I was in the produce section of New Seasons grocery story on Monday when I saw this pile of garlic scapes labeled Specialty Garlic (sourced from Oregon, though I didn’t capture that fact clearly in my quick photo snap). I felt pretty spot on, having just harvested our first garlic scapes of the season the day before. I used them with the potatoes for our Father’s Day/and Dad’s Birthday Sunday meal.
For most of my life I have been content to purchase a head of garlic from the grocery store as needed and never thought to grow garlic myself. In her book Animal Vegetable Miracle Barbara Kingsolver tells this story:
“What’s new on the farm?” asks my friend, a lifelong city dweller who likes for me to keep her posted by phone. She’s a gourmet cook, she cares about the world, and has been around a lot longer than I have. This particular conversation was in early spring, so I told her what was up in the garden: peas, potatoes, spinach.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “When you say, “The potatoes are up,’ what do you mean?” She paused, formulating her question: “What part of a potato comes up?”
“Um, the plant part,” I said. “The stems and leaves.”
“Wow,” she said. “I never knew a potato had a plant part.”
I’ve been in and around gardens all of my life, but never really paid attention to garlic. I thought of it in general terms, much like onions – green stuff above ground, but the main point is below ground, and to harvest is to pull it up.
In 2019, while our family was still living in Alaska, Ryan and Ethan spent a couple summer months in Oregon hanging out with family, working on my uncle’s hazelnut farm, and also Ryan tagged along with my parents’ CSA farmer during the garlic harvest. Of course my Master Gardener was captured by these experiences in the garlic growing cycle and so the very next spring when the snow began to melt he planted garlic in our Alaska backyard. And as a result, in the Stay at Home Summer of 2020, I learned about garlic.
During that time, I learned that the garlic plant grows a loopy thing called a scape at the top of its green stalk. It feels smooth to the touch and toward the end of its stalk a little bulb shape grows, from which a last little bit of green continues on and comes to an end with a point. The scape is firm, but tender, and chops a lot like a chive. There are many culinary uses for a garlic scapes, adding a delicate garlic essence to the prepared dish, and we had fun trying different recipes that summer.
Then a few weeks after cutting the scapes we harvested the garlic. Instead of going to the grocery store for garlic in the next months, I went to the garage where we kept the garlic heads, braided together by the greens, and hanging to dry.
We repeated this process the next year, but when the snow began to melt the following April of 2022, we did not plant a garden because we were busy packing and getting our house ready for sale. We arrived at our new home in Oregon on July 4, 2022. In October I learned something new about garlic: In accommodating climates, you can plant it in the fall.
Late that summer, we dug up a garden plot out in our field and in October, Ryan planted the garlic. The following spring, green shoots popped up and grew in tidy rows.
What are you going to do with all that garlic? My mother wondered aloud whenever she visited the garden and noted its growth. I was not concerned. My boys like garlic and I looked forward to having our own harvest last us through more of the year. Unfortunately, mom and I had our concerns and nonchalance reversed. Right about scape harvesting time I began noticing gopher mounds popping up in the garden. This was our first season in this space. Our first experience sharing land with underground threats. I watched warily, wondering how this was going to play out, but feeling pretty confident that the underground critter would find garlic a repellant rather than bait.
I was wrong.
I harvested the spiraling scapes and then went to Nashville for a week. I returned to find gaps in the green garlic rows, a foreshadowing of how this garlic growing season would end. Often when I went out to the garden over the next couple weeks I would spot more garlic missing from the rows. Sometimes I’d see a hole where the plant had not quite been pulled all the way into the tunnel. But most often the plant was completely gone. I wish we had just harvested some of the garlic when the hits started coming to see if it was mature enough to use, but instead we set unsuccessful traps and waited for “time” when Ryan read the leaves and told me that it was time to harvest. In the end we were left with only a few plants. Needless to say, I bought my garlic at the store this past year.
When October came around we problem-solved the underground demons by planting garlic in our raised beds.
I’ve enjoyed watching it grow this year, but I am a little skeptical as we near harvest time. The soil in those beds is short on nutrients and our watering system has been faulty. Until we cut it down a couple weeks ago there’s also been a tree with branches hanging directly over those beds, constantly dropping tree-related mess all over the garlic beds.
Even so, the scapes have appeared on schedule and it was a delight to find them ready for a meal on Sunday.
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