NEWS FROM MARIQUITA: A CSA Journal

Garlic Snakes
Andy discovers how his first-ever planting of stiff-necked garlic got it's scientific name and stumbles upon another marketing gimmick--spicy serpents.

By Andy Griffin

Snake Charmer: These snakes do have bite, but there's nothing to be afraid of. It's just harmless garlic.

Posted August 3, 2004: The first time I saw garlic scapes they looked like question marks, and felt like them too.

A scape is the flower stalk of the stiff-necked garlic. “What is wrong with my garlic?” I wondered.

I was used to growing a soft-necked variety of garlic called California Early White that doesn’t flower. California Early White is the garlic that made Gilroy, a town close by my farm, semi-famous as the self-proclaimed “garlic capital of the world.”

California Early White is mild as garlics go, and stores well. Each bulb contains a fist full of cloves of varying sizes. Despite the hassle a cook faces in peeling all the tiny cloves California Early White garlic remains a chain-store favorite, even if a lot of it now comes from China and Mexico.

Since garlic is labor intensive, imported garlic from the Third World has made it more difficult for domestic producers to get a decent price for their crop, even in the farmers market. Peeled garlic is popular with restaurants and consumers too lazy to shuck the small cloves of California Early White garlic -- and they don’t seem to mind the canned flavor. But “value added” means capital intensive, and for small growers like myself that is not an option.

To make my way in a market increasingly dominated by importers and processors I switched gears and began selling California Early White garlic in its scallion stage as spring garlic. The large numbers of tiny cloves per head make this garlic a perfect choice for sowing densely and bunching young like green onions. But the season for spring garlic is short -- it gets woody with the longer days. Seed catalogues promote red, stiff-necked garlics as having bigger cloves packed with flavor. “This sounds like me,” I thought, “big, red in the face, and stiff necked.” The selling point would be flavor, I decided, and the convenience of peeling fewer cloves.

The eruption of flower stalks had me panicked because I feared the bulbs wouldn’t size up. I snapped the curly-que flower stalks off in an attempt to force any of the plants remaining energy into the bulb. An aroma of fresh garlic made me hungry and caused me to eat a stalk or two. They were good.

A little research taught me the Chinese had been cooking garlic stalks for thousands of years, so I began marketing my prunings as “garlic snakes.” The flower stalks do coil suggestively like serpents. My marketing gimmick didn’t turn out to be too crass. First of all, it worked. Customers lined up to buy the buds I had to prune anyway. Secondly, even the folks who were afraid to eat garlic snakes crowded around the stall to look at the weird vegetables and drew more customers in by appealing to their herd instinct. Lastly, Allium sativum var. ophioscorodom, the scientific name for the red stiff-necked garlic means “cultivated snake garlic,” so I’m not even lying.

The first curling stalks of stiff-necked garlic flowers made me question my future with garlic. Selling “snakes” gave me an answer I could taste. We will round out the year for garlic sales with scapes. Cured, dried bulbs of garlic can last through February after which we sell “spring garlic”. When the garlic scallions go to stick we can sell “snakes”. As the snakes stiffen we sell “fresh,” uncured garlic bulbs, followed again by the papery dried garlic heads. That, at least is the hope I have in selling garlic scapes.

But, as Eve found out, you can’t trust everything a snake suggests.