the Crossroads Companion

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 salty, spicy and hard. This can be yummy. Warm, [...]

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, the crew will start over there. Myself or another [...]

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!). This week the Noltnerwyss kids are with me up in [...]

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 more than two hours in the office during the high [...]

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 families. In general, they come from hetero-normative [...]

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 come enjoy? A swimming pool so kids would want 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 shorter from here on out. I wonder if any of you [...]

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 poem – the home cook in me finds it [...]

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 here we are, and the food is harvested and ready [...]

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 – curating the last set of recipes, writing [...]

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 sell items with shorter storage lives. In mid [...]

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 delicious sprouts still available in December! Amazing! [...]

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 this year – cooking chickens I raised, and [...]

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. We took a huge risk as a small business and [...]

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 office. A coziness settles in.  We are still [...]

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 intelligence. Humbled by how articulate they are. The [...]

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 and I have operated this farm together, I am most [...]

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 ingredients that tend to be available at the same time. [...]

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 mid morning snack. Ever heard of Muhammara? First [...]

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 I knew a grad student at UW who was culling deer [...]

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 of the season, with a 6-8 week recuperation time [...]

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 seasonal recipes that combine ingredients that [...]

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 September transition time as the yellow time. [...]

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, juicy, and beautiful conversations weave their way [...]

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 food movement and what I think needs to be done to [...]

The Nesco Dream One of the amazing things about running a farm is having so much food at our fingertips to put up for winter! There’s jam to make, hot sauce, spinach to process, pickles, kim chi, sauerkraut, corn to put up, peppers to [...]

Well we’ve hit that point where the crew is ready for the cool times. Just last week I was trying to motivate them through the hot, hot days with a reminder of how soon our hands will be cold. I tried my best in the green beans to get them [...]

The other day I went to water in the greenhouse. I delighted in the brief task. It was a little moment to say hello to the baby plants, watch the droplets fall, hear the fans whir, take a moment away from the pulsing push of harvesting and [...]

Stress pulls at us farmers – just like it pulls at everyone else. Diseases damage crops we’ve worked hard to produce. Or crops can unexpectedly do so well that suddenly we don’t have enough hands to harvest them! Drought causes [...]

Peppers are a long season crop. We seed them in April in tiny flats with 200 cells per tray. Then we pot them up in larger trays so that the plants get nice and big. Then we harden them off outside. Next, we use an implement to shape raised beds [...]