[Image description: a perfectly round peeled bulb of garlic on a cutting board, with unpeeled normal cloves behind it.]

    • thrawn@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      3 months ago

      It might be! That was one of the varieties I planted this year, though the cloves I put in the ground looked like normal shaped cloves, just scaled up a bit.

      • Pheral@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        3 months ago

        I’m actually second-guessing my elephant garlic thought… I planted my first clove this year and it took a month and a half to sprout!!! I thought it had died due to heat, but I finally saw its thumb-sized sprout coming up a couple days ago. My normal garlic only takes a week or so to sprout over here in AZ. The elephant garlic seed leaves look more like an iris or tulip coming up. That one commenter was probably on point, saying the bulb was too young to start segmenting into cloves. That was news to me and I’m over the moon about it! Thank you so much for posting about this in the first place!!!

        • thrawn@lemmy.worldOP
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          3 months ago

          I had the exact same experience with the elephant garlic, they took forever to sprout, long enough that I actually dug one of them up to check that they hadn’t been eaten or something.

  • Dojan@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    edit-2
    4 months ago

    There’s a particular variety of Chinese garlic that grows as a singular bulb. It originates in the Yunnan province, I think. I remember my mother growing it back when I was a child. It’s really nice!

  • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    4 months ago

    That’s not done yet. Garlic looks like this when it hasn’t ‘split’ into the clove parts yet. This will be bland and only have a mild flavor.

      • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        4 months ago

        So you’ve got two modes of reproduction with Allium. Allium like this typically follows a biennial habit, so this years garlic will split into cloves around the fall, in preparation for sending up a flowering stalk next spring/ summer. The cloves are vegetative propagules; just another way to get more garlic other than seeds. Hence you can just plant a clove and get a garlic next year, or, you can plant seed and also get garlic.

        Now for your actually question, I believe the segmentation is probably exogenous, technically yes, however, I am by no means an expert in Allium morphology (although I have done graduate coarse work in plant morph, and worked in a plant morph lab), so don’t quote me. However, it wouldn’t appear like you are describing. Think of the ring at the base of a clove of garlic as a bunch of ‘stems’. The branching would originate there.