Big Stone Garlic

Family Farmed Garlic

Garlic

2021 garlic orders are heading out!

You know it’s August when you can start ordering garlic! Big Stone Garlic is ready to fill orders for Chesnok Red, German Red, Inchelium, Belarus, and Variety Packs. In fact, we sent our first orders out last week. Visit our store for more details.

Please note: Because of the extremely hot and dry growing season here in western Minnesota, some varieties will be smaller than normal this year, particularly our Belarus variety. Also, due to the dry weather, the garlic bulbs haven’t produced as many layers of protective skin as usual. In order to preserve the garlic for you to enjoy, we’ve left as many skins on as possible, so you may notice some residual soil on your order.

A Crash Course on Scapes

picking scapes

All over the garlic fields, curly, corkscrewing stalks are popping up on our plants. Some grow in arcs, others in double loops, and when they’re snapped, you can smell them from the end of the row. But what exactly are they? Good question! These stalks are called “scapes”, and they’re a part of garlic that most people have never heard of.
Scapes are the stems of the garlic flower, and if left unpicked, they’ll form delicate purple flowers around harvest time. Unfortunately for the grower, producing this flower takes up most of the garlic plant’s energy, so the garlic bulbs stay smaller and less developed. Small garlic? Who wants that? Not us, so we head out to our fields a few times a week to harvest the scapes.

Snapping off the scape reverts the plant’s energy back to the bulb, and we end up with some tasty treats in the process. Scapes are edible, with a strong garlic flavor that works nicely in anything from pesto to omelettes to pickles!
Try some of our favorite recipes here:

Garlic Scape Pesto

Marinated Garlic Scapes and Asparagus

Roasted Garlic Scapes and Asparagus

Sadly, we haven’t been able to find a viable method of shipping to keep scapes fresh during transit, so we will not be offering them for sale this year.