Garlic and Onions

Garlic and onions were harvested a few weeks back and left in the basement to dry.  They were finally dry enough for me to clean them up and present them neatly!

While sorting out garlic, I came across something that I found very interesting.  Remember when I mentioned in my previous posts that we were on vacation for the better part of garlic growth and didn't trim(and eat) the garlic scapes.  When we had returned the garlic plants were all dried off along with the scapes.  Ok, so this is what I came across as the stalks dried.

If you can't see it with all the dried off stuff, check out what I have here-

Bulbils!  They're the tiniest garlic cloves ever...

 

I googled and found out that these bulbils are another way of growing garlic!  I am so excited to try this.  Although it takes two seasons to get full sized bulbs, I literally have hundreds of seeds here to expand my garlic harvests! 

 

After sorting out the garlic into good, bad and the ugly - I've kept aside the good garlic for replanting, the bad to be used in kitchen and the ugly goes into recycling garden waste.

 

The good garlic - 30 of them

 

The bad -  smaller and damaged to be eaten

 

The ugly - rest of the plant to be tossed into yard waste

 

Now onto the onions.  This year, my onions(as usual) are mostly medium to small.  I have no idea how to grow large onions.  If anyone has any tips let me know. 

 

I've always been intrigued by the pictures of braided onions and this time, while working on the dried stalks, decided to start experimenting with braiding my very own red onions.  I meant to check out Daphne's blog as she had explained sometime back, how to braid onions and garlic, but since I kept going anyways, this is how it turned out. 

 

Not bad, huh?

 

There's all 4 of them!

 

Rest of the smaller onions.