One of my chief concerns is garlic disease. Unfortunately, there are a lot of different garlic diseases running around in this country and they're all over the place. They are a lot more common than we would like to admit. I have heard that there are some growers in Northern California who have had to stop growing due to white rot infestation of their fields and have taken to contracting with other growers throughout the Northwest to grow for them and have the garlic trucked to Gilroy for processing. In Canada, they are having some similar problems.
Growers are the only people who can do anything about the problem.
Therefore, we will not knowingly ship garlic that looks, feels or smells bad. This chapter is about identifying the diseases and pests that are harmful to garlic and trying to deal with them in a safe and effective manner. I do not know whether any of the things that are harmful to garlic are also harmful to people, but better to err on the side of caution and say that people should not eat diseased garlic or garlic that looks or smells bad or has soft cloves. Then I began to grow garlic and soon discovered how wrong those ideas were. When the grasshoppers ate my garlic to the ground and then went into the ground to eat the bulbs, I cleverly reasoned that I had erred in my thinking.