Check your garlic
Posted: Thu May 13, 2010 3:13 pm
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/
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/