 Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Julie Garden Robinson and I'm your host for today's Field to Fork webinar. This is brought to you by North Dakota State University Extension. This is actually the ninth year we've done the series and we're really glad you've been joining us. Maybe this is your first time or maybe you've been to all of the webinars so far. We have archived all of the webinars from previous years and the link is on our Field to Fork webinar page. And I want to give a special welcome to our watch parties. Welcome, everyone. We also are providing a certificate of attendance on our website and it is posted with the recording, which will come out in a couple days. The next slide shows the upcoming webinars. You can take a look. We hope you join us for these as well. The next slide shows the webinar controls and because of our large number of participants, we invite you to post your questions and comments in the chat. Let's practice finding and using the chat box. Some of you already did. You can ignore the Q&A box. We're not going to use that. We're going to have you put your questions for Harleen in the chat box. So type your city and state where you are right now. The next slide provides an acknowledgement. So as you work on putting your city and state in, I have a special request. This program is sponsored in part with grant funding from the USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service through the North Dakota Department of Agriculture, actually, and I will ask all of you to complete the short online survey that will be emailed right after today's webinar. And as a thank you, we are continuing to provide prizes to the lucky winners of the random drawings. So be sure to include your complete address. And by the way, you will need to scroll down to today's date and speaker's name because we're combining our data from 2023 and 2024. So the 2023 dates are listed first, so scroll down a little bit and click on that button that corresponds to the 2024 date. And with that, our next slide is a welcome to today's webinar and our speaker. I'd like to tell you a little bit about Dr. Harleen Hatterman Valenti. She was born in Northeast Nebraska and raised on a crop and animal farm. She came to NDSU in 2000 as an assistant professor in the High Value Crops Project. So she has spent more time in North Dakota than Nebraska. She has conducted research on approximately 20 different crops, but allium crops have been most predominant during her 23 plus years at NDSU. And I have a beautiful blooming bulb behind me right now that's quite fragrant. So I'm looking forward to spring and some of the bulbs that pop up. So welcome, Harleen. And you can take it away. Okay, so that is wonderful. So today, the topic is how to grow garlic and other alliums. And I only have about 45 minutes. So I'm not going to touch on a lot of alliums because there are way too many that it would take days to go and discuss them all. But so today, I'm just going to talk about three of them, garlic, dry bulb onions and leeks. And those are the big three that we can really grow quite well here in North Dakota. So with that, I'm going to start with a little bit about garlic. Well, first, I'll just talk about the genus allium. It is one of the largest flowering plant groups in the amaryllis family. And that's what Julie was talking about. She probably has an amaryllis. That is what its common name is, bulb flowering right now. The family name is actually amaryllidaceae. And this consists of hundreds of wild and cultivated scented bulbous herbs. And the three that I have talked about are well known. There's also a lot of chives, for example, is another one. But there's even herbaceous ornamentals that grow quite well in North Dakota that Chinese garlic, for one an ornamental onion that grow quite well and prolifically as herbaceous ornamentals. But today, we're going to talk about more of the culinary ones. And to start with, garlic, you know, it can be used for a whole bunch of different things. I have a graduate student that is looking at the cultivars. And some of the information that I'm going to provide is from his trial to give you an idea of which cultivars do better in North Dakota than other places. But I also have a graduate student that is looking at alliums for their health attributes. We know garlic has a lot of health attributes. And I'll talk about that in a little bit. But she's looking at how some of these other alliums, leaps, green onions, dry bulb onions, and boy, now I lost my thought on the third one. It'll come to me probably when I get to the end. But she's looking at more of the health attributes. And that's because a lot of these alliums have these bioactive components. In garlic, it's allicin and allulin. And actually, allulin is the precursor to allicin. So most of the health attributes has to do with the sulfur compound of allicin, which is the most predominant in garlic. But garlic also has G glutamilis thycysteine, sorry, the mouthful, and polyphenolix. And we've been looking in collaboration with Dr. Kalita Shetty on just the health benefits of the polyphenolix with type two diabetes. So Sidra's whole research is looking at the four alliums for that. As far as the amount of production of garlic, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Association has estimated that on an annual basis, there's about 11 million tons of garlic produced. And that's just on 2.5 million acres. That's worldwide. That isn't the United States. Actually, in the United States, we import a lot of our garlic. And that's because of the