Garlic Scapes

It's garlic scape time of year again. For those of you who haven't had the privilege of growing your own garlic (I highly recommend it), scapes are the flower stalks that you pull off around this time of year.

They are actually quite yummy, with a fresh slightly mild garlicky flavor. Although you can use them any way you would normally use garlic they are also good chopped up in salads or grilled whole. I put them on a grilling rack so they wouldn't slip through the cracks but if you're brave you could throw them right on there, just watch them carefully so they don't burn.


These are some of what we picked at home, I think we should have about 40 clubs of garlic if all goes well and they don't rot right in the ground from all this rain.

Interesting fact I recently discovered at work: if you pick about 2000 of these you'll end up with white crystals all over your hands from the sap that comes out of the scapes. I have no idea what it is besides garlic juice but I smelled like it for the next couple days. At least I didn't have to worry about vampires.

More Harvesting

Although nothing will beat the bounty that was our wheat harvest (see last post to fully understand sarcasm), we did pick several other things this week.

Snow peas: They suck. It can’t be said any other way, they have barely climbed a foot up the netting and we’ve gotten at most 10 sad little pale green peas so far this year.


Cucumbers: We got three more spiny fat little pickling cucumbers. The plants appear to be picking up steam, I counted at least a dozen little cucumbers getting started.

Squash: We picked our first squash! Although it is very cute, we are slightly disappointed. Mom is sure she bought patty pans but lo and behold we are definitely not getting any patty pans. Who knows if we should blame the greenhouse or the mom’s memory. Next year I’ll make sure she’s wearing strong glasses while selecting seedlings.

And for the grand finale….we harvested our garlic! Mom (thinks she) bought organic garlic last year at a Farmer’s Market and saved it to plant. She did that in mid November (this we’re sure of, she made notes). We made sure to pick the garlic scapes when they appeared (which we used for stir fry) and this week we decided the garlic was ready to harvest. Mom came to this conclusion because some of the stalks had fallen over (and the bottom halfish was brown while the top was still green) and once they fall over they can get mold. So we pulled up about 8 bulbs ranging from medium sized to smallish. We hung them up in a shady spot on the porch to cure so we can save them and use them this fall. Since we go through so much garlic in our cooking we’re thinking of expanding our crop next year.