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This weekend we butchered the 39 chickens I raise to nourish our family. It is always a difficult, spiritual experience for me.  I raise these birds from chick to slaughter. I do this because my [...]

Homemade Croutons are Where It’s At Yep. That’s right. I’m going to write a whole newsletter about making croutons. Store bought croutons are one thing. They are crunchy and [...]

The First Sweet Corn!  This morning was the first harvest of sweet corn! Our sweet corn successions are located at the K property this season. So most Tuesday  mornings now for the next 8 weeks, [...]

Greetings from Minnesota Greetings from family camp! (I’m writing this message on a rainy Friday afternoon, because once I’m actually up at family camp, there is no internet access!). [...]

Playing in the Fields This morning I am forcing myself to do work in the office.  It’s funny, I spend the whole winter doing office work – so many hours! But try and get me to spend [...]

A Magical Place To Grow Up Middle school is tough. No matter where you grow up. The pressure to fit into the norm is intense. In Mt. Horeb, the popular kids don’t come from farming [...]

An Ice-cream Maker I found myself in a conversation the other day, musing about ways to raise the quality of life at the farm house. Build a back porch? Maintain a cozy fire pit for friends to [...]

Happy Solstice! Today marks a special day – the most day light we will experience all year long. It sneaks up on me every time, and I find it so wild to think about how the days only get [...]

My youngest daughter Juna wrote me some poems. (Love love that in general.) Many of the poems are like what you’d expect from a 7 year-old writing poems. Except one. I am in love with this [...]

Welcome! Happy season ’22! It was a long, cold, late spring. Sometimes I wondered if the sun, heat, or food would arrive. We kept seeding and planting, trusting in the cycle of things.  Now [...]

Last Day Joys! Remember when you were a student and all the excitement you felt on the last day of school? That’s me today! Here I am putting together the last communication of the season [...]

Moving Through the Inventory A question we get a lot is, “What are you doing this time of year?” Quick answer: we are steadily moving through our inventory of vegetables, trying to [...]

Waiting for Snow Did you know there are still leeks, brussels sprouts, and kale out in fields that can be harvested?! On the one hand, I’m so excited about that fact. Local greens and [...]

Hopes for a Fuller Story As a grower and lover of food, I’m all about any holiday that encourages people to sit down and share a meal together in gratitude. I’m super excited to host [...]

Risk We are currently in the midst of our renewal drive, asking members of our summer veggie share to sign up for the upcoming 2022 season. It’s not going super well compared to past years. [...]

Buoyancy In a normal season, by late October it starts getting cold. Frosts don’t burn off until mid morning. Most of the crops are out of the ground. Work moves inside to the shed and the [...]

Farming for 30+ years if you include growing up on a farm; 15th season at Crossroads. Love farming because I am not trapped in an office. I grew up without a television in the house. Sweet corn [...]

Meaning and Connection The other week I sat around a fire with some of my closest friends. One is a teacher. One is a professor. Another a doctor. Another a therapist. I felt awed by their [...]

While we are all still very much in harvest mode at the farm, we find ourselves here at the last week of the summer season. It’s hard not to reflect on season #17. Of all the seasons Mike [...]

One of my favorite things to do in winter time is peruse cookbooks. There’s so much promise, so much potential in them. I’m always looking for seasonal recipes that combine [...]

I sat down to write your newsletter, and then I felt a strong pull to my refrigerator. The muhammara was calling to me. I just had to finish up the tiny bit remaining in a jar – a perfect [...]

This particular morning of the year is always a little sad. It’s the day the pigs go in to slaughter. I have very complex emotions around eating meat. I was a vegetarian for a decade. Then [...]

Hello! — First and foremost, I’d like to send out our well wishes to Seth, a crew member who slipped while getting off a skid steer and fractured two ribs. He is out for the remainder [...]

Dishing Up the Dirt – Take a Look! One of my favorite things to do in winter time is peruse cookbooks. There’s so much promise, so much potential in them. I’m always looking for [...]

The Where’s My? Micro-Season While sharing dinner with a friend recently, I was talking about how everything is yellow right now. How I think of back to school time, that late August early [...]

You Town Farming is a collection of repetitive manual tasks. One of the ways we all get through this demanding work,  is to keep conversation in the fields.  All kinds of meaningful, banal, [...]

Local Gratitude One of the crew members on our farm, Sam, has begun their own small scale farm this season. Today in the fields they were asking me about some of my opinions regarding the local [...]