The first garlic scape of the year came off with a sound like a green bean breaking, and I stood in the east bed holding it for a second as if I'd done something wrong. This garlic has a story. Denise, a fourth-grade teacher at my school who grows it up in Putnam Valley, handed me eight heads of hardneck 'Music' last fall, and the 48 cloves I planted on a cold Saturday in October came up 47 strong.
Snapping scapes off 47 plants
A scape is the flower stalk a hardneck garlic sends up in June. It shoots up out of the center of the plant and curls, and if you let it go, it straightens and tries to flower. Snapping it off means the plant puts its effort into the bulb underground instead. Denise's rule is to snap them once they've made one full loop, while they're still tender. Ours looked like a row of blue-green cursive letters, every one leaning a slightly different way, and I'll admit I sketched them before I picked them.
I started on Tuesday after school and picked a few each evening. Then Thursday got busy and I left the last dozen until this morning. By Saturday they'd started to straighten and the bottom few inches had gone woody, so I snapped them lower and used only the tender top halves. Lesson learned: scapes don't wait for the weekend.
All 47 plants gave up their scapes, about a pound and a quarter in all. Scapes aren't on the shelf at our Stop & Shop, so they don't count in my harvest-value math, which only uses supermarket prices. They still went into the notebook by weight, because that's the rule.
Peas every single day
The snap peas I sowed along the chain-link fence on March 28 are at their peak, and the late row from April 26 is in flower out by the back stockade fence. Picking peas is Mateo's job, and he does it after school with a colander, eating roughly a third of what he picks. I've stopped pretending to mind. We brought in about two pounds this week. At about $6.29 a pound, which is what Stop & Shop charges this year, that's around $12.50 of peas, most of which never made it as far as a pot.
The only trick to peas is to pick them all, every day, even the ones you don't feel like dealing with. Hold the vine with one hand and pinch the pod off with the other. Yanking pulls the vine off the fence. If pods sit on the vine and swell, the plant decides it's finished and slows down.
At the other end of the fence, the sweet peas I planted out in March are blooming. The first bunch is in a jelly jar on the kitchen table, pink and maroon and a washed-out lilac, and the whole kitchen smells like them. Mateo knows they're the ones we don't eat. I remind him anyway.
A quick scape pesto
I chopped about a dozen scapes (roughly a cup) and blended them with half a cup of grated Parmesan, a third of a cup of toasted sunflower seeds, the juice of half a lemon, half a cup of olive oil and a good pinch of salt. That's the whole recipe. It's brighter and sharper than basil pesto, with a garlic bite that mellows after a day.
Half of it went onto spaghetti on Thursday. The rest went into an ice cube tray, the same way my mom and I froze sofrito in February, and the cubes are in a freezer bag now, labeled in Sharpie. Nate, who isn't a gardener but is very much an eater, has already put one on a grilled chicken thigh and declared it a success.
The rest of the garden is keeping up. The strawberries in the grow bags on the porch steps are just starting to blush. The lettuce in the west bed is a week or two from bolting, so we're eating salad at every dinner. And the new porch boards from Kevin's repair are still pale under Kevin's primer, waiting for paint once school lets out on the 25th. Less than two weeks to go.
We ate the first scape pasta on the porch on Thursday night, with the table legs on the new boards. Nate asked how much garlic we could fit next year. I told him we'd see what the heads look like in July.
