Interested in hardneck and other heirloom garlic types. Have hardy kiwi, flame seedless grape, and a czech grape for cuttings. Also have a little bit of Elephant garlic bulbils and a whole bunch of seeds in my profile list.

First of all it is only tentative that the feral I collected is a rocambole. I was going by one set of scapes that seemed to have multiple curls. That was a guess and probably not a real educated one. Secondly these were very small bulbs; I have been able to size this variety up much better with rich beds and better spacing,but what I was working with are the tiny remnant. Thirdly it is not the bulbs that have kept well. It is only an occasional clove in a bulb where the rest of the cloves have dried out into hard little kernels. These bulbs have been stored at very close to room temperature; so they dry out rather than sprouting. Last year I worked the remnants (generally the smallest bulbs) in early June and found quite a few more plump cloves among the dried up ones, but never a complete bulb with plump cloves. I also planted a bed of them, which did not either scape or actually go dormant last winter, but did scape and bulb up this spring after being left in place, although every clove planted grew almost immediately last summer. I did not see anything special about what they produced this year even with the extra time they had to do so, in fact bulb size was somewhat smaller than the same variety planted from larger cloves in better prepared beds. In the past couple of years this variety has sized up pretty nicely to over an inch and a half, from initial sizes that would not have covered a nickel. I have some bulbils from 2015 that oddly enough look like they may still be good... Right now I have some space; so I think I will put in a stub row to see if they sprout. Other than that I have a decent stock of this feral variety to play with in normal beds for next year, and some baby bulbs that developed from last year's bulbils. Virtually every bulbil planted last fall went directly to tiny scapes and baby bulbs, with quite literally no rounds. BTW the tiny bulbs are very tight and hard to break apart into their cloves which are extremely tiny, but the bigger bulbs come apart much easier and their cloves peel pretty easily. Also even though the dried up cloves seem to be completely desiccated, they apparently are not, because they do not grind up into powder but rather almost a paste, that clumps up, and needs additional drying and regrinding. I air dry, which is way slower than a dehydrator or the oven. I am having a blast playing with this variety.

Peter, I left a few garlic plants alone and let them grow scapes and remain in the ground until all top growth died. I wanted the the bulbils to grow as long as possible. The below ground bulbs looked very similar to the picture above when harvested. I think they were lifted in September. I harvested the "normal" ones in July. I planted some of the "old" cloves for next years crop since they looked to be healthy and of good size. I was surprised at the large size of the cloves since I figured leaving the scape on would yield a smaller bulb. Perhaps if I harvested plants with scapes left uncut when about half the leaves had died back the bulb would have been small...I don't know. But by time everything had died back on the scaped plants, the bulbs and cloves were good size: falling apart, but good sized. But they were not anything I'd want to store. I also did not enjoy cleaning all the soil off ones I wanted to use in the kitchen. Anyway, the subsequent bulbil growing was a fun experiment. As expected, many of the plants yielded small rounds. I was surprised to see some develop into tiny little miniature bulbs with super mini cloves. These minis were very cute, but kinda useless. It was an interesting grow out, but not something I plan to do regularly. So, long story short....that is why I know what bulbs left in the ground far too long look like :)

"My question is, should I now plant cloves from these pitifully small bulbs, hoping that genetics kick in, or will they only produce an inferior crop?" Yes, and yes. The genetics are still there, but it will probably take a couple years - under good conditions - before they regain their previous size. If you still have access to your original source, though, and want good bulbs this year, then you might just want to start fresh with good stock. Most of my garlic varieties were stunted in 2015, due to excessively wet weather, and poor drainage. Some of the soft neck varieties only produced a round, the same size as the clove I planted. Last year I moved them to a better-drained location, and they regained about half of their size... since the cloves were close to normal, I am hopeful that the bulbs will be normal this year.