Garlic scapes rise just before summer solstice here in Zone 5, the harbinger of high summer and abundance yet to come, and one of our favorite delicacies of all time. Scapes only form on hardneck varieties. In fact, the scape is the extention of the ‘hard neck’ at the center of each bulb. Softneck varieties lack such a hard ‘scape,’ making them ideal for braiding. If you want scapes on your table, plant hardneck varieties, Friends! We grow about 8,000 heads of garlic each season, both hardneck and softneck, so we revel in the ocean of scapes we harvest each June…
And join us! Whether you’d love 20 or 200 garlic scapes to savor (pickles or pesto, anyone?!), bring your family and friends to…
Share the Harvest: Garlic Scape U-Pick Party
Saturday June 17th, 2023 | Gather at 10 am | Fruition Seeds farm, Naples, NY
Details: We’ll gather by our Sow Seeds & Sing Songs mural at 10, walking to the west field to harvest together. Bring comfortable walking shoes, your own bag(s) to bring scapes home in as well as water to sip in the sunshine – we’ve plenty of fresh mint to tuck in your bottle!
A free fruition event, And Friends!… rather than thinking of this Garlic Scape U-Pick as ‘free’ as in value-less, think of it as ‘free’ as in Robin Wall Kimmerer: All flourishing is mutual and Fanny Lou Hammer: None of us are free until all of us are free…come share the harvest, indeed! We ask that you donate at least 1 handful of the scapes you harvest to our local food pantry. Can’t wait!
If you’d love one, here’s a video on garlic scape harvest techniques, found in Fruition’s Growing Great Garlic Course : )
and, Friends…
…Did You Know?
Garlic scapes emerge one month before bulbs mature. Scapes are our (delicious) signal to make sure we’re ready for the upcoming July garlic harvest! To prepare, we clean out the barn where we cure our bulbs, make sure our fans are working and get enough twine and tags so we can hang bulbs immediately after the garlic harvest. Once one-third to one-half of a garlic’s leaves are brown and drying down, its bulb is ready to lift gently with a digging fork to eat fresh or cure for the seasons ahead.
Counter-intuitively, the science is ambiguous as to whether removing the scapes, in fact, increase ultimate bulb size. Regardless, we harvest each one simply because they’re delicious. We prefer the young, tender scapes but we’ll eat the large, fibrous and spiraling scapes if we miss them young.
Without further ado, here are…
Fruition’s Favorite Garlic Scape Recipes & Harvest Tips
Friends, we’ve made you a sweet little ebook with our go-to recipes for garlic scape pesto, both lacto-fermented and vinegar scape pickles and many more ways we savor our scapes throughout the seasons:
Garlic & garlic scapes are one of our favorite foods to grow, harvest and savor. If you’re local, we’d love to see you on the farm for Fruition’s Garlic Scape Party in June! Let us know your favorite ways to enjoy garlic scapes in the comments below as well!
Sow Seeds & Sing Songs,
& the whole Fruition crew
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Is the ebook still available? The link goes to a 404 page. I got a big bunch of scapes from my Mom’s garlic and was looking for what to do with them! I had saved this link in Facebook.