Growing Garlic from Cloves — Cloning a Bulb Without Seed

Garlic almost never makes usable seed. Instead you plant a single CLOVE — and each clove is a living bud that grows into a complete new bulb of a dozen cloves. Every plant is therefore an exact copy (a clone) of its parent, so saving garlic means simply replanting your best bulbs.

Just before planting, break a bulb apart into its cloves, keeping the papery skin ON each one. Choose the BIGGEST cloves — a bigger clove grows a bigger bulb — and don't damage the flat basal plate at the bottom, which is where the roots come from.

Plant in autumn, a few weeks before the ground freezes, pointed end UP, about 5 cm deep and 15 cm apart, then mulch with straw. Garlic needs the coming winter's cold to trigger it to split into a many-cloved bulb — plant it in spring and you often get one round undivided bulb instead.

In early summer hardneck garlic sends up a curling flower stalk called a SCAPE. Cut it off (and eat it — they're delicious): removing the scape sends the plant's energy down into a bigger bulb instead of into a flower head. Softneck garlic usually makes no scape.

Harvest in mid-summer when the lower leaves have browned but about five or six green leaves remain — each green leaf is a papery wrapper still protecting the bulb. Ease the bulbs out gently with a fork; don't yank or bruise them, and don't wait until all leaves die or the wrappers split.

Hang or lay the whole plants — roots, tops and all — in a warm, airy, shaded spot for 2-4 weeks until the necks are papery dry. This curing is what lets garlic store for months; only after it's cured do you trim the roots and tops (or braid softnecks by their soft stems).

Set aside your very biggest, healthiest bulbs (about a tenth of the crop) as next year's seed stock. Store them cool, dry and airy at room temperature — NEVER the fridge, whose cold and damp make cloves sprout. Replant them next autumn; choosing the best each year slowly adapts the strain to your own garden.

Everything in the seed-saving blueprints is SEXUAL reproduction: two parents' genes shuffle together in a flower, and the seed is a brand-new individual, never quite like either parent — which is the whole point of pollination, isolation and coming-true. Garlic works the completely different way: VEGETATIVE (clonal) propagation. A clove is not a seed — it has no father, no pollination, no genetic mixing. It is just a bud, a piece of the parent plant that grows into a genetically IDENTICAL copy. This has big advantages: it is fast and certain (no waiting two years or dodging cross-pollination), and because every plant is a clone, the variety stays perfectly true forever — a garlic strain kept for a thousand years is still literally the same individual, endlessly copied. But clones have two catches. First, there is no genetic mixing, so the plant cannot adapt through breeding the way seed crops do — the only 'selection' you get is choosing which existing clones to keep (your biggest bulbs). Second, and more serious, any virus or disease inside the parent is copied straight into every clove, so problems accumulate down the generations unless you start with clean, healthy stock. One thing garlic still shares with the biennial root crops, though, is VERNALIZATION: it needs a spell of winter cold to switch from making a single round bulb to splitting into a proper cluster of cloves — which is exactly why you plant it in autumn and let it feel the winter, the same cold trigger that makes a stored carrot bolt. (Hardneck garlic also offers a second clonal route: the tiny aerial bulbils on its scape can be grown on, taking a year or two to reach full size.) Grown this way for over five thousand years across the ancient world, garlic is one of humanity's oldest continuously-cloned crops.