shame you didn't save them to plant - might have been good to see if the resulting bulbs retained the keeping quality.

That would be strange if it were a Rocambole. I'm lucky for the Rocs to last into November but to be honest I have never tried to take them any further. I use the Rocs first and any left over after selecting for seed gets dehydrated for powder in late October or early November. I've already done one batch of garlic chips from 8-10 bulbs that either had split wrappers or some other flaw that would compromise storage. I use a cheapo Nesco dehydrator and put the sliced garlic on the plastic pans that are used for making fruit leather. Set temp to 135d and it takes about 10-12 hours. Stir them up about 1/2 way thru or the slices tend to get hopelessly stuck to the pans. The garlic aroma during drying is heavenly!

I have next week off on vacation (stacation I call it since I am not going anywhere), and one thing on my to do list is going thru my garlic and selecting my seed stock for fall planting.

First of all it is only tentative that the feral I collected is a rocambole. I was going by one set of scapes that seemed to have multiple curls. That was a guess and probably not a real educated one.

Secondly these were very small bulbs; I have been able to size this variety up much better with rich beds and better spacing,but what I was working with are the tiny remnant.

Thirdly it is not the bulbs that have kept well. It is only an occasional clove in a bulb where the rest of the cloves have dried out into hard little kernels. These bulbs have been stored at very close to room temperature; so they dry out rather than sprouting.

Last year I worked the remnants (generally the smallest bulbs) in early June and found quite a few more plump cloves among the dried up ones, but never a complete bulb with plump cloves. I also planted a bed of them, which did not either scape or actually go dormant last winter, but did scape and bulb up this spring after being left in place, although every clove planted grew almost immediately last summer. I did not see anything special about what they produced this year even with the extra time they had to do so, in fact bulb size was somewhat smaller than the same variety planted from larger cloves in better prepared beds. In the past couple of years this variety has sized up pretty nicely to over an inch and a half, from initial sizes that would not have covered a nickel.

I have some bulbils from 2015 that oddly enough look like they may still be good... Right now I have some space; so I think I will put in a stub row to see if they sprout. Other than that I have a decent stock of this feral variety to play with in normal beds for next year, and some baby bulbs that developed from last year's bulbils. Virtually every bulbil planted last fall went directly to tiny scapes and baby bulbs, with quite literally no rounds.

BTW the tiny bulbs are very tight and hard to break apart into their cloves which are extremely tiny, but the bigger bulbs come apart much easier and their cloves peel pretty easily. Also even though the dried up cloves seem to be completely desiccated, they apparently are not, because they do not grind up into powder but rather almost a paste, that clumps up, and needs additional drying and regrinding. I air dry, which is way slower than a dehydrator or the oven.

I am having a blast playing with this variety.