C is the correct answer. Before trimming leaves and roots cure for 3-4 weeks as you would a normal divided bulb.

C: (but cure them before trimming. They will stand up to that real well, then plant them back just as if they were single cloves. If you don't get any more than rounds again next year See D below.)

There is a D:

Harvest them, make garlic powder out of them and change to a variety that will bulb up nicely in a single season, assuming you planted cloves in the fall to begin with. No single variety is adapted to everywhere. I am going to cancel out my experiment with Creoles. The two I have now wintered ok, but did not grow robust tops and seem to be very tiny in bulbs, which are developing, but are little more than rounds for all that they are getting a full season of growth. They will come out in the next week and get made into garlic powder ground fresh and then dried. I don't even see the need to cure them or even trim the tops too closely before running them through the coffee mill I am using to do the grinding. In the future I will stick with the varieties that are going gang busters where the Creoles moped.

Thank you! And also I am very curious- has anyone left them in to over winter? What would happen if I just dug them back out next Spring? Summer?

Are you sure they are all rounds? You don't really know until you dig them up. You could try an experiment and leave some of them in and see what happens. My guess is that they will go thru a dormant period until September or so and then sprout and put up much more top growth than is ideal prior to winter leaving them vulnerable to winter kill. But in zone 6b you might not have a harsh winter.

Im wondering, what's so bad about rounds? Less work peeling.

If you leave them in the ground, the rotting tissues around them could attract the interest of onion root maggots, and there goes your crop and now you have a new problem. That said, I have a feral patch of garlic that comes back year after year. It's crowded -- I dig some as "g'allions" in spring -- but the plants are healthy.

Peter, I have wondered what the problem is with rounds as well, since I too prefer a biggger clove and less peeling, but I am assuming they are smaller than a head of garlic and if grown again, will get bigger along with dividing? Someone please correct me if I'm wrong!

bcomplx- to get a feral patch, what are you doing? letting your garlic flower, drop seed? or letting the croms grow into rounds....or what? i would love that.

When I have culls I just throw them up there and some of them take root and grow among the brambles.

The size of rounds frequently depends on the variety but they are seldom any larger than cloves on most of the Porcelains such as Music, or such Orientals as Japanese. Furthermore rounds are only one while full bulbs are multiple cloves for planting back; so you actually get more usable garlic for different purposes with the full bulbs and requiring less space to do so.

It is also my opinion that when cloves from full bulbs revert to rounds the next year, the variety is not well adapted to the conditions. Some of those will adjust and some will not, the later never really producing decent bulbs.

Some hardy types winter over just fine if not dug, quite a few hardnecks will bend over and seed their bulbils into adjacent areas like walking onions. However if not dug, separated and set back into well prepared well fertilized beds at the proper distance all one normally gets are clumps of stems and any actual bulbs will be very small due to crowding and declining soil quality. That works just fine for gallions and probably would indefinitely.

I have a feral that survived on its own in zone 4 without any care for well over two decades before I collected it. The recovery of bulb size is proving to be slower than I had hoped (the originals were tiny), but not so slow as to discard this family heirloom, one that was probably last cultivated by an aunt of my 87 year old mother, an aunt who has been gone now for almost three decades. I had a few bulbs held against needing to do a spring plant, which I didn't need. I shelled out the mostly dried up cloves to make garlic powder and low and behold every second or third bulb yielded a completely plump clove or two. There were also some legitimate rounds in the bottom of the bag, too, that did not seem to be dried out either. Not bad considering they were harvested last August. Completely out of curiosity I intend to plant them next week as I finish my early season planting and set out my sweet potatoes.