uses and effectiveness of it treating many different cancers and diseases. And so the consumption has increased faster than actually the production has increased. So in the United States, especially, we're really importing quite a bit of, I forgot to start up my little thing. I'll look at time, make sure I don't run over. Importing much of the garlic. So now let's go in a little bit and get started on the production and management. Garlic grows best in a well-drained sandy clay loam soil. So a little bit heavier soil. And actually, we have a study where we're trying to see how these cultivars compare at our horticulture research site, which is more of a sandy loam and comparison to on campus here, where we're in the Red River Valley. We have a clay soil. And so we're testing that. We plant those last fall and we'll hopefully have some results come this kind of late July period when we harvest. Soil pH is best around 6 to 6.8. But I know we have a little bit higher pH out at the horticulture research farm. It's more of a 7.2, maybe 7.4. And we haven't had any problems with that. So one nice thing about garlic is it's a very adaptable plant in most cases. As far as nutrition, you know, we want to overall apply between 70 and 125 pounds of nitrogen, 150 pounds of phosphorus, and excuse me, about 100 pounds of potassium. Now that will depend on your soil tests and what previous crop you had. But it's also important that we don't put all that nitrogen down at one time. We really want to spoon feed the nitrogen. And so that should be split into approximately 25 pounds before planting and then side dress around 20 pounds every three weeks. And then we want to make sure we stop four to six weeks before harvest because we really want that plant not to keep trying to grow and produce. It has to, you know, it's a rather long season the way it is. We need that dry down. We have to go and cure those bulbs and it also helps if you shut that off so that you don't it in the preservation. Otherwise your bulbs will deteriorate quicker if we keep on fertilizing right to the end. As far as irrigation, I think drip irrigation works the best. With drip irrigation, you can avoid some of those leaf diseases that all alliums can get. And with drip irrigation, then it's easy enough to put on about an inch a week if it's getting towards the end and the plants are bigger. You might need to go and put two inches a week when that's some of those hot days, especially like last year. We had June weather, no July weather was in June, so it was really, really hot. We had a number of hundred degree days and alliums in general do not really like those hot days. So it's best that we do whatever we can to go and help them through those kind of periods. Now there are three different types of garlic. You have your elephant garlic, soft net garlic, and hard net garlic. We in the northern part do best with hard net cultivars. There's also then subgroups, but hard net by far are the only ones that we grow in North Dakota. So when do we get started? Well, we're past that time already. We needed to do that this last fall approximately six to eight weeks before that ground freezes. And we actually have another study where we're looking at what is the optimum time because there hasn't been any research on that for garlic. And so I'd rather have us do some trial and error and figure out when's the best time to have to go and transplant your cloves of garlic than to have someone else go in and trial around and find out that through more error than anything else. Spacing, your rose spacing should be anywhere from 12 to 36 inches or one to three feet. And then between the cloves, you want somewhere between three and six inches. They kind of like to be kind of close together, but you need to go and give them enough room so that they aren't pushing against each other and deforming each other. So depth is three to four inches deep. And so you see the picture and in which they've just kind of marked out the row, then they'll go and cover that with soil. You can do that or you can go and just actually, if you have a well tilled soil, you can probably just push them down to that depth. Another way of looking at it is that the top of the clove has to be twice the depth of the clove height. So if your clove was about one and a half inches tall, then you want three inches above that tip of that clove. Of course, we need to mulch in this climate that we have. Actually, one time I was growing some and I thought, well, the previous year, generally, we have plenty of snow and I said, oh, they'll be fine. I won't have to go and get some straw and mulch them. And sure enough, that was the fall that we had the really cold weather before we got the insulation from the snow. And so the following spring, most of them did not emerge. In fact, they just because of that cold injury, they just rotted in the soil. So you want four to six inches of straw. And the nice thing about that is, you know, having that straw through the winter, protecting it, you can then leave it there and it provides weed control, not allowing a lot of those annual weeds to get enough sunlight to go and germinate. So it provides weed control as well. And that is always a good thing because there's not a lot of easy ways to go and for weed control. Usually it's by hand weeding. The roots are rather shallow and you really don't want to go and disturb the roots. So mainly it's been hand weeding for especially for a homeowner. I think if we were to have a big commercial grower, then they would have put down their pre-emergence herbicide way before