by Leslie Cox; Monday, July 25, 2016

Okay…I am finally back to wrap up the info about botrytis neck rot attacking our garlic. Have been kept from the computer for a few days. Watering and weeding chores blossomed with the return of our hot weather.

And then John commandeered me as plumber’s assistant on the latest garden project…with neither of us being qualified plumbers. It has been challenging but more on that later…

In my last blog entry, I had left off at the botrytis spores floating around in the garden and the insects chewing on our garlic at soil level. Sure nice of those little pests to make convenient openings in the neck of the garlic for the spores to take root.

Not!

Botrytis neck rot ruins your garlic. Once it gets a leg hold, the spores multiply to form a white, fluffy mold which eventually works its way downward to envelop the entire bulb. So, if you do not catch it soon enough, the garlic bulb is nothing but soft mush. Only suitable for the garbage after nurturing it along for the last ten months.

However, if you can catch the botrytis rot in the early stages, the garlic should be salvageable.

We had a couple of garlic bulbs that were suspicious looking for botrytis rot infection but still seemed firm enough. To make sure, I peeled the outer layers off to better expose the individual cloves. Only found a little bit of white mold on the final layers of skin encasing the cloves, so I decided to keep them for cooking.

I rubbed the mold off as best I could and set those cloves aside for immediate use. But I do recommend you use those cloves fairly quickly. Luckily, that is never a problem in this house!!

Also very lucky our whole garlic harvest was not damaged by botrytis neck rot. Only had a few bulbs destroyed.

But what about using this garlic as stock for next year’s crop? Is it safe or will it promote further botrytis neck rot infestation in our garden? That is definitely a worry since we will be planting our garlic in another bed in the garden come September.

References say yes to using your garlic for stock but recommend either dipping each clove in hot water heated to 46 degrees C (115 deg F)…no hotter…or dipping them into a ten percent bleach solution.

The hot water treatment would be tricky, I think. It would be so easy to damage the germinating mechanism in the clove by doing this.

I contacted a friend who is “more up” on this particular garlic problem. Her reply was to go ahead and use the garlic for stock…but to be sure to check each clove over carefully for any signs of mold.

Chances are, we all have botrytis spores in our soil. It is something that “just is” in nature as there are many, many species of this disease running rampant worldwide.

The catalysts are the insect drilling into the garlic to open up a hole, and/or dampness softening the leaf tissues at soil level because of wet weather or over-watering. And voilá…Botrytis Neck Rot.

So thanks to the heat wave in April which promoted higher insect populations and then the damp weather in May, some of our garlic got hit with the disease.

But thankfully, like I said, it was only a few bulbs.

And also thankfully, we did not get garlic rust. I have heard from a few readers of my Duchess of Dirt gardening column in the Comox Valley Record newspaper that their garlic had this disease.

Garlic, or allium, rust is identifiable by the little rusty-orange coloured spots appearing on leaves of plants in the allium family…garlic, leeks, wild onions, etc.

Our cool, wet weather in May presented ideal conditions for the spores of this disease to get active. They settle on allium leaves which have been wet for a minimum of four hours. Hard to protect the leaves from rain unless you cover them but using drip irrigation would sure help prevent infection.

The good news is: this disease seems to be entirely restricted to the leaves. Not the bulbs. This makes the garlic cloves safe for using as stock for next year’s crop.

Just be sure to mark “garlic sowing” in your calendar under September’s chores.