Processing Garlic Scapes

In June, hardneck garlic produce scapes, flower "buds" that produce small garlic bulbils. Bulbils are tiny, undivided bulbs that can be used as seed. Garlic do not have fertile flowers so do not produce true seeds. 

See: https://www.cog.ca/uploads/TCOG%20Articles/Growing%20garlic%20from%20bulbils.pdf

Curly Garlic Scapes Emerging  from the center of Garlic Plants

Some years we let some of these scapes produce large bulbils that we plant. The following year, each bulbil becomes a single large clove, ideal for processing. These are sometimes available in farmers' markets at a premium because these large cloves are so easy to peel and a single one is perfect for many dishes. In the second year, each of these former bulbils become an ordinary garlic with a dozen, or so, cloves. But if garlic scapes are left unattended, these bulbils get distributed (each year we rotate every crop) overproducing and becoming weeds, literally, thousands of garlic plants competing with everything. One former garlic bed, long abandoned, is so thick with overcrowded garlic, it looks like grass!

Last Year's Missed Bulbils with Scapes: Imagine If All the Bulbils in These Scapes Matured and Planted Themselves. Result? Garlic Grass!

Garlic Scapes Ready for Harvesting

We're trying to get on top of our garlic's propensity to take over our growing spaces and rigorously harvest every scape. Should any escape and, left on their own, they become a dozen or two garlic plants not far from where they grew.  Early scapes are much more tender than later ones so we pick them as soon as they appear. It's sad that the plants continue to grow scape stems after picking them early, but the resources needed to produce bulbils goes into cloves below ground. 

Belle and First of Two Baskets of Garlic Scapes

This year, after cutting off the fibrous "hat", we chopped these scapes in a food processor, portioned them into sandwich bags and sealed in zip-lock gallon bags for freezing. Our 200 square feet of garlic plants made 6 pounds of chopped scapes, ready for 30 to 50 pestos, soups and curries.

Garlic Scape Processing Operation