the garlic or the weeds emerged. So let's go on, okay, more on the production and management. So garlic will flower and that flowering stem is called escape. And that must be removed because if you don't remove that and you allow the garlic to flower, then it's taking away nutrition from that bulb and those cloves and putting it towards that flower stock and that flower. So you remove the scapes and they can be consumed or if you have a farmers market you can sell them. You can make them into a whole bunch of different things. I'm sure Julie has all kinds of recipes for scapes. Anything from a pesto to just a pan frying them can be done. And so when you do that, then the next sequence of what happens is it's time to go and harvest. And you're going to go and harvest them when there's about six brown leaves or 60% of those leaves turn brown, I should say. Unlike, well, they do like onions. They'll actually that stem will kink over. But you generally want to do that before you don't want to wait that long because then that plant is also over mature and especially if you're going to go and try to utilize any of those cloves to plant the following year or if you want some long storage, they're going to have poor quality. So when 60% of the leaves turn brown, you can either go and try to pull and twist. But I really think the best thing is to have like the picture shows have some kind of a fork or shovel or something to help dig those because I have gone and thought I could just pull them out and no, I'm missing part of the bulb. So I just try to I use a shovel and help to help dig them up. Well, after that, just like other alliums that you want to maybe store or even if you were going to use them shortly, you need to do some curing. And it's best if you avoid trying to cure these outside in full sun because a lot of times you can have problems with sunscald on those. So indoor at a temperature of around 75 80 degrees Fahrenheit. And you can see as a picture, they have them in these little netted bags so that they can have some air circulation. And then, well, actually, after one to two weeks, then you cut off the stems and you can then continue to store them this way. And if you do in those kind of situations, then they'll be able to go and be stored for one to two weeks. If you want longer storage, you need to have them at a refrigerated temperature with relatively low relative humidity. And then you can go and store them. If you're a lot of garlic growers will go and use their own clothes for next for the planting in the fall. And if you're going to do that, you have to make sure that you store those clothes that you're going to use for your seed at around 50 degrees Fahrenheit with that relatively low relative humidity. If you don't, if you go at temperatures less than 50, that hastens the breaking of dormancy. So you're going to end up maybe having a longer shoot. And it's really going, I mean, you don't want that shoot really above ground in the fall. So you're trying to plant it so that it gets a start, but you don't want it above ground. And it's going to be difficult to do that when if it breaks dormancy early. Likewise, if you go and store them at a much warmer temperature greater than 65, that actually will go and delay the sprouting. And that's going to also throw things out of whack because you really want to have those come up in the spring because they don't do really well in really hot, hot temperatures. And so if you have that earlier emergence in the spring, they'll get mature and you won't have to worry about that. See on my time. Okay. So now I'm going to just talk a little bit about some of the cultivar or the cultivar trial that Stephen is doing. And so he's looked at these 29 cultivars. And you'll see that some of them say 2021 and have the same name. And that's because we're actually using the seed, seed, I guess the cloves that we planted in 2021, seeing if there are certain cultivars that do better, that are more adapted to our environmental conditions that would work better for someone who, who is trying to go and use their own seed and continue to use their own seed or maybe sell garlic. And so that's why those say 2021. As far as then results. So this is the results that Stephen got from 2023. And he at initially he was looking at the number of leaves that are produced because more leaf production just means there's more photosynthesates that go into that bulb. So help that bulb get larger. And of course, that's what we want. And when you look at this, this is 30 and 45 days after they merged from the soil. And we see here that, you know, we have a number of them that are doing well. Both they are producing around six leaves at 30 days. And at 45 days, they're right up around nine days. One in particular went from only producing about five leaves at 30 days and really shot up the leaf production that was Yukon Ukrainian red. And by 45 days, it was up to nine leaves. When we looked at then 60 and 80 days after emergence, the order hasn't really changed too much. There was, you know, they really didn't go and do a lot more growth, except for like Ukrainian red, it did quite well in that it can, you know, continue to produce some leaves so that by 60 days, it was at 11 and just a little bit higher at 80 days in comparison to a lot of these others that stayed around that nine area. Another one that was the Deerfield Purple 2021 cloves and it again jumped up from having around nine to right up there to 10, 10 and a half leaves. So there was then a number of these that just, you know, they, after 45 days, they really didn't