A Garlic Scape and Sour

 

Many years ago, perhaps nearing 15 or so, we used to raise garlic every year in a small raised bed garden we had behind the house we lived before this one. A coworker at the time had given me a couple bulbs of his softneck garlic and I stuck them in the ground to great success. Over a period of maybe five years, we kept replanting and eating that garlic and ended up with a decent sized bed of it. But then we moved and left that behind.

After that, we mainly just consumed and preserved excess from my mom's garden until she passed away but she never raised garlic. After her death, we took over the gardens and made them our own but being 40 miles away, we often lacked the energy to drive down there in late fall to loosen up some soil and stick garlic back in the ground for another year's crop. So, we just got back into the rut of using store bought garlic again.

Last fall with our first garden season under our belts from the new garden behind our house, I decided it was about time to get back into garlic. I grabbed our favorite seed catalog from of all placed, Cottage Grove, Oregon, an outfit called Territorial Seeds. Unlike other seed catalog companies, they seem extremely caring in the timing of sending out perishable seeds and in fact, give you a shipping window and we can select or request certain times in some cases. I have also emailed them questions in the past and they are always quick to respond. So after browsing through their garlic collection, I selected a hard necked garlic variety hardy for our area that looked like what we were after. After it arrived, right on time, I planted it in the unused part of the raised strawberry beds.

It has been a learning experience for me since this was my first time planting the hard necked variety. They have been growing vigorously up until recently and then shot up seed heads and have slowly started withering off. Perhaps a bit too late, I read that you were supposed to cut off those seed heads or scapes as they form so that they garlic will pump the last bit of energy into forming a bigger bulb. According to some sources, the two or three weeks after the seed scape are the weeks where the biggest amount of growth occurs. So I grabbed a sharp knife, hustled right out to the garden and cut off all the scapes.

I brought them back inside and did some more searching and found that they can be great to eat, providing a milder garlic flavor than the cloves themselves and are great in salads. I wish I had known that a couple weeks earlier. Our salad days are very numbered now and it is all bolting and starting to get slightly bitter. I had a week earlier picked a few bulbs of garlic just to see how it was forming and use for cooking so I really didn't need to use the garlic scape for flavoring either. But I found several sites saying pickling the scapes made a very delicious delicacy that is nearly impossible to find in a store setting. So I pickled our scapes and also the flower bulbs themselves which some reported were edible too. It is more of an experiment at this point as I have only eaten one chunk of scape raw as I was cutting it up and it indeed had a strong garlic taste to it. I imagine the pickling process will weaken that up to a more mild garlic flavor and my brain says dill and garlic go together quite well. We shall see in due time I guess. Meanwhile, my garlic still have five to six green leaves and according to sources, I should wait until it is down to three or four green leaves before harvesting so I hope maybe I can get another couple weeks of intense bulb growth before harvest.

I think four days after the last sour cherry harvest, I was looking our our dining room window and no longer saw any light green immature sour cherries on the tree. Being partially red/green colorblind, I struggle seeing the deeper reds against the darker greens so I knew that either the birds had nabbed the last of them or they were mostly ripe again. So I headed out this morning with my bucket and a sling to hold it ties around my shoulders and picked another two gallons worth of them. I'm guessing that will equate to two or possibly three more pies meaning I am up to around 8 or 9 pies in my freezer "bank" in the basement. I am so excited.

One note worthy event is that while picking the cherries, two birds kept landing on the other side and were consuming cherries too. They scared off at my voice a few times and then basically ignored me until they had consumed enough and flew off. Cheeky birds! Nearly all of them were ripe or mostly ripe so I picked all of those and left only a handful of underripe ones or ones I just couldn't safely reach from my stepladder without risking my bone health in a fall. The birds can have them with my compliments!