Saturday, October 8, 2016

I ordered for my Denver friends Michael Mowry and Amy Cara the Racombole garlic that thrived incredibly for me for 14 years in Denver, but that inspired me to AGAIN to research obsessively on garlics that MIGHT grow here in Tampa where day lengths and temps are SO wrong for garlic. For years me and friends in surrounding cities and in rural areas have tried SO many types of Creoles, Spanish, and Cuban garlics that MIGHT grow here but we all got the same results.....a winter annual with delicious leaves but an utter refusal to make bulbs. Garlic won't even grow at all in the summer here! So I looked on line, wrote down new candidates, looked them up, and ordered them from Filaree Garlic: Mexican Red Silver, Mild French, California Early, and Early Red Italian. $35 plus $12.50 shipping. I think of this as gaining knowledge to share....I am no longer a garden writer but share on FaceBook, a Florida gardening forum on Yahoo I've been a founding member of since 2002, plus my blogs. Each variety will be labelled and in different parts of my yard to avoid a mix up. IF any work here I will know by late next spring IF the foliage yellows and dies back and IF I pull up actual new bulbs from the planted cloves. Today I learned there are MANY types of Racombole.....I will never know if the one they got is the same as my Denver one. My instincts tell me that these four might very well grow in Denver.