How to Propagate Garlic from Bulbils

Propagating garlic is very straightforward. Where I get hung up usually has to do with deciding how many cloves to spare from the kitchen knife to plant back out.

And I love these tasty flavor bombs, so it’s a battle between the taste buds of the present and future.

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Sure, every year the number of cloves you end up with increases, but it’s not by a lot, and it can take a long time to significantly increase your planting stock without buying more seed garlic.

That’s where the bulbils come in. Leave a few scapes alone and you’ll end up with ten to 100 tiny aerial cloves from each one to plant in your garden in the fall.

How does this type of propagation work and where do you start?

Read on to find out!

This is what we’ll cover:

You know those delicious scapes that sprout from your hardneck garlic each spring?

If you leave them be, rather than cutting them to use in pesto or stir fries, each one will eventually produce an umbelliferous bloom. In the late summer and early fall, the scapes will produce mini cloves known as bulbils.

These little guys can be collected and either eaten – although it’d take a lot of the rice-grain-to-pea-sized bulbs to flavor a given dish – or planted out like seed garlic.

Bulbils, or bulblets, are not seeds produced via sexual reproduction. Scapes are not true flowers, and their reproductive parts only form partially – so they aren’t viable, and there’s no cross-pollination involved here.

Each one is a clone of the parent that offers a different way for the plant to vegetatively propagate, as is dividing your bulb harvest into cloves