The piquillos are planted in May and picked by hand when red, in September.
Pili Echarri is sixty and has a market garden in Sartaguda, by the Ebro, that she worked with her husband. He died in 2020. Pili thought about renting it out.
Her daughter Ainhoa is thirty-three and was a lab technician in Pamplona. She asked her mother to give her a year. That year they set up a small roasting room in the tool shed.
Now they roast and peel by hand the piquillos from their own garden and from two neighbours' gardens. Ainhoa says the Ribera has more and more greenhouses and fewer and fewer market gardens. She wants hers to stay a market garden.
