Nope, not a typo.

I’m talking about garlic scapes — gardening’s version of content repurposing.

If you’ve ever grown garlic, you’ve at some point been inundated with garlic scapes.

If you haven’t, they’re the stem of the garlic plant that would become the flower if you let it grow. But you don’t want to do that because, odds are, you’re growing the garlic for the bulbs.

And if you don’t cut off the scape (once it’s done a complete curl), the plant puts its energy into the flower rather than the bulb.

Cilantro/coriander is the only other plant like that I can think of where you get a double crop. (Cilantro = the leaves; coriander = the seeds.)

I like ventures that yield useful byproducts.

It’s like how a podcast grows your authority, but then you also get to meet a bunch of interesting people.

Or how writing a daily email:

  • allows you to connect with people (hi!),
  • provides you with a growing body of work,
  • gives you an easy place to point people who want to know more about you and how you think,
  • can work as a portfolio (if you’re a writer, anyway),
  • AND ensures that you are forever clarifying and refining your thinking.

It’s marketing’s version of garlic scapes.

Scaping by,
James

P.S. Looking for pictures of garlic scapes ‘in situ,’ I found this stunner of our garden in the morning mist from July 2022. I had to show you 🙂