My name is Melissa Driscoll and this website is all about my values, my farming practices, and the food I grow or raise. My husband Jay and I purchased this 7 acre farm in February 2010.  At seven acres, it is not a big farm, but it is 54 times larger than the Minneapolis city lot I was previously growing food on!

Over the last ten years I have:

• Planted and maintained a half-acre native prairie to provide habitat for birds and insects

• Built a hoophouse with help from 30 friends and family members

• Became certified organic through the Midwest Organic Services Association (MOSA)

• Raised rare Delaware hens whose eggs have become certified Animal Welfare Approved by A Greener World (AGW)

• Become expert at all facets of growing and marketing garlic, ginger, tomatoes, turmeric, herbs, and anything else local food makers want me to grow

• Sold for years at Mill City Farmers Market, but now sell primarily to chefs and food makers and at Sogn Valley Craft Fair in October.

• Saved a barn and granary that were on death’s door, and then remodeled the barn to create a pack shed

• Created a fabulous value-added product with garlic scapes called Escape! Garlic Scape Pesto

• Joined with two other ginger farming women to lead a successful federal grant-funded ginger experiment

• Host Garlic Harvest every July, with good clean work and excellent catered lunch!

Please contact me if you want to collaborate with me in any way — food, art, soccer, song, nature observation, canoeing!

As far as how I came to be a farmer…

Farming in the Genes 

There is a history of farming on both my mother and father’s sides of the family.

My mother’s family name is “Brackett”, following the male lineage (as is common) and my Great Great Grandfather is George Augustus Brackett. George was a big mover and shaker in early Minneapolis history – he started the first volunteer fire department, he started an aid society to help widowed women and orphans, and he had a farm where he grew and bred giant irises and lots of other plants on Brackett’s Point on Lake Minnetonka.

He and his wife Anne has 7 sons and one daughter, and at the age of 70 (after Anne died?) he decided to “make his fortune” by selling provisions to the miners up in Alaska during the Alaska and Klondike Gold Rush (1900-1902). So he and his sons and their wives travelled to Skagway, Alaska and Atlin, BC and lived there for 2-3 years. One of the son’s wives was an amateur photographer and she took a number of photos and put them in an album.

For a number of reasons this album was lost to my mom’s family for years until it was found in a crashed car in California. My Mom was encouraged by the Alaska Historical Society to interpret the photos, and she did, in a book she wrote called One Women’s Gold Rush.

George A.’s son was my grampa’s Dad. My grampa was John Chapin Brackett, and I knew him well when I was a kid because most weekdays he came out to our house in Afton, Minnesota, to use my parents’ yard to garden. We ate the produce, and my grampa would also take extra produce around to his friends in St. Paul. There are photos of me at the age of 2, putting onion sets into the dibble holes that grampa created.

And I have fond memories of grampa’s “breaks” from gardening. He would settle himself in a lawn chair and open a beer and ask me if I wanted a sip. I always did, but I would take a gulp! I liked beer better as a kid than I do now. Once my little sister Julia was around, Grampa would offer this treat to both of us, and when I took my gulp Julia would cry fowl “Melissa took a gulp Grampa, not a sip!”. I don’t remember getting in trouble – Grampa would just laugh. Grampa and his brother Russel (my “Uncle Russ” who was really my great uncle) grew up breeding and showing Jersey cows at the State Fair. There are some sweet photos of the two boys and their cows prepped for the fair.

According to my Dad, my Mom did not start gardening until my Grampa died when I was ten. There was that huge garden, and Grampa not around to take care of it… my Mom had lost her Mom when she was ten, so Grampa was her last biological parent. I think gardening was a way to honor grampa, and to grieve. I get that. My Mom died in 2012, and I think part of my impulse go grow things is therapy.

But Mom didn’t just grow vegetables, she started the Afton Farmers Market, she was in the first Master Gardener class at the University of Minnesota, and she wrote 100+ nationally publicized articles that were mostly about gardening, for a number of magazines. She wrote for Mother Earth News, Organic Gardening, Family Food Garden, and many others. There are a number of cute photos of 6 year old me holding a huge head of broccoli, or some other vegetable, because Mom said she would give us a modeling fee if she could sell her the photo with the article she was writing. She knew what would motivate us to sit still and smile.

She taught Julia and I how to write. In fact, when I went to graduate school, I was chagrined to learn that instead of writing in a magazine style I would have to write in the “just the facts” style of scientific writing. Mom also taught us about experimentation. Many of her articles were write-ups of her garden experiments.

On my Dad’s side, my Great Great Grandmother Thomsen made her money first in Joliet Ill, selling women’s hats. In middle age she married Mr. Thomsen and came to St. Paul, and she purchased the St. Paul Pioneer Press. She lived on Summit Avenue, but her daughter Hazel (who was really her brother’s daughter, but she adopted Hazel and her two sisters) inherited some of the fortune and purchased a farm in Center City called “Hazel’s Den”. Yup, and when the family sold the farm the name remained and now “Hazelden” is a world renowned addiction treatment center. My grandmother Abigail (Abby, but we called her ‘Nana’) and her younger siblings grew up at Hazelden. The farm had a herd of milking Jerseys, a huge flock of chickens, a stable of horses for riding, beautiful gardens, etc.

My Great Uncle Charley was one of my Nana’s younger siblings and one day when I was 9 or so Uncle Charley pulled into our driveway in Afton with 25 Rhode Island Red hens and a rooster. Recently I learned that Charley did not call ahead and ask my parents anything, he just brought these chickens for me, and from then on I have been attached to chickens! At 11 I was winning Reserve Grand Champion and Grand Champion for my breeding pens and egg-laying pens at the Washington County Fair and then going on to show at the Minnesota State Fair. Charley made his living raising chickens for a while before I was born. He raised broilers, and capons before the farm was sold. Then he went into selling cars.

The other family member who had a big influence on my Dad, and therefore on me too, was Uncle Bob. Uncle Bob (who is really Great Uncle Bob) grew up at Hazelden, and then he got married and had kids, but he parented my Dad and my uncle Fletcher, and other boys as well. He taught them about fixing cars, he had road trip adventures with them, they found old abandoned boats and fixed them together. He loved Port Wing, Wisconsin, on the South Shore of Lake Superior, and he took them up there to goof around and grow up. There are lots of Uncle Bob stories in our family, he was really my Dad’s second Dad.

Because of Uncle Bob, my Dad gets a lot of joy out of fixing just about anything, going on adventures, creating furniture or just about anything out of wood, and he was a patient teacher of those things. Uncle Bob sometimes got the boys in a little bit of trouble, but he was also very patient, and lots of fun. When I was a kid he used to do this trick that I loved where he lit a match (he and my Nana were life-long smokers) and then he would stick the lit match in his mouth. He could also find quarters behind my ear.

So my passion for chickens from Great Uncle Charley, my passions for vegetables from my Mom and my Grandfather, my passion for experimentation and learning from my Mom, my ability to fix stuff and create things out of wood from my Dad and Uncle Bob, a feeling of being rooted to Minnesota from all of these people, combined to create me, and I have created this farm.

I don’t have kids, but I hope that someday I can pass this place and this work on to the next generation.

Photos