Long curly stems stared to appear on the garlic which I thought must be it starting to flower.   I thought we had better dig it up as it was ready even though there are another two weeks or so to go.    Before I did, I found a page on the internet which suggested you could eat them and keep the garlic in the ground for a little bit longer.  Garlic scapes from Mountain Times

It suggested you chop it all up, mix it with a small bit of oil, freeze it and then use with pasta dishes and things like that.   Garlic scapes are the sort of thing you might by from a farmers market for no doubt a high price, spread a bit of mud over them and you are able to charge a little bit more.

We had gone to the allotment during the day, pottered about a bit but mostly sat in the sun.   Pumpkins plants were available to all plot owners, part of the community competition for later on in the year.   I decided I would give that a miss, I didn’t want to commit myself to having to mix with too many other people in the world.

Tom came with me in the evening to do some watering.  The week had been wet but it had been warm at the same time, the ground was dry.  One of the strawberry plants seemed to have wilted away, hopefully there is time for it to come back.   Not so lucky with one of the potato plants which had started to wilt a couple of weeks ago and was now mostly gone.  Upon looking closer, ants.  The whole plot seems to be covered in ants popping up all over the place which is our biggest pest (slugs, rabbits, ants).

We watered plenty.   We didn’t recover the carrots and beetroot but instead used the green netting to make a fence around them all.   It will hopefully stop rabbits and of course carrot fly when the time comes.  The broad beans had black fly and so I sprayed them with soapy water.

We watered a bit more before we left, some plants were bone dry again, the sun was low the it still seemed very hot.

Lastly, we cut off the garlic scapes to take home, where we cut them up into small pieces, mixed with a small bit of oil and put into egg cups to freeze.   Tomorrow we shall put the frozen chunks into food bags and keep in the freezer until we need to add garlic to a sauce or something while cooking.    The instructions said they had a mild garlic flavour the but the kitchen was smelling like a giant Italian pizza restaurant.    Time will tell just how strong it might be, but our first harvest which on the 21st we will dig up the actual garlic bulbs to join it.  Exciting times.