Backyard Garlic

Meet Margaret Witham and Rebecca Hennessy

Who we are: We knew that we wanted to start a food business but we weren’t sure we had found the right thing for us when we met Don Womack, “The Garlic Guy,” at a 2015 Farm and Food Conference in Nashua, N.H. Don welcomed us to his farm and we were soon hooked on garlic. In October of that year, we planted our first crop in our own Portsmouth, N.H., and while it grew — garlic is in the ground for nine months — so did our business plan. The first real test for knowing what we had gotten ourselves into came at the Button Factory Open Studios. Our Backyard Garlic grinder jars sold out before the weekend was over! That’s when we knew that our hunch that we had something special was right.

Our next big change will come this summer when we move our entire operation to Eliot, Maine. There we will have a much bigger “backyard” to grow even more garlic to keep up with customer demand and our own love of growing the stuff. We will have a larger dehydration facility and look forward to producing more product.

What we produce: Dehydrated garlic in a refillable spice jar with attached grinder lid, and we offer Backyard Garlic Refill Bags ... to keep your grinder jar topped off and the cycle of convenient garlic deliciousness going.

Why you should try it: There are over 100 — maybe more — varieties of garlic and, yes, they do taste slightly different, ranging from mild to quite hot. Every year, Backyard Garlic makes a blend of six to seven different varieties of garlic. Each grinder jar and refill bag contains our tried and true staples of German X-Hardy, German Red and Russian Red with the rest a fun experiment with different varieties year to year.

Where to find it: With the support of our Seacoast communities, Backyard Garlic has continued to grow since … [and we have] added more markets to our vending schedule and have been lucky enough to be stocked on the shelves of many New England stores and farm stands. Backyard Garlic grows garlic and buys garlic from partner farmers: Fat Peach Farm, Madbury, N.H.; Willoughby Farm, Kensington, N.H.; and Side Hill Farm, Madison, Maine.

Website: backyardgarlic.farm

Photo Credit: Margaret Witham and Rebecca Hennessy. Courtesy photo.