TEULON, Man. – On a hot summer day, stepping into Shelley Drohomereski’s greenhouse is like walking into a rainforest. It is flush with humidity and potent with the scent of oregano, mint, lemon verbena and other herbs.
But Drohomereski isn’t keeping her small slice of paradise to herself.
She has built a business around delivering trays of live herbs from her Teulon farm to Winnipeg restaurants, where chefs clip off what they need for each entrŽe.
“People want to eat at places where they know that everything that’s going in is as fresh as fresh can be,” she said.
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Drohomereski, 29, started her Herb Thyme farm two years ago after seeing a chef in a Vancouver restaurant clipping his own herbs. She loved cooking and gardening, and so decided to see what Manitoba chefs were using.
She discovered most chefs ordered from distributors, who shipped from California. They had to order two weeks in advance, and the minimum amounts were often too large for smaller restaurants.
Pricing was a problem too. “They’d pay $8 a pound for basil in the summer, but they’d pay $38 a pound in the winter,” she said.
So Drohomereski decided to fill the niche.
Fresh from the tray
She supplies about 50 kinds of fresh herbs, either still growing in trays as they are sold or clipped during the past 24 hours.
Her prices are consistent year-round and range from $16 to $26 per pound.
She caters to chefs’ needs and will sell as little as a quarter-pound at a time. (A pound is about the size of a small throw cushion.)
Drohomereski says business is up about 70 percent from last year and her customer base is gradually expanding.
But she said there have been a few problems to weed out.
To build the greenhouse and start the business, she got one-year loans from her bank and a local business development group. She heated the building with propane, but the heating bills were higher than she was quoted.
So she refinanced one loan to buy a wood-burning outdoor furnace, which heats water and pumps it through radiators in the greenhouse.
Drohomereski also had never grown herbs before, and had to rely on trial and error to learn how to work with them.
From her survey of chefs, she knew they love french tarragon. But during her first winter, she couldn’t get it to grow. She checked for bugs, read books, potted it and repotted it.
Then in the spring, the herb “just took off,” she said, adding that she now realizes it’s the kind of perennial that needs to rest during the cold season.
Herbs grow at different rates, and she had to chart their growth to know how to keep a constant supply seeded and growing. For example, she said oregano takes 30 days to mature in the summer, but twice as long during the winter.
Working with a local biological control company, she has managed to work most of the problems out of her operation. She introduces ladybugs and other helpful insects into the greenhouse to eat pests. She does not use any chemicals.
To market her service, Drohomereski goes to chefs’ association meetings, donates herbs to culinary events and knocks on doors.
She said about a dozen restaurants buy the trays of live plants. They’re grown in a peat and vermiculite mixture rather than dirt to meet health standards. And she has about 50 other customers who buy clipped herbs.
“Once you start using them, you’ll never go back to using the stuff from the jars,” she said, raving about their flavor, smell and eye appeal.
“They’re not all that same dried kind of forest green color that the stuff in the bottle is.”
Drohomereski said she has always been involved in small business. “I have an entrepreneurial gene or something,” she laughs. She has worked as an accountant and helped her parents with a food processing business.
Long work hours
With the herbs, she also gets to experience the joys of farming. “They’re just like having animals,” she said. “They have to be watered and fed,” adding that she works 14-hour days in the summer and often has to meet shipments at the airport at erratic hours.
When things slow down, she likes to cook – with herbs, of course. Thyme is her favorite because of its versatility.
Drohomereski would like to expand and maybe add another greenhouse, and look for customers in the other prairie provinces.
But for now, she feels she’s been successful. “From starting with basically nothing, no plants, no inventory, no anything, it has grown over the past two years.
“Does that sound like a bad pun?”
