Planting Martin's garlic bulbils

I've gone slightly crazy since i first started learning about garlic.  I've found a variety called Martin's Heirloom Garlic, and it seems pretty exciting.  The bulbs are some of the largest ones, and the bulbils themselves are the largest i've seen.

How do bulbils work?
A bulbil is kind of like a seed for garlic.  It's not true seed, I might talk about true seeds later as I try to get garlic to grow some, it's a cumbersome process but will allow me to "breed" my own personal garlic type.  But bulbils are exact copies of the parent, so they will grow to be the same basic garlic bulb.  The only difference between cloves and bulbils is that bulbils can take 3 years to grow properly.  Well this is year one :).  Martin's are said to only require 2 years to grow, so that's exciting.

Here's a picture of some of the bulbils I got in the mail today (planting tomorrow)

They're like large corn kernels.  Very nice, i'm excited to see how they do, and I'll keep you guys up to date.

Why would you want to grow from bulbils?
If bulbils take 2 or 3  years to grow, and cloves only take 1 year, why would you want to do bulbils?  From most hard neck garlic you get anywhere from 4 to sometimes as many as 12 cloves.  On the other hand, if you let them go to "seed" and grow bulbils, you can get the same 4 to 12 cloves (though depending on the type they'll be smaller) and you also can get 15, 30, or sometimes as much as 100 bulbils.  Honestly though, to me the main reason to do bulbils is because they're way way cheaper to start :), and that's a great way to start into something you're not yet sure you'll be good at.

I'll add another picture when I get them planted, and hopefully a few throughout the season as they grow, and definitely pictures at the end of the season to show what the harvest is like :).


UPDATE Saturday Dec 1, 2012

I got them planted, they took up almost 4ft x 4ft.  I planted several bulbils inside under my grow lights, these will take the place of any that may die in the ground this year.  If all of them make it :) then i guess i'll take room from somewhere else :).

Here's some pictures of the finished product.

This is where my peas were last year, we'll be planting them in the rows this year that my wife is planning on working in.  Note the "tool" that i'm using here.  It's a dowel that I have measured out nicely to help with planting plants that need 8in, 2in, or 16in spacing.  It also happens to be the right size to fit martin's bulbils in.  I found it much easier to poke all the holes at once rather than one at a time.

I'll take more pictures as the garlic grows.

New pictures :).  These are the ones I planted in doors.  Here's the data:

11-30-12: Planted 36 Martin's Garlic indoors

12-10-12 (10 days): First martin sprouted

12-12-12 (12 days): 2nd and 3rd sprouted

12-14-12 (14 days): 4th and 5th sprouted.

Here are pictures as of 12-14-12:

A little blurry, these are #2 on the
left, and #1 on the right.

About 2 or so inches tall

They're doing pretty good so far, we'll see how it goes.