the Crossroads Companion

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 [...]

The Garlic Circle Today we will begin the garlic harvest. This is one of those crops that pins me down to time and memory in beautiful ways. I’m not sure where to start in the circle of time. So I’ll start with today. Today we will [...]

My kids love chicken. For the most part, I will only eat the meat I raise. So this winter I called up a farmer friend and asked if she’d give me the low down on raising meat birds. She was. I took copious notes. She assured me if I already [...]

A short newsletter this week, as admittedly with rain coming Thursday and Friday both we are trying to cram 5 days worth of work into 3! Doudlah:  You may have noticed that in our online customization store we are offering Doudlah Farm’s [...]

Young Friends One of the gifts Covid gave me was to break the barrier a bit more between being the farm boss and being friends with my crew. Pre-covid, I usually didn’t try to socialize with my crew. We chatted it up in the fields of [...]

Welcome either back, or to, Crossroads Community Farm! We are so happy to be feeding you this season. The first box of the season is a beauty, and we are proud to share it with you.  The vegetables are a result of so many different [...]

As the pandemic wears on and the darkness and cold close in, I have been enjoying the surprising number of letters that have arrived at the farm.  When opening renewal check envelopes, it is common to receive little post-it notes of thanks or [...]

The food system was built on the stolen land and stolen labor of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and people of color. – Soul Fire Farm, from their google reparations map As a white, privileged farmer, the statement above is something I [...]

Dear NASA and SpaceX,  As humble farmers, we have a request: can you invent affordable work gloves that keep hands warm, dry, and dextrous in cold and wet environments? We fully understand that you may desire us to direct our request to the US [...]

Potatoes were harvested by digging fork/hand at the first farm I ever worked for. I can still remember the sense of awe as I watched our potato digger, with its rumbly belts and chains, undercut and toss potatoes out neatly on the ground for the [...]

Covid forces creativity, no doubt. As the weather cools, we have been trying to figure out how to eat lunch and preserve our safety.  Our general lunch space is in the garage of the farmhouse. We have two rows of tables and ample room to spread [...]

Three cold hardy crops remain in the field: Brussels Sprouts, tatsoi, and kale. As we didn’t get to the Brussels yesterday, we found ourselves harvesting them today in the rain. Cold rain has a way of quieting field chatter. With the rain [...]

The other day, my friend Rachel asked me how I was doing with the seasonal transition. She asked me with a very knowing, intense gaze – both because she is a therapist and tends to ask questions this way, and because she is married to a [...]

Across the span of my farming career, I’ve encountered lots of snippets of sexism. Sometimes the sexism is overt, like when an older male farmer neighbor will be talking to Mike and I standing together and only look at and address Mike [...]

As always, the end of the summer season seems to land itself so quickly! Overall, we’ve had a fantastic season. Our crew was so fun, hardworking, covid-careful, and amazing! Meanwhile, growing conditions were insanely good. We feel so [...]

On my weekly whiteboard of madness, today’s big task (and tomorrow’s too) is garlic planting. Garlic planting holds a special place for me each season. It pins me down to a very specific time of year, similar to how a birthday or [...]