Join me for A Brush With Life. I'm your host, Susan Waughtal. We'll be talking to artists and musicians, inventors and farmers, and other fascinating folks. We'll hear their stories of  successes and challenges, dreams and inspirations. Get ready for A Close Encounter of the Creative Kind.

 Thank you for listening to my very first episode of my very first podcast ever. As I was learning how to do this, I read so many how to be a podcaster books and watched so many YouTube tutorials. A common suggestion was that the first episode should be about yourself so that the listener can learn about the host of the podcast.

So it is in this episode. I will have a conversation with my husband, reminiscing how we came to build our life at Squash Blossom Farm. Squash Blossom Farm is a small, 100 year old farm near Rochester, Minnesota, devoted to local food, local art, and local music. My husband, Roger Nelson, and I met in second grade and from high school on, imagined creating a place that was devoted to the arts, growing food, and building community.

Finally, in our 50s, we actually made it happen. 16 years ago, we purchased this farm, named it Squash Blossom Farm, and ever since we've been renovating it, building a commercial kitchen and winery and creating a place for people to come and have wood fired pizza, mead, bean to bar chocolate, listen to music, take classes, celebrate events, weddings, festivals, and get to know each other and appreciate the land.

Squash Blossom Farm, if I do say so myself, is rather magical. Filled with delightful donkeys, colorful chickens, friendly dogs, bossy geese, industrious honeybees, and oh so many flowers. Often times when people walk up the driveway, they exclaim, You are living my dream life! In this episode of A Brush With Life, Roger and I will tell you the story of how we built our dream. 

  Without any further ado, I'd like to introduce Roger Nelson, my husband, life partner and co farmer. 

Hello, my dear. This is a little bit awkward,  we don't usually talk to each other formally like this. But  This is an opportunity to  recap, I guess, our whole 45 years together, or longer than that if you go back to high school.

Because we have known each other since Since second grade. Second grade. And when I saw him, I said, That's That's the boy I'm going to marry. We went to different grade schools.

I moved away and went to different grade schools. But we reconnected in junior high. And had lots of classes together. Yep.  Algebra. math analysis.  I sat behind you in math analysis. Did you? Yes.  And we created that underground newspaper called Subterranean. Do you remember that? , I don't remember being, especially involved in it.

 Maybe I had some contributions to it. You did!

So how did we end up here on this farm? 

Oh my gosh, that's a long, long story. 

Tell us the short version. 

We had been looking for a place like this for a long time. So after second grade 

(Which was let's see about 60 years ago)  
We had some dates during high school - often in the winter time we would  go cross country skiing.

We'd come back and go to Renaud's Pizza and usually buy whatever you could with a dollar and a half at the time. 

Usually we had hot chocolate, I think, because we were so cold. It was skiing in 20 below weather.

But we would conspire about what the future was going to be like.

Our utopian community.  Which would be Like a communal farm where everyone grew food together and cooked together and made music and art.

That was our dream life.

And that dream stuck with us throughout the rest of our lives so   we're still in the distant past.

So then you went back to school to finish college and got your architecture degree and I got my art degree. And we had our first child, Sara, and you got your first architecture job in Dakota, Minnesota, population 340, I think.

Something like that, yeah. Even back  then, we were just in the throes of being a young couple with a family and new jobs, and No money, no health insurance. We were still always on the lookout for the perfect place in the country to have our little Utopian community. I don't think we were always thinking about it as that.

I think probably at that time, we were just thinking about it as  a better place for us to live, to have a garden and maybe some animals...

But long drives in the countryside.

Yeah, that was how we spent a lot of our weekends. Taking the kids, we have to bribe them by saying, Every half hour we'll stop and look for fossils, so they would put up with driving in the country looking for a farm.

Yeah. So we worked there for a decade and then moved here to Rochester,  we bought a  house here.

We looked for farms but could not find, anything we could afford or that was close enough or not in too terrible of shape.

