Garlic Scapes: When to Cut and What to Do With Them

Every June, my hardneck garlic does something weird. These curly little green spirals start shooting up from the center of each plant, looping around like they’re trying to tie themselves in a knot. First time I saw them I had absolutely no idea what they were. So I left them on. My bulbs were underwhelming that year. And then the next year. Lesson learned, eventually.

Those curly stalks are garlic scapes. And cutting them off is one of the easiest free wins in the June garden.

What You’re Even Looking At

A garlic scape is the flower stalk your hardneck garlic sends up when it decides it’s ready to reproduce. It’s green, it curls, and it has a swollen little torpedo-shaped bulge near the tip called a bulbil. That bulbil is basically a tiny aerial seed head. The plant wants to put energy into making it. You don’t want that.

Here’s the nerdy part: the plant is redirecting its photoassimilates, which are sugars made through photosynthesis, toward that reproductive structure. Cut the scape off and the plant has nowhere to send that energy except down, into the bulb underground. That’s the whole move.

One thing worth knowing: softneck garlic doesn’t do this. If you planted the braiding kind, the kind you see hanging in Italian restaurants, you won’t get scapes. Softnecks put their energy into layers of cloves without ever sending up that curly stalk. Hardnecks are the ones that scape. And hardnecks are honestly what I’d recommend for PNW gardens anyway since they handle our winters better.

When to Actually Cut Them

Timing matters here. You want to cut garlic scapes while they’re still curled, ideally before they’ve made a full loop or started to straighten out. In Redmond that usually means sometime in June, though it shifts a week or two depending on how gray and wet the spring was. So, every spring.

Once the scape straightens up, the plant has already committed a chunk of resources toward reproduction. You’ve lost some of the benefit. Cut it early. Snip or snap it off a few inches above the last set of leaves. That’s it. No tools required, no complicated technique, just break the thing off.

I’ve also skipped cutting one or two at the end of the season just to let them flower, because the bees go absolutely nuts for them. Worth it at least once. But if you want big bulbs, cut them.

What to Do With Them (This Is the Good Part)

Garlic scapes taste like mild garlic with a slight grassy edge. They’re genuinely good and you’d pay a few bucks for them at the Redmond Saturday Market. You grew them for free as a side effect of growing garlic. This is exactly the kind of situation I live for.

Garlic scape pesto is the big one. Throw scapes in a food processor with olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and whatever nuts you have around. Walnuts from Trader Joe’s run about $5.99 a bag and work great, pine nuts are not worth what they charge. Parmesan if you’ve got it. Pulse until it’s paste. It’s bright, garlicky, and works on pasta, sandwiches, eggs, whatever. I made a batch last year and my daughters ate it on crackers for a week straight, which is a win I wasn’t expecting.

Stir fry. Chop them into inch-long pieces and treat them like scallions. They soften fast in a hot pan and pick up whatever flavors are around them. Easy weeknight move.

Pickling. Pack them into a jar, pour hot brine over them, water, white vinegar, salt, maybe a pinch of sugar, let them sit in the fridge. They’re ready in a few days. The acetic acid in the vinegar denatures some of the sharper allicin compounds, which is why pickled garlic tastes mellow and almost sweet compared to raw. Anyway. They’re good on a charcuterie board or chopped into potato salad.

Freezing. If you have more scapes than you can use right now, chop them up and freeze them in a zip bag. They’ll go soft when thawed but are fine for cooked applications all winter. No blanching needed. I keep a bag in the freezer and add them to soups and scrambled eggs through December. Practically free garlic flavor, months later.

The Part Where I Admit the Mistake

For the record, I didn’t just leave the scapes on once. I left them on for two full seasons before I figured out why my bulbs kept coming in small. I thought I was doing everything right. Watering, mulching, not harvesting too early. It was the scapes the whole time. Two years of slightly sad garlic because I didn’t know what that curly thing was.

Cut the scapes. Eat the scapes. Grow bigger garlic. It’s almost too easy, which, if you think about it, is exactly what a scape-goat situation looks like.

(Sorry. I couldn’t help it.)

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash