Hi Kathy, and welcome to ATP!
I really hope you do plant some of them. Especially if they naturalize or establish themselves, they'll be a remembrance even if you seldom cook with them. See what they look like in bloom.
And if you do, you can send photos and we would all get to see your papaw's backwoods garlic! (Or onion, or wild garlic, or ...)
>> In any event plant them to field now. Harvest next June-July.
As a wise Ken once said:
"I plant my garlic approximately 2-3" deep and space the cloves on a 4" center.
... I cover all of my garlic with 4-6" of leaves."
http://garden.org/ideas/view/d...
My guess is that, if it isn't easy to separate the cloves, plant most of those heads or bulbils whole. Maybe experiment with trying to divide a few, just to see whether there really are cloves.
(P.S. - Thanks for the silica gel thumbs-up! If you try it, just don't seal several tablespoons-full of silica gel tightly with a small amount of seed, or dry seed, and leave it for weeks with NO humidity indicator. The seeds would suffer if the RH went below far below 15% and stayed there.) Sealing silica gel with a batch of not-fully-dry-seeds will absorb a lot of the silica gel's "desiccating power" right away, and then it won;t be able to pull the RH below 15%. My plastic jars don't seal well enough to keep the gel "pristine", but a glass jar with rubber seals probably would.)
(Edited to add: cross-posted!)