change much in their leaf production. Oops, there we go. As far as average scape length, what we were seeing is that, you know, the ones that were producing more scapes or longer scapes generally are more adapted to the environmental conditions that we have here in North Dakota. Our best was Dakota White, but statistically, because these other letters also have an, or these other cultivars also have an A associated with them, there was no statistical differences in the average scape length for those cultivars. When we look at average scape weight, again, we had a few more. So there's a number of those that went and didn't have the longest scape length, but they were probably thicker. Thus, they had similar weights and you can see those seven right there that were for average scape weight. Now this average bulb diameter, again, I should have probably earlier talked about what the scale is here. This is in millimeters, but really what I'm trying to get across is you can see how the diameter went from these, which were all statistically the same, having the largest diameter to those that had were statistically the same for having rather small diameter bulbs. And that then, when we look at average bulb weight, which a lot of times is how they're sold, we see here that we had three of them that had the heaviest weight. German White had by far the heaviest weight, but Georgian Fire and Music were statistically the same for weights. In opposition to that, we now know that, or are pretty sure, we'll find out with our second year of data this year when we harvest, but we have a pretty good idea that purple, white spring, chestnut red, Yugoslavian, Ukrainian red, which is kind of unique. Well, that was 2021. Spade, Deerfield, German red and Italian Lola Canono really had, most of those had smaller bulbs, but they also had very small weight for garlic. So, in conclusion, the average number of leaves was similar for all these cultivars until about 60 days after they merged from the ground. And then after that, then Ukrainian red really took off and it produced the highest number of leaves. However, that wasn't associated with bulb diameter or bulb weight for that cultivar. When we're talking about scapes, Dakota White and German White produced the longest and heaviest scapes, respectively, while this Italian Lio Canono and white spring did not even produce scapes. When we're talking about the bulbs then, there was numerous cultivars that produced bulbs that had a diameter of approximately 2.4, 2.5 inches, but only German White had the bulbs that weighed over 2.5 ounces. And so, by far, was the superior cultivar that we tested and we tried to find every cultivar around that was available in the U.S. through numerous garden supply catalogs. And so, German White appeared to be the most adapted to the North Dakota environmental conditions while there was two that were the least and were, would not be worth the time to go and put into your garden. Okay, so now we're going to go and move on to onion basics in a little bit. I'm going to probably have to hurry up on this with onions. So, garlic's a perennial and if you didn't go and harvest your garlic, it would come up again. But that would not go and behoove you to go in and because it's not ornamental looking at all. And so, it also would then, all of those cloves would try to come in that one bunch, which would also defeat the purpose of growing garlic. But onions, on the other hand, they're a biennial and so they need two years before they flower, which is important to know for some aspects of why you have flowering. So, they also have these concentric swollen leaf bases and that the leaves emerge from the center. So, the oldest leaf is here, the newest leaf is going to come from there. And bulbing is determined by the photo period and temperature. And that's important because the bulb size and the rate of bulb development depends on the size of that plant when bulbing starts. So, you have a larger plant when it starts and you have good temperatures, then you'll have really a good size onion bulb that you will harvest. So, some of a little bit of information on, you know, these various vegetables that have storage organs and how they respond to photo period. So, we have some that are classified as day neutral. They don't care what, you know, how long a day is or how short the day is and that's carrots, beets, turnips and radishes. So, they're classified as day neutral. You plant them and when they get, you know, as they mature, that storage organ will get bigger. However, onions and garlic are long day. And so, they, that is triggered by their flowering or their storage. The bulbing is actually triggered by long days. There are some exceptions, but it's still considered a long day and I'll talk to you a little bit about that. On the other hand, we have short day vegetables, potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams and casabas that actually the tubers start to form in response to short days. So, just a little bit more information than maybe you want it to know. There are different onion types, but I'm thinking I'm going to run out of time. And so, I'm going to kind of just pass over this because really, you're going to order what's available in a, or what's available in the store or through a catalog. And that's already been kind of, they've kind of tested these cultivars for various areas. Other classifications include skin color. Of course, you've probably seen that in the store where you can buy reds, whites or yellow. According to the mildness or pungency, the yellows that we are accustomed to