Garlic Queen

Angela Nickle (BA ’94) is standing in a field explaining why garlic enthusiasts are completely nuts, which is hilarious because she’s talking about herself. She’s got dirt ground so deep under her fingernails, it’s become a permanent feature.

“Put a bunch of garlic people in a room and our partners are in the corner thinking, ‘Are they still talking?’” At 60, she’s the self-proclaimed garlic queen of 15 acres outside Uxbridge, Ont., growing 40 varieties with the devotion of someone who’s found religion in vegetables.

She wasn’t always like this.

“I took human resources and marketing and business at York, and now I’m farming,” she says. “I’ve gone from people to animals.” Her mother’s sudden death in 2003 provided the catalyst.

An Italian immigrant, her mother did piecework as a seamstress, until she got so fast the bosses cut her rates, just to keep from paying her what she earned. To advance, she turned to upholstery before starting her own business, inspiring her daughter to be entrepreneurial herself. Losing that support was devastating. “It did a real 180 on me. I took a whole year off.”

During that year of grief, her daughter, then in Grade 2, wanted a pony. Most parents would have bought a goldfish. Nickle said, “You need a farm if you want a pony.” The kid didn’t blink. Neither did Angela. “It was always my mother’s dream to have a farm and to be living off the land.”

Today, Lindsay is 29, handling the livestock and growing schedules, while her mother does what she actually loves: converting strangers to the church of garlic. They call it FN Happy Farm (the F for family, the N for Nickle, because Happy Farm was already registered). In summer and fall, visitors come to buy produce or take Angela’s garlic braiding workshops, learning to turn ordinary bulbs into something approaching folk art while she preaches the gospel of growing your own food.

Everybody can grow garlic. You can start with one bulb and just go from there

“Everybody can grow garlic. You can start with one bulb and just go from there. You can eat it as a flower, make jam, powders, pesto.” Her eyes get bright when she talks bulbs: evangelical bright.

She grows everything chemical-free, because “I feed you as I want to eat. We’ve got enough chemicals in our body already.”

It’s an approach that might give conventional farmers nightmares, but Nickle learned something at York that most people miss: “You just can’t plant and pray. You need planning, marketing, systems.”

She started with chickens, then added turkeys when her accountant pointed out she was losing money. Everything was a progression that led to garlic. The farm now operates with international volunteers and community-supported agriculture members, proving that spreadsheets and idealism aren’t mutually exclusive.

But she’s not kidding herself about the reality. “Farming is a grind, grind, grind.” The cycle never stops: fall planting, spring cultivation, summer harvest, winter planning. When the ground finally freezes solid, she does what any sensible person would do: “December through April, I’m out of here. I’m gone. I’m in the Caribbean.”

Which leaves her with plenty of time to think about the next crop, the next convert, the next person who might discover what she learned two decades ago: that food doesn’t just appear in grocery stores, and the people who grow it deserve more than an afterthought.

Nickle’s often talking to young people, sharing the lesson her own career pivot taught her: “You must get an education. You never know what’s going to happen. You need to show you have the ability to learn.” ■