second try

Recently I cleaned up the remnants of 2017 harvest, mainly a few very old and very dried out and very tiny bulbs. The dried out cloves I ground into what seems like a very weak garlic powder, but there were some cloves still plump even after almost a year and a half. I set those aside, generally only a clove or two a bulb at the most. Most bulbs had none.

One of them fell onto the dirt in a pot of amaryllis, where it sprouted.

Several others have also sprouted. I didn't think that was possible, not after so long. These were mixed hardnecks, most likely rocomboles and purple stripes. Granted that they were only a tiny fraction of the whole set of cloves, but I didn't expect to see any of them. I store at room temperature right in a coolish corner of my kitchen mostly in paper lunch bags. It might just be possible to hold out a number of bulbs of special favorites against some total crop failure and have something to plant back after skipping a year.