growing for storage are much more pungent and usually the ones that do not store well are much more milder in taste. They can be categorized also according to their shapes. Now, here's where, you know, I said they were a long day for that, for the bulbing, but within that, this is so crazy. You know, they'll still go and say, you have short day, intermediate day and long days, but they're all long days because you can see the short day ones for bulbing is 12 to 13 hours of day length. The intermediate need 13 to 14 hours and the long days need 14 to 16 hours before they start to bulb. And you know, those short and intermediate ones are really for, I'd say probably Kansas on down and the short ones are Texas, Florida area. Okay, sets versus seed. You know, really sets have higher vigor and especially in less favorable spring conditions. So they're going to take off quicker. They also provide a more consistent stat, stand establishment. But with that, they're more expensive in comparison to seed. If you've bought a dozen sets versus 12 seeds, there's quite a difference there. Another thing about the sets is they're earlier at maturing and they require a shorter growing season because with the sets, you generally already have four to five leaves in that set. And so you see this picture here and the sets you could see are so much further ahead of the seed. In North Dakota, commercially, we generally plant just because of the cost of the sets. And since I don't think anyone's going to be doing this, and this is available in the handouts, I'm just going to go and kind of just go over, pass through this. But you know, growers that are commercially growing onions, they're going to try to plant as early as possible. And they do it in these double rows, as you can see in the picture, because onions, they kind of like to be by each other and do much better. And they're really wimpy getting out of the ground. So they need as much help as possible. Some will do transplants. But to go and get put through transplants, you need to start those eight to nine weeks in a greenhouse or indoor with adequate lighting. And you have to really be careful that you don't have any vernalization occur. And that's also true with those sets. And I think I'll go over that in a little bit. The sets are next. This can be costly. At one time, the growers were, there are some growers that use actually transplants because you have they're already growing some other vegetables and they have a vegetable transplanter. And so this works out quite well. This also goes and gets them a very early market because the transplants will be just as early as sets so they can get an earlier market and thus get a better price. Or they'll do it for those late maturing Spanish types in more of these more northern states. As far as sets, if you're going to use sets, you want to have them be less than a half inch in diameter. If you happen to go and have a few of those that are larger, usually what they're what you can do is just use those for green onions. And the reason I'm saying this is because if they're larger than that half inch diameter, they've been put into a cooler and shipped to wherever for these garden centers or box stores to go and sell. And if they have, if they're larger than that half inch diameter, they probably have gone through the juvenile stage and thus can be vernalized to think they should flower. So those larger ones are going to probably go and flower on you, which is something that you don't want with onion. So spacing. We kind of talked about that weed control in commercial. It's very rigorous. Onion are just like garlic. They're just don't ever canopies. So weed control is really, really important. But, you know, all the alliums have a very fibrous shallow root system. So you have to really be careful. So if you're pulling weeds, you don't allow those weeds to get really, really large because you'll if that are growing next to the onions because that will actually go and cause some injury and they may just kind of stop their growth for a while, which, you know, in our short growing season is important not to have anything that slows things down. So watering, you can see what that is. Fertility, again, just kind of like the garlic. You want to more spoon feed the nitrogen. You don't want to go and give too much upfront and you don't want to go too long with fertilizing the onion either. Generally, you want to stop by July in your fertilization because if you go much go past into August, then you end up with onions that have really thick necks and those tend to be soft when they cure and you end up getting a lot of disease problems with that ball brats because of that large neck that stays soft longer. Okay, so we kind of talked about ball being and I think I mentioned that it's controlled in onions by that long day. So location is important. I said it was day length and temperature. So this is why it's really important that we have the right kinds of cultivars, those long day ones. Anything really above Kansas, this would be for long day when we're going through that just because of the day length. And so here's a little table that kind of talks about how our days get longer. And you can see here by June 7th, we're almost to 16 hours. So if we didn't go and plant, if we're going to go by seed, and we didn't get that planted until May, they'd come up and they'd almost by that time be triggered into wanting to bulb and they wouldn't have hardly any, they'd have just two leaves. And thus we'd end up with very small diameter onions. Here's another way of looking at it. So here's