Wait - you sell Bath Bombs and GARLIC??!!

Yep. You read that right. Not only does our business create incredibly fun bath and body products, we also grow hard neck garlic! Seemingly a strange combo, right? Stick with me to see how this is connected!

I've always enjoyed nature. Gardening and creativity go hand in hand. We started The Rustic Bee when we got bees. We had beautiful yellow beeswax and we were at a loss of what to do with it! That led to the development of The Rustic Bee's line of Beeswax Lip Balms that are still a favourite of our customers today! Well, the bees are gone from our farm as summers are a very busy time for us. Checking the hives and harvesting honey became too challenging from a time perspective and we decided to move onto different things. That led us to garlic growing in about 2017! See the connection? Nature, gardening, growing things!

We now grow about 12000 heads of hard neck garlic made up of about 8-10 varieties. We plant in late September and allow the garlic cloves to spend the winter nestled under about 4 inches of soil and 5 inches of straw. Come spring, they poke their leaves through it all and the cycle continues! Throughout the summer, weeding can become labour intensive and we're constantly looking for new ideas to keep the weeds at a minimum, naturally. Scapes, or the coincidentally delicious flower stem of the garlic plant, poke up mid June. If you have the opportunity to try scapes, you won't regret it! Use them like you would green onions. They can be grilled, made into pesto, chopped into salads...you name it. Early to mid August means garlic harvest. We use an undercutter and tractor which loosens the soil around the bulb, making them easier to pull their soily roots from their 9 month home. We cut the leaves and place them in racks to cure for 2-3 weeks. At that point we re-trim the stem, trim off the roots, clean up the loose papers and bag them up for sale! We sell our garlic through our website and some local retailers (check out the Grapevine Deli in St. Albert, Alberta or the Edmonton Corn Maze just west of the city during the season).

Bath bombs and garlic...the perfect business model!