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[ Sampler Assortments ]
[ Pickle & Preserve Garlic ]
[ Artichoke (Softneck) Garlics ]
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[ Creole Garlics ]
[ Porcelain Garlics ]
[ Purple Stripe Garlics ]
[ Rocambole Garlics ]
[ Silverskin (Softneck) Garlics ]
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We're Looking for Growers With Big, Healthy Bulbs - Do you Have What It Takes?
If you are an organic/natural grower of garlic and have some good size, well-grown bulbs for sale, please
E-Mail me and let's talk.
It's August of 2007 and we're always looking for top quality garlic.
A tornado/freak hailstorm wiped out our own crop in the late spring of 2000 and we made arrangements with some other growers to purchase garlic from them to sell through our website. It worked so well we have done it every year and it has worked well for everyone involved. We have become a resource for small and medium size organic/natural garlic growers. If you are an organic/natural grower who can grow more than you can sell locally, and if your garlic meets our quality standards, E-Mail me and let's talk about doing some business together. We're looking for the best you have to offer because the people who buy the garlic expect the best, so send us quality garlic - your reputation rests on it and first impressions are very important. This could result in a lot of future repeat sales nationwide from people who have enjoyed your garlic.
Our idea has been to buy from organic growers at regular bulk prices for these unusual strains of garlic and sell at the retail level via the internet. There are lots of good organic growers located in remote rural areas or other areas that do not have adequate local sales. We wish to provide such growers with a market they would not otherwise have and permit them to increase their sales and incomes. We have served as a resource to the public seeking exotic gourmet garlics and then broadened our service to include being a marketing resource for small growers.
By bringing buyer and grower together, we serve a valuable function to both. We realize neither we nor any other small grower can satisfy the market needs for these garlics, but by combining resources, we can help more buyers find their cherished garlics and more growers find a good market for their best garlic.
Our attractive and informative website serves to increase the desire of people to try the garlics they see and read about. By letting garlic lovers know that so many kinds exist and a little about them, we create an appetite for them and also provide people an opportunity to buy them. By providing our customers with large, healthy, well-grown garlic, we foster in them a desire to try even more of these culinary delights. This leads to even more subsequent business. By providing top quality garlic we cause our customers to want to buy from us again and to tell their friends about the interesting garlics they got - everyone wants to share a good thing to make it even better. You cannot generate this kind of excitement with second-rate garlic, only the best will do.
I propose to share the attraction of my website with participating gardeners/growers who want to rent a booth (webpage) on our website and sell direct to the general public with each grower setting their own prices and other customer relations, pretty much like any farmers market in the country. We will provide a webpage of our own set design for each grower using basic information provided by the grower, telling the public who and where the grower is, how their garlic is grown and what kinds of garlic they have available at what prices. At the present time I propose to consider that we will process credit card transactions and forward the full amount of the transactions, minus our commission, to the growers on a timely basis. That is one possibility we will consider.
Even though accepting credit cards can triple your sales, most small growers don't accept credit cards because they only sell for a month or two a year and credit card fees are a year-round thing. I propose to set it up so that the market will accept cards and give members a regular accounting. I also propose to give members a year round page so people will have all year long to get to know them and place orders for fall delivery. This will allow growers to communicate with people and get some idea of their market appeal and plan accordingly.
I expect that we will continue to sell our special sampler assortments to give the customers tastes of the many different kinds so as to whet their appetites for more. I do not; however, plan on selling any bulk garlic orders myself with all bulk sales to going to the growers by having the customer buy direct from them using their credit card through our processing facilities. I am also considering accepting garlic from at least some growers in lieu of cash for certain parts of the costs involved so that the gardener/grower is out as little actual cash as the circumstances permit. The garlic which I would accept in lieu of cash will be used to fill sampler assortment orders and the grower's name will be posted on each cultivar of garlic in the assortments in order to help make more sales for each gardener/grower.
The bottom line is that We can put in a website for people where there is a greater drawing power than they could generate on their own. It's a well known fact that even if you have an excellent website, it doesn't mean much if you can't attract customers to it among the millions of websites on the internet. We've been on the internet for 10 years now and are very highly placed in the search engines, usually on the first page and often the very first listing and have been for the last few years.
Our website attracts a lot of people, some of whom are customers looking for garlic to buy and our number of hits continues to increase every year. Our website has had over a million hits since 1997 and we have had 250,000 in the last 12 months and the number of hits per day continues to increase as more and more people find our website and tell their friends. Over a thousand other websites link to us and this continues to help keep us highly placed in the search engines.
We receive a lot of free publicity each year in newspaper and magazine stories by writers who have found our website to be attractive and uncommonly informative. In the past few years we have been recommended by the NY times, Dallas Morning News, San Francisco Chronicle among many others and Forbes, Organic Gardening, Mother Earth News and many other magazines. So far this year, the AP wrote a story about garlic and mentioned us favorably and sent it to every newspaper in the country. Also a video about us is now circulating all around the country on the RFD-TV channel and we're getting some response from that. Texas Gardener magazine published an article about us and the garlic in their Sept/Oct. 2007 issue. There will almost certainly be more.
I believe partnering with many gardeners/growers will help our website , the growers and the customers, all - everyone wins, no losers.
I also believe we are the best opportunity small remotely located growers have to increase their customer base to the whole USA and increase sales and profits.
I also believe that by eliminating the middleman, me, and reducing the transportation costs by having the grower ship directly to the consumer/gardener, the prices will come down somewhat, allowing for lower end user prices.
