At his booth, Crebs was in full scape-education mode. He'd posted a sign ("Saute just like onions for a mild garlic taste"), propped a news article on the vegetable next to his basket and - for good measure - stuck a couple of spears into his ball cap.
"Once I break one open and have people smell it, they're pretty much sold," Crebs said.
For kitchen gardeners growing hard-neck garlic, scapes are a bonus crop. (Soft-neck varieties do not produce scapes.)
Vegetable twofers are not unknown. Beets and turnips produce edible greens as well as veggies. But garlic is the rare three-fer - four-fer by some counts.
There's the bulb, of course, whose pungent cloves star in hifalutin' aioli and humble garlic bread. And the scapes, which add a more delicate garlic note to salads, stir-fries, soups and sauces. Even the plant's squiggly roots, marketed as "angel hair garlic," have a place at the table. Some restaurants turn them into tempura.
At Dogwood, deLutis dusts the roots in cornstarch and fries them to create a crisp garnish that puts those fake-O canned fried onions to shame.
"The roots are delicious," he said.
Garlic farmer Jack Gurley also uses the hollow garlic leaves, which sprout beside the solid scape portion, in place of green onion tops.
"I don't know any vegetable out there, other than garlic, where you have four options," said Gurley, who enjoys dipping kohlrabi, cut up like carrot sticks, in garlic scape pesto.
Gurley and his wife, Beckie, harvest about 5,000 scapes a year at their Calvert's Gift Farm in Sparks. They distribute some in the weekly deliveries they make to customers who sign up for a season's worth of produce through the farm's Community Supported Agriculture program. They peddle the rest at farmers' markets, including the one in Catonsville, where they've been selling bunches of six for $2.
"We've been training our [CSA] customers on garlic scapes for a long time," Beckie Gurley said. "Some of them are, 'Oh, my gosh! They're here. I've been waiting all year for them.' "
Even so, the Gurleys are careful about overdosing their CSA members on scapes - or sweet potato leaves, for that matter, even though the couple's children have pronounced the sweetly spinachy leaves "bizarrely good."
"Sweet potato leaves are still a little out there," Jack Gurley said, "like garlic scapes."
