Garlic scapes
It looks like I missed out on a delicacy this
spring --- garlic scapes! We planted
four kinds of garlic last fall to test which one is the tastiest
and grows best in our soil. One kind was a hardneck garlic, which
sends up reproductive stalks (scapes) and eventually produces little
bulblets.
Now that the scapes are a couple of weeks old, I finally got around to
hitting the internet. It turns out that good gardeners pluck the
young scapes and eat them in stir fries, pesto, and other delicacies
when they're still young and tender. Mediocre gardeners (us,
apparently), finally remember to pluck off the scapes when they're a
little older, then discard them. Bad gardeners leave the scapes
on and end up
with garlic bulbs which are 33% smaller, on average. Next
year, we'll be good gardeners!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Daddy --- it couldn't hurt to try to eat the onion scapes. We don't have them because we start from seed instead of sets and onions don't bloom their first year.
Anonymous --- next year I'll know better!