses in the tissue of propagated clones will have a far more noticable effect on the performance of a strain maintained by clove division and re-planting.

So essentially - yes the cloves replanted will be as near to 100% clones of the originally planted garlic as to make no difference to the resulting plant.

Only planted my garlic yesterday, hopefullt then won't rot off

Quote from: Stevens706 on December 09, 2013, 13:26:57
Only planted my garlic yesterday, hopefullt then won't rot off

Garlic is very hardy plants...unless your soil is flooded and standing under water some time, they should be fine.
And you are not late with planting neither!  They'll be fine.......

squeezyjohn, interesting, thank you. I would have said from experience that they 'do' seem to adapt.  Maybe I was adapting to give my garlics better care.   Apart from one new type from the seed circle, all mine are well over a decade old and over time have got better with the exception of last year, which was a problem year in many respects.

If you plant garlic from somewhere like Spain or Israel it wont grow the same here - it will be smaller and take longer to mature due to the different weather conditions that it has been grown in and acclimatized to. I've tried and tested it.

I've got little garlic story to tell...so I'm going to share it with you while we are 'talking' about the subject.
Few years ago I managed to get hold of variety of Finnish garlic. There is only few that is 'listed' as being Finnish so I was very excited to get hold of it. What I got was half a dozen teeny weeny little bulbs...."that's it?!" The kind lady in the 'shop' (organization like HSL) said that they never grow any bigger than that...but she thought that as I'm going to grow them under UK growing conditions...they propably eventually make bigger.
WELL...now that I've grown them few seasons...they are not bigger at all?! They look just like 'ordinary' bulbs but in more minute scale. Peeling them for cooking will take 'some' extra time...BUT boy...do they 'kick a punch'. Good strong taste...

I have tried to selectively pick largest cloves for growing on...but it proves to be challenge..there is no larger cloves..
I have planted another row of them again...this time with even more TLC...with a hope that they would 'bulk up'.
But, perhaps it is not to be done but it is in its DNA to be such a 'big garlic in small clothing'..
I hope next summer I have sufficient amount of bulbs/cloves to share if anybody fells like taking on new 'pet'...

Edit to add (and to keep it on original subject..) ...hmm...for being such small bulbs...I wonder how they do if grown in containers.....(...and she will disappear to rummage in GH for those few scrappy little cloves that was left over from planting....and where is that terracotta pot again...?...)

Just planted my garlic started in pots. Roots were coiled but I didn't loosen or cut them. Protected them from rabbits/pigeons as they seem to like to nibble the shoots. Looking forward to seeing the results.