Harvesting Delicious Garlic Scapes In The Garden
Are we all ready to enjoy some delicious garlic scapes? So fun to look at and super flavorful, now is the time to harvest these curly scapes to maximize the potential of your garlic plants. Then, you can use them in the kitchen just as you would garlic cloves!
Ready To Go
Last fall, I planted a couple of different hardneck varieties of garlic (Music and Russian Red), which do best in cold climates. As you can see from my garlic patch this spring, my garlic handled the winter really well!
While the garlic bulbs themselves aren’t quite ready for harvest, my plants have beautiful scapes ready to harvest.
I love garlic scapes. They’re one of my favorite things to buy at my local farmer’s market, so I’m excited to have them in my garden for the first time this year.
Curlicue
The garlic plant will send up a stalk or scape around the summer solstice in June. Let the scape curl one or two times into a ring, and then cut it at the base (where it emerges from the stem of the garlic plant).
When the scapes curl, you know the actual garlic cloves growing beneath the ground are about a month or so away from harvest. Cutting the scapes allows the plant to put all of its energy into fully developing the bulbs.
To The Kitchen!
While you wait for the cloves to fully mature, enjoy your beautiful scapes in my favorite pesto recipe, garlic scape pesto!
EDITOR’S NOTE: I’ve been replacing the arugula in the garlic scape pesto recipe with spinach lately and have been really digging it. Bon appetite!
