Chinese Pink
Regular price
$7.00
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Chinese Pink is an excellent, productive variety that has excellent eating quality, and is a great grower. The plants hold well in the ground and size up even in challenging Junes and Julys. Excellent introduction to the Asiatic family.
It’s been a long road to adapt Chinese Pink to my climate, but I finally have a winter-hardy, robust pool of genetics. Asiatics and Turbans have a low threshold for dormancy- a few cold nights in autumn followed by a November warm spell seem like “winter, then spring!” to them, so they start sprouting early readily. This can cause extra winter losses as they overinvest in that first shot of growth and get whacked with actual winter. You know, that "snow makes a weird crunch noise" kind of cold. Plant as late as you dare to avoid loss. I am also going to experiment with planting earlier to see if a stronger, deeper root system is the better survival strategy. Weak Chinese Pink cloves will grow into rounds instead of differentiated bulbs. This actually works out, because you get really great bulbs from those oversized rounds. The plants also form large, robust bulbils that are good planting stock. This means that sometimes, Chinese Pink crops are a mix of megabulbs from rounds, medium and large sized stock from cloves, and smaller bulbs or rounds from bulbils. All part of the cycle. An average of 7 cloves per bulb, also plenty of bulbils from each plant.