this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024
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It is my understanding that trying to raise garlic from grocery store bought cloves are prone to die of disease. Somehow. Half remembering something I read while considering trying to grow garlic in my garden.
Store bought everything is often not really good for home growing.
Trees in industrial agriculture are often spliced (don't know the proper English word) so that the root is a different variety that's stronger than the branch variety that produces the actual e.g. apples. If you plant the seeds, you'll get a weak root.
Also, often enough the varieties you can buy are not really suited for the local climate. Peaches do grow where I live, but store bought peaches won't survive the emotional coldness of a northern German winter.
Grafted apple trees are often a flavorful top connected to a weak root. Weak root = smaller trees that can be planted closer together and are easier to pick. If you plant apple seeds, you will probably get a ginormous tree with fruit only useful for cider making (a la Johnny Appleseed's business model) because they don't taste good either fresh or in baked goods.
I was lucky to get what I assume is a mutant avocado seed. I tried to grow six different seeds, germinated four, and only succeeded in actually planting one. Two didn't germinate, and the other three grew roots but the seedling was malformed and wouldn't grow out of the seed.
The one that survived must have had a mutation that allowed it to survive despite what was otherwise probably an intentional effort to produce sterile seeds.
Usually I hear "grafted," where you take one variety with strong roots, cut the top off of him, take another variety that makes the fruit you want, cut the roots off of him, and then put the good roots on the good fruit and tape them together. I've even seen one root stock grafted to several different species of fruit so the same tree grew apples, pears and pomegranates.
Apples don't breed true; a seeds out of a Gala apple won't grow a tree that makes Gala apples. They might be better, they might be worse, they won't be Galas. All commercial apple production is done by grafting branches of existing trees onto new root stocks.
I am just north of where peaches will properly grow. Doesn't stop people from trying. Every year in early spring there's a late cold snap, and every year people say "It's killin' my peaches." Every single individually wrapped year I hear that from someone.
I mean, peaches do grow pretty far up north, my grandpa had a peach tree in northern Germany and it often had enough peaches to almost kill itself due to their weight.
But those peaches were pretty small, not very sweet and had pretty thick skin. Not ideal, but serviceable.
It's a quirk of our climate here that it'll start getting comfortably warm even in late February into March, and then around late March or early April there will be 36 hours of frost, enough to kill all the blossoms that opened during that false spring. So you get pretty leafy trees that bear no fruit.
I get you peaches, I also just barely survive the emotional coldness of a northern German winter.
Nah, you're probably fine. But you will likely be limited to the Least Delightful Variety of garlic, also known as California Late White, a softneck variety chosen for it's durability, shelf life, and ease of growing.
There are so many other really awesome varieties out there. And garlic is so easy to grow.
counterargument, it's trivial to grow