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07/05/2016 12:00 AMVampires? Werewolves? Demons? Don’t worry. Dave Sousa has your back. He grows and markets garlic—the pungent plant with the reputation not simply for its penetrating odor but also for warding off problems from malevolent spirits to high cholesterol. In fact, Dave’s business card reads, Essex Garlic Company—Vampires hate us.
Dave says that the taste of fresh-grown garlic is a far more rewarding gastronomic experience than chopping a supermarket clove. “You just can’t compare,” he says.
And visitors to his booth at the Ivoryton Farmer’s Market get to judge for themselves. Dave give samples of garlic bread, spread with a topping of his own garlic, crushed and mixed with basil, parsley, oregano, olive oil a bit of butter. “That’s what sells the garlic, when they taste the bread,” he says.
Dave also has cards with other recipes featuring garlic for roasting chicken and meat. “Garlic is good on anything; what doesn’t go well with garlic?” Dave asks. Then he pauses to add a caution. “The only thing garlic doesn’t work with is bacon,” he admits.
Dave is a regular at the Ivoryton Farmer’s Market on summer Saturdays from 10:30 a.m. to 1 pm. There he is known as Dave, the Garlic Man. For the last five years, he has also been the manager of the market, which has grown to some 25 booths from three stalls in the parking lot of the building once owned by Aggie Waterman, the first market manager. (The building, which then housed Aggie’s restaurant, now is the site of the Blue Hound Cookery.) According to Dave, the market now includes vendors of fresh produce, meat, fish, local crafts, and coffee.
The story of Dave’s garlic begins with a sad story. He and his wife Rosemary lost their 17 year-old son Eric in a car accident ten years ago. To fill the void in his life, Dave started working in his garden at his home in Ivoryton. “I felt better when I pulled weeds,” he recalls. He began planting new things, garlic among them. He gave the zesty bulbs to friends and family who were so enthusiastic about the garlic that soon he had outgrown his home garden in Ivoryton.
For the past six years, Dave, has leased four acres from Donald Higgins on which he now grows a number of different kinds of garlic plants, including elephant, German white, and Spanish Rioja garlics. He pulls up the thick stalks of the plant to expose the garlic bulb so a visitor can see how the appearance of the varieties contrast and explains the differences in their taste. He now also cultivates several kinds of potatoes, including Magic Molly, a fingerling potato with purple skin and deep purple flesh. He sells the potatoes, along with shallots and onions that he grows, at his stall in the farmer’s market.
Garlic, Dave says, is relatively easy to grow, but people sometimes tell him they planted it in the spring and got nothing. That’s because they have overlooked the first rule of garlic planting: do it in the fall. “It starts growing in the winter, but it grows slowly,” Dave says.
Garlic may be the spice of life, but Dave’s life has many other aspects. For over 20 years, he has worked as an electronic engineer at Whelan Engineering in Chester. He is active in the Essex Republican Town Committee and is now serving his second term on the Essex Economic Development Commission. Both he and Rosemary are active in the Ivoryton Village Alliance, a group of local business people and interested local citizens who support not only the Farmer’s Market, but the Ivoryton Illuminations in the winter holiday season and the Fourth of July Parade.
At this time of year, Dave spends nearly every evening down at the field in Westbrook, weeding and watering his plants. He has some machinery to help with the work, but machinery of a special kind. Dave is an enthusiast of old farm machines, with the mechanical skill to keep the classic vehicles running.
The garlic he tends is ready to harvest when half the leaves on the stalk of the plant have turned brown. (The tall stem looks somewhat like the stalk of a tiger lily and Dave points out that the lily is a member of the onion family, as is garlic.)
According to Dave, harvesting garlic from the ground does not create the distinctive aroma for which the fragrant bulb is best known. But if you have been slicing and dicing, Dave says there is no real antidote for the lingering smell that the garlic cloves produce. Nor does he see why there should be. “Antidote, why would you want an antidote,” he asks. “You can never have too much garlic.”
For more information, go to: www.essexgarlic.com.