Our HIP Team

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Dan Lagueux, a man with vision, integrity, high morality, and the "Hippie" behind the Peas. 

Dan was born and grew up in Quebec. He taught himself English by watching American sitcoms. He didn’t know it at the time, but this would serve him well in his future. Dan served his country by joining the Canadian Service. He learned a lot in those years: strength, teamwork, how to be a leader. After getting out, he was working in an upscale restaurant where he would meet his future wife and the mother of his two beautiful girls. 

An opportunity came up which would move his young family to the states. In trying to teach his daughters the importance of following your dreams, he realized he wasn’t following his. Next followed a few years of very hard work, but he had the support of his entire family. Dan and his wife, Valerie, opened New England’s Tap House & Grille in January of 2013, a now thriving restaurant in his hometown of Hooksett, NH.

Dan being the entrepreneur that he is, saw a piece missing from the equation. Dan has always tried to get the best, freshest product to serve his guests at the Tap House, why not grow it himself. And, oh, the property he found to do just that. Over the river and through the woods from his home, his dream came to fruition. With an emphasis on ecologically safe growing practices, Hip Peas Farm is showing the fruits of all the hard work Dan and his family put in to this adventure.

As a kid, Michael used to help his dad in their subsistence farm in Merrimack, New Hampshire. Michael graduated from Merrimack High School in 1987. After graduation, he joined the U.S. Army where he served for four years as a radar repair technician. Upon completing his time in the army, Mike worked in restaurants until 2011, when he took a hiatus to became a stay at home dad. Last year, Michael joined the Hip Peas team to become a 5th generation farmer. Mike specializes in maintenance and landscaping, and is a key member of the farm team. 

Kevin Gagnon knows what it means to move through the land slowly enough to understand it. He has walked the Appalachian Trail — all 2,189 miles of it — and completed the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada, 2,668 miles through desert, mountain, and forest. These are not weekend hobbies. They are the biography of a man who pays attention to where things grow and why.

That same attention runs Hip Peas Farm. Kevin tends the land that supplies New England's Tap House Grille and Oscar Barn Venue — no synthetic inputs, no shortcuts, just soil and season and the kind of knowledge that comes from years of working the same ground. He grows the vegetables that arrive on your table, and he takes that seriously.

Since 2013 he has also worked behind the bar at the Tap House — which means he has spent more than a decade standing between the farm and the guest, telling anyone who'll listen exactly where what they're eating came from. He is, in the best possible sense, a man who cannot stop teaching. Whether it's the students he works with at the farm or the couple at the end of the bar asking about the night's specials, Kevin's answer is always the same: let me tell you about what we grew.

Enya grows 27 varieties of flowers on Hip Peas Farm — from seed, by hand, without chemical pesticides or herbicides. The same values that run the farm run her garden: patience, attention to season, and the belief that what you put into the ground matters.

Because she grows with the seasons, no two harvests are the same. The flowers on your table in October are not the flowers from July. They are what the land is doing right now, cut at the right moment and arranged with the kind of care that only comes from having grown them yourself.

Enya has believed since the beginning that flowers are one of the most direct ways people have of saying something true — marking a moment, offering comfort, showing up for someone without words. At Oscar Barn, that belief has a home. Every bouquet that comes through these doors started in the soil a few steps away, tended by someone who knew exactly what it was going to become.