We planted at least 20 cloves of the early garlic variety last fall, and I just harvested about half that many heads. If that wasn't discouraging enough, none of the heads were very big, and some of them weren't even divided into cloves. It's possible that they were affected by a mini-drought that occurred at just the wrong time this year.
I'd just about decided we weren't going to keep planting them anyway, but now it's official. In the future, if we're desperate for garlic (and I was fairly desperate -- I'd run out of both fresh bulbs and pickled cloves) before the standard harvest time, we always have thousands of volunteer plants (from discarded bulbils) that can be pulled early.
As far as I can tell, the last few weeks of garlic's growth cycle is more about drying out the skins around the individual cloves than anything else. I pulled a few volunteers (of the German Extra-Hardy variety) last week, in the course of preparing the bed for other types of plants, and they were a good size, flavorful, and fully formed. The only thing different from the fully matured heads I've harvested in the past is that the skins, both on the outside of the head, and the wrappers on the individual cloves, were more like onion layers than the usual paper-y texture. They weren't easy to peel, and they probably wouldn't have stored as well as more mature ones, but they were fine for immediate use.
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