Why Buy Garlic Cloves?

Grey Duck Garlic is unique in that we offer our customers presorted large and medium organic garlic cloves. Garlic cloves are a great way for growers to save time and money while receiving a quality product.

Seven reasons Grey Duck Garlic presorted garlic cloves are a good deal:

1)  You receive only premium planting size seed cloves that will produce larger garlic bulbs (your choice of medium or large cloves).

Picture: Uniform Romanian Red cloves will produce nice large bulbs.

Size of clove makes a huge difference. Susan has done several field trials and larger cloves consistently produce much larger garlic. If your market depends on premium size bulbs plant large cloves only. We have dramatically increased the diameter and weight of our planting stock by only planting the largest cloves each year. It takes the same amount of time to weed and harvest a small garlic as a large one.

2)  You will not have to clove and sort the garlic which will save you time and the cost of labor.

You receive only healthy, plump, ready to plant cloves. We carefully inspect the cloves before we send them out to you. This saves you the time and trouble of popping bulbs, inspecting cloves and sorting cloves.

3)  You will save money since there will be zero waste. 

Cloves have no waste. Garlic bulbs usually have about 5-11% waste depending on the garlic variety; plus you will usually have some cloves that are too small to plant (some garlic has more small cloves than others; this really depends on the garlic variety). 

4)  Uniform cloves will give you a more uniform crop.

This is important if you are reselling your crop. Restaurants, in particular, often appreciate a uniform or graded crop.

Picture: Uniform garlic plants grown from cloves sorted by size.

5) Garlic harvest time depends on size of garlic.

Larger garlic takes longer to mature than smaller garlic. When you plant uniform cloves all garlic can be harvested on the same date.

We really notice this when we are selecting for a new (to us) garlic variety. Harvest can be very variable since we plant all the cloves.

6) Shipping is less on cloves than bulbs since more cloves can fit into a box.

When you buy presorted cloves they are ready to put in the ground the day they arrive. If you aren't ready to plant when they arrive don't panic. Cloves can be stored in a cool area for several weeks before planting.

Make sure to specify when you will be planting when you order so we can ship your garlic at the right time for you.

7) Some of the cloves are gorgeous!