I also believe that public demand for these gourmet garlics is increasing very rapidly and the marketing opportunities are vast and that people will be looking more to the internet even to shop locally and will prefer to purchase as close to home as possible.
I also believe that as the public learns more about the pharmacological properties of garlic, the demand will increase.
I also believe we are on the ground floor of a business that will continue to grow at a rapid rate and lots of money will be made by those prepared for the opportunity.
Finally, I believe the American public is sick and tired of grocery store garlic and are eagerly willing to pay extra for superior quality, toxin-free, non-irradiated garlic.
For this year, 2007, we are going to buy at volume pricing from growers and sell at retail and ship direct to the customer. Next year, 2008, we will be set up as a gourmet garlic growers market. I will be talking with a lot of other growers this year and trying to interest as many as possible and may even come up with some alternative way to do it. Anything is possible.
March 2, 2008 Update.We are still looking at ways to put things together so that they will work for everyone and there are a lot of options to consider and it just takes time. When it is time for things to come together, they need to be able to do so smoothly.
Friends, for the last three months the biggest concern I have had to deal with is whether or not Yahoo will remain stable enough to continue successfully hosting our website. With upcoming layoffs and their current problems, I may decide to relocate the hosting of my website. They have been good hosts the last two and a half years and appear to continue to stay up and online intact and traffic continues to flow. They just no longer measure that traffic well and if it weren't for our own hit counting software we would have no idea how much website traffic we have been getting. As it is, our count is very accurate and website traffic continues to build. We had 275,000 visitors last year with unique IP addresses, up from about 200,000 the year before.
It doesn't matter how good your website is if its host can't keep it online all the time. We have not yet had this problem with Yahoo but must anticipate the possibility in light of their present problems. Therefore, it is imperative that we immediately seek a suitable back up site to be located on a different host.
Things are still up in the air with Yahoo! and I am actively looking at some other hosting arrangements in case Yahoo! gets intolerably worse. Microsoft is reportedly telling its employees already how to deal with the acquisition of Yahoo! and how to phase it into their present organization, so it's clear to me that they intend to buy out Yahoo! and what they are doing is haggling over price. The question is whether it can remain online and intact reliably enough to continue using them as a host and how things will be in the apparently inevitable transition into Microsoft.
I will not put my fellow growers in the situation of having to depend on an unreliable webhost. Only when the hosting situation solidifies to the point where it is dependable will I put anyone else on my website. There's a lot more to doing this than meets the eye; for example, you can't just say let's interface this with that, you have to know exactly how the interface can be accomplished, if it can be and what to watch out for and how to deal with every little ripple that it creates. I have to check out the legal implications involved in processing credit/debit card sales for others and a lot of similar things as well as how to implement the new system using my present shopping cart and other things. In short, I'm just not ready yet to get the online garlic growers market up just yet but I'm working on it and hope to be able to put together something viable soon.
The growers I have met generally have had a cooperative attitude toward other growers and bought and sold among themselves as well as the public. Most seemed to be conscientious growers and there has been an emphasis on organics and general sustainability. Together we will be able to find ways to serve the steadily increasing Gourmet Garlic marketplace and live long and prosper with it.
If you have been looking for a niche market of some kind where you could make some extra money via the internet, this may be your best chance if you are consciencious enough to grow superior garlic.
One of my chief concerns is garlic disease. Unfortunately, there are a few different garlic diseases and pests running around in this country and they're all over the place. I cannot in good conscience support or condone selling such garlic to the public knowing that they will plant it and infect their gardens with garlic diseases and/or pests. I do my best to educate growers at all levels on what pathogens and pests are and how to recognize them and suggest ways to deal with them sustainably.
While I can't guarantee anyone else's garlic to be absolutely disease free planting stock, I want to do everything I can to see that it is, anyway. Sometimes garlic that looks, smells and feels good is diseased and the observer is fooled. But at least we're making a sincere effort to help growers learn how to avoid bad garlic.
If small growers want sell small amounts of garlic via mail order, it is in their best interest to send only good, disease/pest-free garlic.
If the garlic is good, the customer may want to buy more, if some of it is bad, they almost certainly won't.
The small growers best advertisment is his/her garlic. People will naturally flock to great garlic, lousy garlic repels them - and should.
Garlic is too good of a thing to grow poorly.
Click here to learn more about garlic diseases and how to deal with them.
As you can see, I am still trying to work out something that will be good for everyone, long term. Please e-mail me back with any ideas you have and let's continue to develop this. In the meantime I will communicate with other growers and maybe we can come up with something that will work.
One thing is for sure - I have created a website that can sell more garlic than I can grow and I wish to share this resource with buyers and growers alike.
It will also make many more varieties available than I can grow in my geographic location.
More to come soon.
[ Our Home Page ] [ Online Catalog ] [ Garlic Overview ] [ 40 Varieties ] [ Growing Garlic ] [ Cooking with Garlic ] [ Chemistry of Garlic ] [ Garlic Pills & Oils, Etc. ] [ Health Benefits ] [ Links ] [ FAQ's ] [ How to Order ]
[ Sampler Assortments ]
[ Pickle & Preserve Garlic ]
[ Artichoke (Softneck) Garlics ]
[ Asiatic Garlics ]
[ Creole Garlics ]
[ Porcelain Garlics ]
[ Purple Stripe Garlics ]
[ Rocambole Garlics ]
[ Silverskin (Softneck) Garlics ]
Our webpages have been visited over a million times in the last ten years by people who just want a little room to grow...Thanks.