our daylight and then we have our dawn and here's our dusk. And you can see how that changes then when we get for daylight savings time and then in the fall again. But June 20th then is our longest day where we have day length from almost five o'clock in the morning to 10 o'clock at night. So this is why I feel June is just the most fabulous month in the year in North Dakota. Oops. Okay. Getting almost, oh, I gotta hurry. So why do my onions flower? I think I've talked about this repeatedly. And so I'm going to go on to leeks because I only have a few more, three more slides. So growing leeks, they're really pretty easy. But they need a rather a real long time to mature. They're rather slow growing. And so most leeks need 120 to 150 days. So you need to start them from seed indoors and then you transplant them early spring. You can, to go in, you really want to have this stock long and white. This one's not really quite there. I mean, they didn't have, they didn't have these buried very long. To do that, you can either go and throw, keep throwing soil up or you can plant them in a furrow and then slowly fill in as that plant grows larger and larger. The water is about the same as onion and garlic. But they can actually onion and garlic can tolerate cold too. The problem is that what you can go, what happens here is different because you have this bulb only in onion and garlic, you harvest end of July first part of August. I mean, you can't even get to the cold temperatures there. But with leeks, because they're tolerant of cold, you can actually let them in delay your harvest or maybe just pick them as you need them after that first frost. Because a lot of times here in North Dakota, we'll get that first frost and then we have a month of really rather nice weather. So the fact that they can tolerate that cold, you can have fresh leeks for quite some time after that first frost. So start them indoors February, March, you transplant them when they're 10 to 15 weeks old. You don't want to wait too much longer than that because then they'll go through some kind of a transplant shock. And if you go less than 10 weeks old, they're just going to be so small, very difficult to handle. Before you transplant them, you want to acclimate them to the outside. So about a week where you have them in kind of a protected area where they aren't just getting wind whipped all over the place, but they're starting to adjust to the outdoor breezes more and a lot more sunlight. So acclimate them for about a week. And then when we have average daytime temperature of 45 degrees or above, you can go and transplant them. And I think you need, you can't, because two weeks ago we had above 45 for a few days, you just don't go and do that in North Dakota because all of a sudden we can have a blizzard again. And so, you know, you want to wait until 30 year averages above 45 degrees for your location. Planting pretty much the same as the others and we fertilize. So depending on the cultivar, you can have some shorter ones that are mature when that stem diameter, the stem diameter is a half an inch. And the larger ones, you want to wait until that's about an inch in diameter. And then you, again, I would dig these instead of trying to pull because they have quite a root system. And I just pulling, many times you're just going to pull off that bottom part. So one other thing is try to thoroughly clean before you use because, you know, if you're filling that soil in from that furl, you might get some soil down into those leaves. And you can eat both the green leaves and this white stem that had turned white because of the soil around it. And so with that, just a little bit over. Sorry, Julie. That's great. Well, thank you so much. We have a number of questions. So I'll quickly go through these. First two questions. One's about hard neck and the other's about soft neck. So why are hard neck varieties of garlic best in North Dakota? I think they're hardier. So they, you know, with that straw covering, they just do better. And then we have a question asking about southern varieties, I'll call them zone seven. Are soft neck varieties of garlic better for, I guess, warmer climates? Probably. They actually store a lot longer than hard neck. So if you can see in that also depends. So soft neck have more cloves in a bulb than hard neck. So if you want, you know, if you're in zone seven, I would think maybe you would go with the elephant garlic. Also, soft neck are a little bit more milder than the hard neck. But I've never lived, well, no, I have never lived in zone seven. So I better not, better not go and talk to somebody who's an extension specialist in zone seven, I'd say. That's a good answer. What could you expect if you plant garlic in the spring? Okay. So there are places that planted in the spring, but the fact that it doesn't, you're going to have to give it, you know, they require those chill weeks. So you're going to have it in your refrigerator so it accumulates those chills. And then they just never get as big. So if you want larger bulbs, then plant them in the fall. A couple of questions about scapes. How do you remove the scapes? Do you cut them off? Yes, just cut them off and make sure you cut them off before that you can see the flower. It's a little, like a candy kiss. You want to get it before it gets much bigger and definitely before it opens to go, I could have done it. I should have put a picture of that. I could have done that. I never thought about that. And then a question about garlic leaves versus garlic scapes. Okay. What's the difference? The scape will be around and the leaves are more flattened, hollow flattened leaves. And it will come up through the center. And so it'll be, and then it'll start to form what is that flower head. And when that starts to form, that's when you can cut it off. And you'll just cut it as close to the plant as possible, to the bottom of the plant. And I will tell everyone that on our field of fork resources page, if you go to garlic, we have a garlic from garden to table that was first written by a previous horticulture specialist in me. So you can also check that. We have a lot of recipes there too. Here's another question. I want to leave garlic in the ground around my property. Will it naturalize? You know, I suppose, but it's going to be these little clumps. And then if you, if you want something like that, then go with the garlic chives are herbaceous ornamental, because they, they're very naturalized. They're herbaceous ornamental and much more set up to, I mean, they actually have a really unique pretty umbil flower. So yeah, I would go with ornamental onions or ornamental chives or garlic chives. They have different names like that. Common names, but they're alliums that are herbaceous ornamentals that are much more naturalized for a situation. Very good. The next person asks why people would want to grow shallots? That was the fourth one I couldn't think of. Thank you for coming up with shallots. And they're, they're a much more milder onion and they can be grown. But we haven't been able to, there was only one of the four cultivars that Sidra used that actually had a sizable. They're much smaller, but you know, some recipes just call for shallots because they want that much more milder. They don't want that pungency of, of the onion. Next question. When do you pick winter onions? I'm not really too familiar with winter onions. And so that's okay. We can go on to the next one. That's a question for your local horticulture specialist if you're from another state. If leeks are planted two to six inches apart in a row, can you not have the rows six inches apart? I'm working in raised beds and it's the same true for garlic and onions. So the difficulty with a raised bed, you know, so when with leeks, you know, you want to, you want to have that stock that is white. So you keep throwing soil. What we did was we made furrows. And if it's really, if you have six inch rows, where are you going to put that soil for your furrows to go and slowly fill it in? We had these mounds on each side of the row that we then slowly filled it in to go and get, you know, you're hoping to get six, eight inches of soil covering that. So that's the whole part with leeks that would make in a raised bed having them so close together is unless you, you know, didn't care to have that much white and you wanted to just have a lot more green leaves. If you don't go and put that soil there, then, you know, your leaf, your leaf base is going to be right close to the, you're not going to get much of the bulb part with it. But with onions, you know, we generally put them about four inches apart because we're trying, our aim is a four inch diameter onion. So if you have them closer together, then they're going to start to compete and actually cause some deformity in the shape of the bulb, let alone probably compete more for nutrients and water as well. So the next question, what are some common insect pests that will feed on onions in a home garden setting? Well, there is the onion maggot that will affect the seed. And that's the biggest, I guess, insect that is a problem. Otherwise, there, you know, you don't have caterpillars or anything like that chomping on them. But yeah, but there are some leaf spots and then of course, some bacteria that if you have bruising, that can cause problems. But, you know, the biggest problem is, you know, if you fertilize too much and you get those with onions, especially you get those larger necks that stay soft and they don't dry down so fast, then you have a various fungi that get in and start causing neck rot problems. All right. So we'll take two more questions here. Can you eat onions that have flowered? Oh, yes, you can, you can eat them. It's just, you know, that plant, when it's flowering, it's diverting a lot of those carbohydrates that it's producing from photosynthesis to that flower. So your bulb's going to be smaller and it's not going to store very long. So. All right. So last question we'll take for today. Can you eat garlic chives? They're not just ornamental, right? So I've never, well, I suppose anything could be edible unless it's poisonous, correct? But garlic chives versus chives. Now, see there's chives, which you would eat the, the hollow leaves and, and then garlic chives is just the ornamental allium species. And it got that common name because the leaves are flat like garlic, but it's the different species and it, it never hoods the cloves. It just stays as like a little green onion. So I've never eaten them. I've never had the desire, but I don't, you know, I would stick with the, the known stuff. I'm sure you could eat them, but I don't think there's going to be much flavor to them. Okay. Well, that's all the time we have today. Thank you so much, Harleen. We really appreciate all your expertise and seeing the latest research that probably isn't even, you were the first, all of you, to see some of that research. So thank you very much. And we hope to see you next week. I'm your presenter next week. So thank you again for joining us and please fill out the survey that will be in your inboxes in a couple of minutes. So thank you everyone.