Grow Garlic for yourself or for market

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Like all home-grown food, the flavour of fresh garlic is so much better than store bought. “There’s education that’s needed and mostly it’s palate education,” says farmer Jim Cappelini. “Once people experience the [taste] difference, they rarely want to go back [to imported store-bought.]”

Asked how he got into garlic farming Jim said, “So we bought this property in 2008 and we had this commitment to pay off the mortgage in five years….we didn’t think at the time that we were buying a farm. We were buying a piece of property that was rural…. And so we thought, what can we do on a piece of land?”

“My wife was the gardener and she knew she did not want to be a farmer,” says Jim, who started with a handful of garlic bulbs and eventually expanded to 40,000 bulbs.

Asked if there is anything that can go wrong Jim says “Everybody should be very afraid of not curing their garlic properly. If you don’t cure your garlic, then any residual moisture stuck between the wrappers and the bulbs…will inevitably get mold.”

And is it too late to start growing garlic for sale in large quantities? Jim says “there’s a lot of room [for new farmers]. We still only grow about 15% of the garlic we consume in Canada.”

Website: rasacreekfarm.com