Hardneck Garlic Varieties: Porcelain, Rocambole and Purple Stripe

Garlic comes in two kinds, and the choice is mostly made by your winter. Hardneck garlic needs a real cold spell to form a bulb, sends up a curling flower stalk called a scape in early summer, and produces a single ring of large, easy-peeling cloves with the richest flavour in the crop. Softneck garlic is the supermarket kind: no scape, more and smaller cloves, a braidable neck, and a storage life of nine months or more against a hardneck's four to six. North of roughly zone 7, hardnecks are the garlic that actually thrives.

These 8 are the hardnecks in the library, in three groups. Porcelains, Music and the German whites, carry four to six enormous cloves and keep longest of the hardnecks; rocamboles, Spanish Roja and Merrifield, are the flavour benchmark and the shortest keepers; Chesnok Red is the purple stripe, the one for roasting. Plant cloves in October or November, pointed end up, four to six inches apart, and mulch. Cut the scapes when they curl once, which sends the plant's effort back into the bulb, and eat them; they are the first harvest of the year. Sorted alphabetically.