TZ -OH6
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Location: Mid Ohio

Check your garlic

It seems like just over night virus symptoms showed up in my garlic patch. Sometimes this change is associated with a few days of cloudy weather that causes the plant to darken up (same thing happened with a virused potato last year). It was hard to find much information on garlic viruses even though they are common. Last year nearly my whole "crop" was infected (generic seed garlic from Lowes) and this year it looks like the cloves from one bulb were infected (seven plants). This garlic was from an online order. I hate to imagine what percentage of grocery store garlic is infected, so I won't try to grow any of that.


Anyway, the infected garlics (yellow stripes and checkering on the leaves) are the ones to pull up early to eat for spring garlic. Rogue them out so aphids etc can't pass on the disease to other plants. Mine will go into spaghetti sauce tonight.


Supposedly soaking and stripping cloves before planting helps reduce virus (from mites), but I think I'll simply plant all of the cloves from a given bulb one after the other so the infected ones will all be in the same spot. This year I separated the cloves from all of the bulbs and grouped them by size, and so I had to hunt through the whole patch to find all of the infected plants.


pics of symptoms

https://pmo.umext.maine.edu/ipddl/ClinicImages/Garlic/GarlicPOTYVirusPositiveImages.htm

more info

https://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/PMG/r584101311.html


At bottom of blog

https://toads.wordpress.com/2009/05/

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Ozark Lady
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Location: NW Arkansas, USA zone 7A elevation 1561 feet

Wow, that is some odd looking garlic.

I am glad that I only planted a bit here and there, so all the garlic is separated, by which bed they are in. I would plant what I had, and run out, so plant something else to finish the bed. So, when I got more garlic, it always had to go into a new bed!

They were talking about virus free garlic being from tips? Do they mean by letting them go to seed, and planting the seeds?

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BrianSkilton
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Location: South Dakota

Just took a closer look and I believe my garlic is infected. I have picture I may post later. So, I guess the question is, leave them and see what happens or take them out? Could this spread to other plants? Thanks...

TZ -OH6
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Its only a problem if you are saving next year's seed cloves. If it did infect anything else it would be onion family plants, and so you would want to weed out (I.e. eat) any shallots, walking onions etc with symptoms and only replant clean ones. I couldn't find the link, but one person made sure to process his seed garlic first so that he didn't get diseases off of the knife from cutting roots and leaves off of eating garlic. He/she also didn't wash the seed garlic in a bucket because of nematode transfer.


I'm not sure how they would get clean tissue from grass-like plants because the zone of cell division is at the base. Plants with tip growth, like potatoes, can sometimes produce new tissue faster than the virons can migrate through the tissue. I guess maybe the tips of the scapes where the bulbils are forming might be the place, or root tips. That is why it is so important to get sexually reproducing (true seed producing) lines going again, to mix some disease resistance in. True seed is very rare in garlic.

sixshooter
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Posts: 110
Joined: Sat Aug 02, 2008 2:00 pm
Location: Davison Mi

bad photo quality, but is that what I have happening here?

[img]https://i303.photobucket.com/albums/nn133/ThirdEyeVision_photos/downsized_0517001729.jpg[/img][/list]

TZ -OH6
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Location: Mid Ohio

It's hard to tell from the picture but it looks like the one plant has a "rough green" look which could be from light green checkering in with the darker green. If that is the case I would say yes something is not right with that plant, and you should be on the look out for the same symptoms on plants from the same bulb. Symptoms should get worse with age, but again, if you are not plannng on saving garlic for replanting there is no hurry to pull the infected plants.

sixshooter
Senior Member
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Joined: Sat Aug 02, 2008 2:00 pm
Location: Davison Mi

it doesnt look stripey, so if I'm just growing to harvest, then thy should be okay? theyre not loike rotting in the ground or anythinhg are they? I guess ill have to wait a couple months to find out.

TZ -OH6
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Posts: 2097
Joined: Fri Jul 25, 2008 7:27 pm
Location: Mid Ohio

It doesn't have to be stripey. The term is 'mosaic' and can range from checkeboard-like to longer stripes. The virus doesn't rot anything, just lowers the efficiency of the leaves so the bulbs/cloves won't be as big as in a healthy plant. There are different levels of "Viral Load" which build up over time from replanting virused cloves year after year. Same thing with potatoes.



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