What do you do after you have spent an entire morning pulverizing cloves of garlic in a food processor?

Deb Carreau, co-chair of the Essex Garden Club May Market, didn’t dare go into her house.

“I smelled terrible. I took off my clothes outside,” she says.

The final result of that pulverized garlic, however, is one of the main attractions of the Essex Garden Club May Market: the specially formulated garlic salt that the club sells.

The May Market will take place on Saturday, May 13, from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Essex Town Park on Main Street. Mara Johnson co-chairs the event.

The formula for the garlic salt remains closely guarded.

“The recipe is more secret than nuclear codes,” Deb says. She adds that there is always a long waiting line of purchasers, including one shopper who sends a case of garlic salt every year to her son, a chef at a five-star restaurant in California.

The May Market sells a wide variety of plants, bulbs, cut flowers, and herbs and ventures farther afield in jewelry, accessories, and even some original art. Deb says one shopper comes down from Maine every year to buy perennial bulbs, and garden club lore has it that she is always first in line. All the perennial bulbs come from the gardens of either members or friends of the garden club. Because the perennials are locally grown, Deb points out, they have already proved suitable for local gardens.

Another popular booth sells tomato plants — 400 in all — sizes and varieties, from cherry tomatoes to Big Boys.

The May Market raises money for the garden club’s scholarship and campership program as well as for the town beautification activities that are an ongoing mission of the group. The garden club’s work includes cleaning up and planting at the town park on Main Street, Dickinson Park, and the various traffic islands around the town.

This year, the garden club is offering two scholarships of $5,000 for local high school seniors planning to study in an area related to the environment and the natural world.

In all, the garden club, as a result of its own fundraising activities and several generous grants, will offer 40 campership weeks this summer.

The camperships, for students at Essex Elementary and John Winthrop Middle schools, are for the two-day camps, Bushy Hill and Pequot Sherwood, at the Incarnation Center in Deep River, as well as Essex Park and Recreation summer day camp.

Deb got involved in the garden club after she retired in 2020 from United Technologies Corporation (now reconfigured as Raytheon Technologies), where she had been vice president of finance for the last 14 years of her career. In finance at her level, Deb says she was used to being the only woman in the room at management meetings.

Her corporate career, in addition, includes positions as controller of both Otis Elevator and Carrier Corporation and director of internal audit at United Technologies.

With the extensive travel for her corporate responsibilities, Deb recalls that at one time, she had accumulated 2 million frequent flier miles.

Deb grew up in Blackstone, Massachusetts, a small town near Providence, Rhode Island. Her mother was a para-educator and her father a high school teacher at the local school that she would have attended. However, she did not want to have her own father as a teacher, so she asked to go to private school.

Her parents told her she would have to pay for it herself, and that’s just what she did. She says she got her first part-time job at 13 and did things from scooping ice cream to working in a nursing home.

“It was good; it taught me you have to work to get what you want,” she says.

Deb started out college at the University of Massachusetts, majoring in physical therapy, but after a job in a sports clinic, she decided the field wasn’t for her. She dropped out of school, went to Florida, worked as a waitress, a bartender, and other employment she describes as “stupid stuff.”

She found a mentor in a bookkeeper at one job who interested her in accounting, and she went back to school and earned her degree in business administration and management. From a college dropout, she got an award for outstanding student in accounting. Later, while working, she earned a master’s degree in computer science at Bentley University.

Since retirement, Deb has had time to connect with more things in Essex and has become treasurer of the Essex Land Trust. She regularly walks land trust trails. In the winter, she and her husband Wright, an engineer who retired six months after she did, are skiers, often in Vermont or Colorado. That also gives the couple a chance to see their two grown sons, one in each state.

As a shopper at the May Market this year, Deb plans to “hit every booth.” And she admits as a troubleshooting floater, she will be constantly on the run. She expects her own professional computer expertise will be useful for an innovation this year: The May Market is accepting credit card payments. There has already been training on how to use the card reader but if there are glitches, “and there always are a few,” Deb says, “I will be there to help.”

Essex Garden Club May Market

Saturday, May 13, 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Essex Town Park on Main Street