Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast everyone. Kevin Espiritu here. It's

Garlic Week. We're coming up on the end of Garlic Week on tomorrow's

episode, but we're still here. we're talking about scapes today with

Jeremy of Squared Roots farm a seed garlic and culinary garlic producer I've got

some of their seed garlic cloves in my house right now. They're going to go in the

fridge a little bit later today to vernalize them and part of the reason why is because I'm trying

to grow some hard-neck garlic varieties down in a warmer climate,

which can be a little bit of a challenge, but Jeremy Gardneck, excuse me, hard-neck garlic produces scapes.

And I think, you know, for those of us warmer climate gardeners it's just

not something we see much and so could we talk a little bit about exactly what

those are? Yeah for sure so yeah the hard-neck garlic produces escape.

So this is the bolting flower stock,

very similar to other allions,

like an onion flower or a leak flower.

About four to five weeks prior to harvest,

the hard-neck garlic will start to produce the skate.

So a tender stem will grow up

and then it will make a full turn

and sometimes two full turns

and then at the end of that stem is going to be a flower head.

Now if you leave that scape on the plant it will produce a flower and in that flower are tiny little garlic.

They're not actually seeds but they're garlic bulbals and a garlic bulb is like a tiny clove.

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