I owe you a letter.
Two weeks have passed since I last sat down to write one and I want to tell you honestly why — not because anything dramatic happened, but because the kind of busy we have been living does not leave a lot of room for sitting down. Every hour of daylight has been on the farm. Every hour after dark has been recovering from the farm. The writing had to wait.
But I am here now. And I have a lot to tell you.
· · ·
Let me start with the bees because the bees deserve to go first.
All 35 hives are home.
Thirty-five. Every single one. And they are not just surviving — they are thriving in a way that makes me stop in the middle of whatever I am doing and just watch them. This week Scott added the second box to each hive because the bees had already built out the first one completely — brood on one side, honey forming on the other, every worker doing exactly what she was put on this earth to do.
When you walk between the rows of hives on a warm afternoon there is a sound and a smell that I do not have adequate words for. The sound is steady and purposeful — thousands of bees all moving at once with complete certainty about what needs to happen next. The smell is sweet. Not overwhelming. Just enough to stop you.
It smells like something is becoming.
I think about that a lot out there. Something is becoming. Right in front of us. In real time. And all we have to do is show up and not interfere with it.
· · ·
Now I need to tell you about the strawberries.
And I am going to tell you the real version.
We planted just over 6,000 strawberry plants across three different days in April and May. We did the University of Minnesota soil testing before we started. Nothing came back as a significant red flag. We had every reason to believe the soil was ready.
And then we waited.
And watched.
And what we saw over the following weeks was not what we were hoping for. Two hundred and fifty plants out of six thousand were up and healthy. The rest were struggling in a way that told us something was wrong beneath the surface — something the initial testing had not caught.
I will not pretend that was an easy thing to sit with.
· · ·
Here is what happened next and why I keep saying a prayer of gratitude for the farming community we have stumbled into.
We made some calls. We talked to Pat. We talked to MOSA — our organic verifier — because every single input decision on this farm has to pass through that filter. We are one year into our three-year organic certification process and we will not compromise that for a shortcut. Not ever.
The diagnosis was compaction and soil health — hay roots that had not broken down, ground that needed more than the initial work had given it. The good news was that solutions existed. The limiting factor was that because we are transitioning to organic our options are narrower than a conventional farm's would be.
What we landed on was compost — the right kind, approved for our certification path — arriving by the semi load. More tilling to break up what the hay roots left behind. And then something that has genuinely changed the pace of what we are doing out here.
We got a strawberry planter.
I did not fully understand until this week how different planting with a real planter is from what we were doing before. It is the difference between weeks of work and days of work. It is the difference between a problem and a path forward.
We have now replanted 3,000 new everbearing plants into the worked-up soil. We have four different patches ready and waiting as we are about to put in 22,000 June-bearing strawberry plants for next year's harvest this week.
Twenty-two thousand.
A year ago that number would have made my head spin. This week it felt like the answer.
· · ·
The oats are sprouting.
I want to make sure I tell you this because in a week with a lot of heaviness it was one of the things that made me genuinely smile. We planted oats, field peas, and four types of clover on the land we are building up to help feed the bees and the dirt, finally this week you can see the rows. Actual rows. Green and deliberate and exactly where we put them.
There is something about a row of sprouting seeds that restores something in you. Evidence that the ground wants to grow things. Evidence that the work is working. Evidence that patience is not the same thing as waiting — it is actively tending something that is not ready to be seen yet.
I cannot wait for that field to be full.
· · ·
The well gets dug this week.
I am going to say that again because I need you to understand what it has meant to not have one.
The well gets dug this week.
We have hauled thousands of gallons of water to this land by hand. Every plant that is alive out there has been kept alive by water we drove in and distributed ourselves. There have been days when that felt like the hardest physical thing I have ever done. There have been days when Scott and I looked at each other over the water trailer and just laughed because what else do you do, well other than pray for rain.
The electricity gets finished this week too.
I thanked God out loud when I found out both of these things were happening. Out loud in the field by myself. I do not care who heard me.
· · ·
I want to say one more honest thing before I close this letter.
It has been hard.
Not in a way that makes me want to quit — I want to be very clear about that. But in a way that I did not fully anticipate even though I thought I had prepared myself for it. The curveballs that farming throws are not theoretical. The strawberry situation was not a number on a spreadsheet. It was real plants we planted with real hands and real hopes and watching them struggle was genuinely painful.
And yet.
We figured it out. We called the right people. We got the right answers. We made the decisions that protect the long-term health of this soil even when easier options existed. We did not compromise the organic certification path even when compromising it would have been simpler.
I am proud of that. Quietly and completely proud of that.
A few tears. A lot of laughs. Bone deep tired. And still completely certain that this is exactly where we are supposed to be.
· · ·
One more thing.
I have been sitting on this for a few weeks because I wanted to wait until the moment was right.
Our branding is done.
I have seen it. I have held it. I have looked at it more times than I can count and I still get a little emotional every single time. My girls were part of choosing it and watching them see it for the first time — that reaction alone told me everything I needed to know.
It is exactly right.
I am not going to show you everything today. That deserves its own moment and I am going to give it one very soon.
But I wanted you to know it is coming. Because you have been here since before there was anything to show you. And you will be the first to see it.
· · ·
With sunshine on my face and dirt under my fingernails,
Three Daughters Market + Co. · Three Daughters Fleur + Co. · Minnesota · Spring 2026