Garlic scapes

image from Fifth Season Garden Co

This weekend at the market you'll be able to pick up handmade soaps and lotions, fried pies, baked goods, barbecue, smoked meats, and tomato and other summer vegetable plants. If you're putting plants in the ground right now, be sure you're prepared to give them some water. The soil is dry, and the days are hot. I recently read that our area's average rainfall in April is around 4 inches, but we only received two this year. It's hard to imagine that this time last year, the soil was water logged, and we were worried about the creek flooding our garden.

It seems pretty much everything is happening a month early this year. The dogwoods, mayapples, blackberries, and redbuds were all early. We were eating mounds of watercress well into May last year, but this year it's already become very spicy and is flowering. We are still using the flowers to spice up and beautify our salads. Our elephant garlic (which is actually a leek) sent up its scapes over a week ago already, and I saw the first scapes on our hard neck garlic at the beginning of this week. Those are a month early, too.

Garlic scapes are the flowering stalk sent up by each head of garlic. Each clove of garlic that you plant and mulch in the fall will produce a head of cloves, and each of those heads will send up a scape. Some people leave the scapes on the plant, and some people who cut the scapes just throw them away. Cutting the scapes encourages development of bigger cloves, and scapes are absolutely delicious.

You can cook the scapes the same way you cook green beans. They have the same crisp, crunchy texture of a fresh green bean with the flavor and kick of raw garlic. You can sauté the scapes in some butter and olive oil, which will tone down their punch a little, and dress them with just a touch of salt. You can chop and add them to stews and soups just before serving for a sharp, raw garlic accent or add them ten minutes before serving to mellow the flavor a bit.

We let our scapes grow until they develop their first curl. They are usually 6 or 7 inches long at that point, but the flowering head is still firmly encased. You can pick them later, but the lower part of the stalk will get tough as the scape gets taller. The case around the flowering head will also get a little tougher as the plant matures, but you can always just snip it off. If the garlic goes to blossom, you can use the blossoms raw to add a beautiful garnish to your cooked dishes or to elevate your salads from blasé to gourmet.

You should dig your garlic after the leaves have turned yellow but before the whole plant turns totally brown. Use a fork to loosen the soil before pulling them up to reduce the number of heads that get left behind. Even with careful harvesting, it seems like you'll inevitably miss a couple cloves which will happily sprout and show up next year.

Cure the garlic by placing the whole plant in the shade where it will have good air circulation. Some people also cure their garlic right where it was harvested, but the flavor of some varieties of garlic changes when exposed to sunlight. When the papers are thoroughly dried, snip off the stem with some hand shears. To prepare your seed stock, gently separate the cloves and save some of the largest to plant in the fall.

For your culinary garlic, leave the heads in tact and store in a dark, cool, dry place. Stored garlic can withstand light freezing and thawing, but should be kept from freezing through on very cold nights. You'll be able to enjoy your garlic well into the following spring.