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The Garlic Grind

It’s a fall day in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and walking down the street I catch a strong whiff of garlic.  The magnitude of the smell is what you’d expect when walking through the Italian section in a big city – an aroma built up from restaurant after restaurant peeling and cooking with garlic all in the same small neighborhood.  The scent hangs in the air, surrounding and encompassing you like an aromatic hug – familiar and cozy to anyone who likes it.  I’m passing the house where my neighbor Rebecca lives.  Rebecca is one of the two garlic farmers in town.  The other is her business partner, Margaret.

Portsmouth is the kind of coastal city you would expect to find in New England.  Small, with tightly packed residential neighborhoods whose houses and backyards all back up to one another.  The options for yard space usually range from small to tiny.  The city has a waterfront area lined with restaurants.  In the summer months you can sit on their decks and watch enormous cargo ships and tugboats pass by.  Our neighborhood is a unique one in the city.  Rebecca’s and my houses are both considered to be ‘on agricultural land.’

Both mothers and passionate about sustainable foods, Margaret and Rebecca started their business in part because Rebecca knew how to grow garlic and do it well.  Garlic is planted in the early fall so that it has time to grow roots before the ground freezes, which usually happens around November.  Dormant through winter, the garlic starts growing again in the spring and is eventually harvested about nine months after it’s planted. 

One of the bigger business challenges for Margaret and Rebecca is related to timeline.  After they harvest the garlic and start curing the bulbs in the late summer or early fall, they plant again for the next year.  Later in the fall, after the harvested bulbs are cured, they dehydrate and package their garlic into grinders, just like small pepper mills.  Then they sell the packaged garlic through the winter.  Their sales – how quickly their product sells and when they run out of product – should tell them how much product to plant for next year.  But remember – the garlic for next year has already been planted.  It had to be in order to develop those fall roots.

So far, this is just one of a handful of factors I’ve seen them roll with as business owners.  I think about this while I’m walking down the street and taking in the scent of the garlic that they are dehydrating for this year. 

Rebecca and Margaret had been expecting to get a commercial grade machine to peel their garlic this year instead of doing it all by hand.  A little over a week ago, they were notified by the manufacturer that it wouldn’t be there in time for this year’s peeling and dehydration processing.  Just after that I received an email from Margaret saying that they still needed to crack their 25 pounds of garlic – and that they would take any peeling volunteers available in exchange for crullers and croissants from a local bakery. 

Though theirs is an urban farm and they have a few years of business ownership under their belts, the situation is like that of all farming.  It’s about adapting to your situation.  Their approach:  Perseverance.  They just don’t let the grind get to them.