Quick Take: Garlic scapes are the curly flower stalks that hardneck garlic sends up in spring, and cutting them off early sends the plant's energy back into growing a bigger bulb underground instead of a flower.

What Does It Mean If Your Garlic Plant Is Producing Scapes?

If you're growing hard-neck garlic in your vegetable garden, you'll likely notice really tall, curly stems forming on your garlic plants during the lengthening days of spring. These are flowering stems called scapes.

Scapes are an extension from the center of the garlic bulb that's developing underground, and they're a way for the plant to produce seeds. If you leave them be, these vibrant green stems will eventually form little bulges (which are actually unopened flower buds) that contain garlic seeds.

Garlic scapes are 100 percent edible and a really delicious way to bring the taste of garlic into your kitchen while you’re still waiting on the bulb to form underground.

Do All Garlic Plants Produce Garlic Scapes?

It's really only hard-neck garlic varieties that produce garlic scapes. Hard-neck garlic is more winter hardy, so it tends to do best in colder climates, or what we call long-day regions (basically, places where you go from what feels like a 4-hour day in the winter to a 15-hour day in the summer).

For those of you in warmer climates, you'll do best growing soft-neck garlic, which does not produce garlic scapes.

Most people consider hard-neck garlic a little tastier, and you get garlic scapes as a bonus. The only negatives are that hard-neck bulbs don't store as well as soft-neck, and you can't braid the stems.

When to Pick Garlic Scapes

You don't want to keep garlic scapes on the plant unless the main reason you're growing garlic is to produce tiny garlic seeds. Removing scapes helps the garlic plant put all its energy back in the direction we want it to go: down underground instead of up top. I'm talking, of course, about that nice garlic bulb.

Basically, if you want large garlic bulbs, make sure to cut off all those garlic scapes.

You can remove garlic scapes as soon as you see them form. Or you can wait until they're taller than the rest of the plant and beginning to curl if you'd like to use them in the kitchen. I wait to harvest them until I have a fair amount to cut at once. This is typically around early summer.

How to Harvest Garlic Scapes

Use a clean pair of scissors or pruners to cut the scapes where they branch off from the rest of the leaves. Avoid cutting the leaves of the garlic plant.

How to Use Garlic Scapes

Garlic scapes are a great way to bring that garlicky flavor into your kitchen up to two months before your bulbs are finally ready for harvest. Young scapes are tender (with a similar texture to cooked asparagus) and have a milder flavor than mature cloves.

You can chop garlic scapes up and basically treat them the way you would green onions or chives, which is to say you can eat them raw or cook them. You can make pesto with them. Add them to your favorite salad dressing. Toss them into soups and stews and stir fries. Grill them. Sauté them in EVOO and treat them like a little side dish (just like you would green beans). Slice them and make your own garlic butter. You can even pickle them and add them to charcuterie boards the way you might use cornichons.

By the way, the bulge in the curling scape is the unopened flower. It's much more fibrous than the rest of the scape, so it's up to you whether you cut if off or eat it.

How to Store Garlic Scapes

You can store garlic scapes in a plastic baggie left slightly open in your fridge for up to three weeks. I like to enjoy garlic scapes fresh, but you can also flash freeze them. Simply spread them out on a cookie sheet and put them in the freezer unwrapped until the surface looks frozen over (about 20 minutes). Then, toss them into a freezer bag for long-term storage.

Common Garlic Scape Mistakes to Avoid

• Waiting too long to cut them. Once a scape straightens back out, it's already toughened up and past its prime for eating.
• Cutting into the leaves. Snip right where the scape branches off from the rest of the plant, not lower into the foliage — you don't want to damage the leaves feeding your bulb.
• Leaving scapes on soft-neck garlic thinking you did something wrong. You didn't. Soft-neck varieties simply don't produce scapes, so there's nothing to cut.
• Tossing the scapes. They freeze beautifully, so there's no reason to let extras go to waste if you can't use them all fresh.

Time to Grow Your Own Garlic Scapes

Garlic scapes are something many people just don't experience if they only get their produce from the grocery store. Here's yet another wonderful example of how you get to enjoy so much more of the plant when you grow your own in a kitchen garden.

So get some garlic cloves planted before your ground freezes this fall and look forward to some delicious garlic scapes in late spring or early summer.

Thanks for being here and helping to make gardening ordinary again!

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