Across the Northern Hemisphere at about this time, garlic plants are reaching for the sun. Each clove planted last fall has divided and swollen into a bulb of cloves, while the flowers emerge in a circuitous path. Each flower sits on a stalk that, before it will stand up straight like a stalk is supposed to, spends a few days curling around like Cupid’s hair, before finally reversing course and uncurling, at which point the stalk straightens and the flower opens in a firework-like bloom.
Or at least, that’s what would happen if the garlic growers were to let it. But any serious grower will pick this flowering stalk, known as a scape, long before it uncurls. Otherwise the plant will focus too much energy on flowering and not enough on bulbing. This intervention is just like when a cattle grower removes the little boy flowers from the bull cows, and turns them into steers, which grow massive, delicious bodies.