Our careers kept going and our kids kept getting bigger and at some point or another, we were on the verge of middle age.

Yeah,   Turning 50, I kind of had my midlife crisis.  I had a burnout from a job that I really loved., but it was all consuming and our kids had fledged. And I went to see a life coach because I was really in a depression .  The life coach had me do three pages of writing a day and lots of other little exercises, but through that it came up obviously to me that I still really had this farm dream.

At some time in this conversation, you should probably tell the dream story.

Okay, I will tell the dream story . So, as I was getting better from the  depression,  I had terrible insomnia and  hadn't slept and didn't have any dreams. I started having dreams again, and I woke up one morning from this incredibly wonderful dream, where We were driving around like we always did in real life, looking for our farm, our kids were little in the dream, and we went to the town of Minneota, which in real life, I know that's a town, but I'd never been there. But in my dream it was Minneota, and we found on the outskirts of town, a little brick farmhouse for sale.  We drove in. It was an elderly couple  selling their farm and they showed us all around.  I can remember it so vividly, like the kitchen had a two story space with a library ladder and the whole upper level was all books.

There was a huge garden. The woman and I went out to the garden and I said, "Do you have any asparagus? "And then she pointed down the way and there was a forest of giant asparagus. And there was a pond. And I said, "I could have ducks!" So, in the dream, we just bought the farm right then and there. We helped them pack everything into their Winnebago.  I would find little treasures and say, "Oh, you'll need this." And she would say, "No, I don't need it." All the treasures of the farm came with it. 

That was the dream and it was so wonderful and I told it to Rog. And then I went off to do my morning errands. I took a bunch of old magazines to the library magazine exchange, which is right outside the Friends of the Library bookstore, which I can never resist going in.

I went in the bookstore and there was a book that appealed to me. Its title was The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth, by Bill Holmes.  We had read some Bill Holmes. He's a poet from southwest Minnesota, and we both really liked his books. So I bought it. I brought it home and said hey Rog I Got this book at the library bookstore by Bill Holmes, and I showed it to him and Rog said 

I said, "Hey Sue, did you look at what's on the cover of this book?"

And sure enough, there was a map of, southwest Minnesota, and the town, Minneota, was like in bold letters on there. 

With a heart, rather than a star. I was like, that was a sign because I had just told him that dream a couple hours earlier. So Rog said, we've got to go to Minneota. Cause then we had this feeling like we were going to find that brick house, it was our dream farm. So a few weeks later we drove to Minneota, which turns out is, near Pipestone. So we had a really fun time, went to Pipestone and we drove all over Minneota. It didn't look anything like my dream. Didn't find the brick house. 

But, on the way back, I realized, wow, this is really close to my grandparents farm.  When I was a little kid, I would go there every summer for a wee until I was about eight. So I called up my dad and said, "Dad, how do I get to Grandma and Grandpa's farm?"   He gave me directions through all these gravel roads in the cornfields, and we went there and the farm isn't anything like it was back when I was a kid.
It was a traditional little, family farm, with a big red barn. Well, now the house is there, but cornfields come right up to the doors of the house, and there are giant blue silos.  It's a big commercial. industrial farm now, but it was fun to go back there. And then we had the long drive back.

What is it? About five hours, almost. And the whole time on the way back, we talked about, should we buy a farm? We're turning 50. So that's when we decided. 

Yep. So that had to be, uh, 17 years ago.

Yeah. Two years before we ended up here. We had made the decision. Let's go ahead and look seriously.  

We looked at every single farm probably in a 50 mile radius of Rochester for sale. Yeah. It's fun because now when we drive around I can say, "Oh, I've been in that farm! I've been in that farm!"

We made offers on several of them and none of them  worked. Happened. They didn't happen. And then finally this one came up, and we had actually seen this place many times in our travels, and thought, there's the place that we really should be.

But It was never for sale, until one day...

 I was just driving looking on one of my scouting missions and I had been scouring all the MLS listings every day for a year and I'd never seen this one listed, but I drove by and like, WHAT? It's for sale. How did I not find it?

 Well, it was way out of our price range, that was why, but they were having an open house and we came to it and we loved it and our realtor came, the next week and he said they're asking way too much, you should make an offer. So we made an offer really at the top of what we could possibly afford.

But they didn't even respond, they, they didn't even counter offer. So, for a whole year we went to every single open house, mid winter it was 20 below, hot summer, the people meanwhile moved away and so it was empty.  Sometimes we'd ride our bikes out and just sit on the patio and dream about it.

Until, finally, the people had moved away and they were facing foreclosure and had to find a buyer and we were able to make it work. So, it happened, but man, it took a lot of patience. 

It did. So  now we're here. 

We're here! 
And we thought we would just be like hobby farmers and keep our jobs.

Yeah. Have a garden, maybe a couple chickens. 

Maybe a couple chickens. Oh, I look back fondly on  that goal. 

Well, the first thing you did was build  a wood fired clay oven. 

Uh huh. 

To start making bread, because you had started doing that as a hobby.

Yeah. 

And then our kids, who had fledged, as we say, were off in various other parts of the world, and  they decided, we're going to come back and help launch the farm project, which in their minds was, an entrepreneurial opportunity for them. So that first year, we ended up with

Well that first year, they gave me chickens for Christmas.

Oh yeah, nine chickens. 

And then in the spring, those entrepreneurial kids were like, "We're gonna raise Steers and pigs and meat chickens and start baking for the farmer's market  to raise money for college!"

Right. So, was it that year we had, like you said, two pigs? Yeah, we started the first year. Four hundred meat chickens. Thirty laying hens. A cow and her calf. 

First we got the two little jersey steers and then the cow and the calf. I think it was still within the first year that we also got La Fonda, our milk cow, right about at the one year mark.

So we just dived in with everything and bees, we had also got a beehive and we were baking for the farmer's market every weekend, Rog would make sourdough. And the kids would bake, Sara would bake all night, making pies and turnovers, which were still warm in the farmer's market the next morning. They went like hotcakes, except they were hot turnovers.

Oh, we forgot the geese and the turkeys. 

Oh yeah, we had geese and turkeys. So it was a pretty big undertaking for people who had no farm experience. Right. . 

And the big garden. We didn't do the CSA until a year later. 

A year later, something like that. 

But both Sara and Cadence were really committed to the idea of sustainability.
Prior to having meat animals that they were raising, they were both vegetarian since they were 12 and 14. So it was pretty shocking that they were raising meat animals, but they were just concerned that the animals have a good life and be raised without hormones and chemicals And now they still are that way, they eat meat, but they're very persnickety about it.

Our kids left they went back to school Yeah, and and we had made them promise when they left they were not gonna leave us with all those animals.
So they did harvest them all. We were just left with our egg chickens and our milk cow, and our geese. We still decided to keep on with those animals because we'd really grown to love it. 

Yeah, yeah. And permaculture principles incorporate the use of animals as well as plants.  

It's an ecosystem. 

Yeah, it's a system of things that work well together.  There wasn't really a garden here.  We invented this garden. It took a while to figure out where exactly was going to be the best place for it. The soil was not probably the best. 

I think the soil was great because it had been horse pasture for years before. But our soil is very heavy clay. Very heavy clay, yeah. So we had to amend it with  a lot of compost and things to lighten it. 

There's so many stories of foibles and fumbles. We started out planting, I think, 30 kinds of tomatoes in a little tiny greenhouse from Menards. We were going to sell tomato starts. And I was working a part time job at the nursery because I thought, oh, I'll get a discount on plants. But in reality it meant I was too tired to do any gardening here when I was done at the end of the day.  We had all those little tomato plants out there and a huge storm came up and blew the whole greenhouse over and scattered them all over and Cadence said, "Mom, all the plants are all over the yard.I'm just going to go plant them. "And we didn't know what anything was so we couldn't sell them. That first year we had so many tomatoes. It was a bumper crop. We were bringing in bushels of tomatoes every day into our dining room. So many fruit flies.

We had the milk cow, and she was giving us five gallons of milk a day, which we couldn't sell because we  aren't a commercial dairy, and that's against the law, and we couldn't use it in our baking, so we ate a lot of creme brulee and ice cream, and we learned to make cheese, we would spend an hour milking in the morning, and then six hours making cheese, six or eight hours making cheese, and another hour milking and cleaning up at the end of the day. It was a full time job just to deal with the milk.

The farm came with a nicely renovated house and a whole bunch of outbuildings, all of which were in various states of disrepair, or just full of junk and needed to be cleaned up. So we started on the various aspects. So the room that we're in now,  was once the granary.

Cadence and I cleaned it all out, put in a new floor, windows, ceiling..  we finished it off, trying to keep it as rustic as we thought it should be.  

Cadence thought she was going to live out here amongst the feral cats and rodents. She cleaned it all up so they were gone.

Yeah. 

We started with the barn; we took off some of the metal siding on the south side, and glassed it all in. A whole bunch of glass windows, made it into kind of a sunroom on that south side of the barn. 

We used to always go to pizza farms in Wisconsin. You would drive an hour, and then wait an hour for your pizza, and have your pizza, and drive home an hour. They were delicious and really fun and we always thought they need to have a pizza farm in Minnesota. We should open a pizza farm if we ever find the right farm. And this one seemed like a really good prospect for a pizza farm.

And we thought about that even before we bought the place. But, when we talked to the county health department, they said, no way, you can't have a commercial kitchen in a barn and you'd have to have handicapped accessible restrooms and parking area. And it was beyond our capabilities.

But we still had pizza parties with our friends, cooking them in our little clay oven. 

Potluck pizza parties. Everyone bring a topping, we'll make the crust and sauce. 

Yeah, and those were really fun, and it  got us to thinking  the community aspects of our life was an important piece of the puzzle.

And in the meanwhile, our farmer's market baking was taking off. We had a huge following of people who loved our breads and pastries. It was intense baking, like, two full days, late into the night, to bake enough stuff in our little 
kitchen. In our house kitchen, which is not a very big kitchen for four people to be working and also be dealing with milk and eggs. I was growing sprouts then for the co op too. 

Oh, that's right. 

So we had a lot going on. But, we finally did decide to pursue the commercial kitchen idea.  

It was one of those things like, it had the same feeling to me of the decision to buy the farm. It was like, we don't know how we're going to do this, but it's the right thing to do and we're just going to go ahead and make it happen.
And the same thing happened with the commercial kitchen. We don't really know exactly how we're gonna do this and we think it's gonna cost a lot of money and end up spending quite a bit more we think it's the right thing to do and we're just gonna go ahead  and make it happen. 

Cadence made a Kickstarter movie for us.
So we did a Kickstarter and thought this is going to be our ultimate sign, if we have enough community support to go ahead, we're going to do it.  So we borrowed from our retirement and got the Kickstarter funds. We did everything pretty much ourselves except the wiring and plumbing that we had to have professionals do.

And used all reclaimed materials. This is the commercial kitchen that the ReStore built, kind of. We got our tiles, our windows, our doors, so many things from the ReStore. Yeah. And Craigslist and Marketplace, all of our equipment, used equipment. 

It was a massive undertaking and when the health department came back and the building department, they said, what's the situation with your well?

And of course there were no records of the well. I say. well, you're going to have to have a new well,  and,  what's the situation with septic? Oh, well, that's pretty old too. So we have now two wells and two septic systems, one for the business and one for the house of each. That was a huge cost as well.

By this time our kids were off. So we had started hosting WWOOFers, Willing Workers On Organic Farms.  That summer that we finished the kitchen, I think we had probably six WWOOFers  over the course of the summer, some who stayed all summer and some yeah for a short time, so they learned how to tile floors, and tile walls, and screed concrete, and oh, everything. We were so grateful to them- we couldn't have done it without them.

I was going through my notes, and I had forgotten that not only were we taking on doing the commercial kitchen, but you were looking on Craigslist and found that somebody had a greenhouse for sale. We already had a greenhouse of sorts. We had a hoop house that had plastic pulled over the top of some metal posts. But this was a real greenhouse. I mean it was essentially the same size and the same structural framework, but then it had the polycarbonate panels and 
and a beautiful gothic roof and heat.

...nicer looking kind of thing and some heat. 

We thought we could just buy this greenhouse, take it down one weekend and haul it home and set it back up the next weekend. Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha 
ha ha. The taking it down and bringing it over in one weekend happened. The rest of it took many more months.

Took almost two years. To get it all the way done. To set it up. But we were doing that in the same time frame as doing the commercial kitchen. That's part of the reason why. But also weather did not cooperate. We would set up the first few sections and that's as far as we'd get. And then there'd be a windstorm which would blow out the first section and we'd have to take the second and third section out to start over again.

Oh, that was frustrating. 
Ah, that was fun. .

You know, this was a decision that we went into not knowing exactly what we were going to get into. And I think, in some senses,  we lost a little bit of the permaculture aspect, the garden, and a  bit of food forest kind of stuff, and the coordination of the animals with the garden, all that kind of thing diminished a little bit. 

It was kind of put on the back burner. 

Since our focus now was more on  making the pizza business and the farmer's market business help pay back  that huge amount of investment. So, you know, with all these things I guess in your life, there's  Some things you lose when you gain some other things.

Yeah, it's been the most incredible adventure of my life to do this farm with you because I never envisioned that we would become bakers and pizza makers and essentially restaurateurs, as well as farmers and gardeners and beekeepers and chocolate makers and have a winery making mead and  do events like weddings. And have a sculpture garden and all the beautiful places we've built on our farm. And all the animals, which was really my original impetus. I loved animals and I wanted to have goats someday, and now we have goats and donkeys . It just brings me so much joy.

But, throughout all this, Rog is a musician, a singer songwriter,  a really good guitarist. I'm an artist. I thought we should pull it back into, the whole idea of this podcast. Talk a little bit about how do we fit that into our lives here. Yeah. Squash Blossom Farm. 

Yeah.  Well  on the music end of things, I think even when we first started doing the, potluck pizza parties, we would invite our friends. I played in a band that had eight members. All of us were at various stages of learning how to play music together. People would often bring instruments and we would have pizza and play music together and sing.

That was fun, and when we finally got the commercial kitchen approved and we were able to start doing actual pizza parties, there would always be a local, , band that played while people were waiting for their pizza or eating their pizza.

It's really helped me develop  a membership in the music scene in Rochester. Most of those people are younger than me, but, it's just been nice to get connected with a lot of different musicians.  And so many different styles, Celtic and jazz and folk bluegrass... it's been really wonderful to kind of feel like we're supporting the local music community by having all these musicians play here and now They come to us and wanna play. Yeah. It's really exciting.

We've never been able to really pay people very much. We pay them a little bit of money and pizza and a little something to drink, but I would say at least  half the people who come here say, this is our favorite place to play because the vibe is so good. 

And it's such a wonderful audience to play for. We usually have about, maybe, 150 people that are all families,  kids to old people. Yeah.  Just casually eating their pizza on the lawn and exploring the farm, petting the goats and enjoying the music. Yeah, it's really wonderful on a sunny day there is nothing better. 

I think that this place has sparked some musical inspiration for you. You've written a few songs, and Oh yeah, yeah. Not nearly enough time to play, but 

Well, there is that, but, you know, it's all these tradeoffs. 

And for me,  this granary, which was a little antique store for a while, is now my studio, which hasn't really had a lot of action as a studio yet, right now it's a recording studio, but it's also my painting studio and sewing studio, and I  feel so blessed to have this space to make art. This year it's going to happen a lot more, but I've kind of come to the realization that my real artwork is this whole farm. I can't focus on my painting so much as making the farm be this beautiful, wonderful, meaningful place which really makes my heart sing. Anyway, I don't know if the world needs any of my paintings, but it does need my  farm. It does need your paintings.  Thanks. 

 So what's next for us in the farm? 

Well, you know the world is  kind of a scary place these days. 

Yeah, right now, as we're recording this, it's the big, huge fires in Los Angeles and recently the big floods in North Carolina and,   climate change  weighing heavily on our minds.

Yeah.  Somebody I was reading or listening to the other day was saying. We're blessed with living in a time of really likely big changes, globally, and philosophically, and culturally, and Economically.

Economically. Environmentally. The way that the world has been for the last hundred years is  really an anomaly.  Some amazingly wonderful things have come out of it, but it hasn't been wonderful for everybody, and it's almost surely going to change. Nobody knows exactly how and when and to what extent. But, you know, as some people have said, maybe the way it has been, even though a lot of people feel like it's great, it hasn't been necessarily all that great for everybody in the world And maybe this change is an opportunity to be involved. Maybe We're at a point of being involved in what's coming next. 

I don't think we have a choice in that. I mean, we're getting older, but  our kids and our grandkids, they're going to be dealing with it for sure. One of the things that we've really felt about this farm, Squash Blossom Farm, that's our name for it, it wasn't named that before we came here, but it's a, 120 year old farm. with 110 year old buildings and has so much history, which we only know a little bit of, but we really feel a responsibility to protect and restore and preserve it. And I think the whole idea of these little farms - maybe it's going to be important in the future to have these  bits of resilience around cities like Rochester to be growing food and we're  trying to promote diversity of native plants and insects and birds.  Not just us alone, we can't do it on our little ten acres by ourselves, but I think there's a lot of like minded people; hopefully we can make a difference. 

Yeah, our  tagline is Local Food, Local Art, Local Music and  I think that the local food part really seems to resonate with what's going to happen. The factory farm way of doing agriculture these days is at risk of  having some significant changes, but it's not all about just whether or not you can eat  how you heat your house and those kind of things.

Community and the cultural aspects  and the artistic aspects of your life are as important. So I think with our focus on local art and local music,  I think what we've done , is maybe, set this place up to take whatever the next step is likely to be, in the context of what's happening  

the world.

Yeah,  we're pretty good at going with the flow, because we don't have a rigid idea of where we're going, because we don't know enough to even have that, and we have so many things we want to do. Right. So that's our, maybe our weakness and our strength  both. but in this case it's a strength. 

Yeah. , 

Rog, I can't think of anybody in the world I would be better suited to working with on this dream.

Thanks. Thanks for that. Thank you. 

I don't know why I decided to pursue this podcast project, but I've been thinking about it for a long time. I guess maybe I'm just kind of curious or maybe nosy about other people's lives and motivations and inspirations.   Interviewing people gives you license to ask nosy questions and find out about their innermost workings. So that's going to be really rewarding for me, and I know I'm going to learn a lot of things , as I go about this. Not just the technical things, which are going to be huge alone for me to learn, because  that's not my area of expertise, but learning about how other people pursue and pursue happiness , and living.

I think you're going to do an amazing job. I know. Thanks. I hope people enjoy it. So thanks so much. 

Thank you for listening to this episode of A Brush With Life. You can find photos of today's guests, their work, links to their social media and upcoming events on our website, www. abrushwithlife. org. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe from our website. You can also leave me a message. I would love to hear from you.

Thank you to Squash Blossom Farm for ongoing support, and especially to Roger Nelson for creating our theme music. A Brush With Life is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Southeast Minnesota Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.