Harvesting: Garlic Scapes

Friday, July 24, 2020

July 2, 2020
In the last garlic post I left out a little bonus harvest you get from hardneck garlic: garlic scapes! Unlike softneck garlic, hardneck garlic grows a hard flower "scape" stem that if you harvest before it blooms can also be eaten. I choose to pickle my garlic scapes, dilly bean style. It works nicely. Because of this hard scape, the hardneck garlics cannot have their stems braided. So they get tied up with twine instead of braided.

June 16 and June 30
I chose to harvest my garlic scapes when they all made a "full circle", they have a tendency to get very loopy! I could probably have waited another week or so, but you don't want to wait too long because then the plant will put too much energy into producing the flower, rather than making a larger bulb!
My garlic scapes harvest was about half the size of when I last purchased them from the Farmer's Market for FoodInJar's Pickled Garlic Scapes, but I just halved the recipe, and it worked out fine: