Say hello to Merle—the friendly face behind Merle’s Midwest Market, where every jar is made with care, creativity, and classic Midwest charm.

Merle specializes in small-batch jams and preserves that capture the best of the season. From rich apple pie filling to a perfectly balanced jalapeno pepper jam, her offerings are full of flavor and made with simple, quality ingredients—no shortcuts, just good old-fashioned know-how.

Her table at the Mount Horeb Farmers Market is a favorite stop for sweet spreads and thoughtful gifts that taste just like home. Whether you’re topping toast, stirring into yogurt, or gifting a jar to a friend, Merle’s creations add a little extra joy to any day.

 Thank you, Merle, for sharing your kitchen talents and warm spirit with the Mount Horeb community each week!
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Homestead-grown. Handmade. Heartfelt.
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Say hello to the makers behind Sunny Side Down, LLC , a homestead-based farm where the love of self-sufficiency, gardening, and old-fashioned skill has turned into a passion for artisan breads, pies, jams, sauces, salsas, and pickles —all handcrafted and deeply flavorful.

What started as a personal journey toward sustainability has grown into something much more: a way to share meaningful, locally made food with the community. Every loaf, jar, and pie is made with care and attention to the little things—the textures, the flavors, the feeling of something made just right.

At Sunny Side Down, it’s all about the details. The kind that bring you back to a simpler time, yet still feel perfectly at home on a modern table. Their market stand is filled with small-batch goods that tell a story of tradition, creativity, and deep respect for the process.

You’ll find them each week at the Mount Horeb Farmers Market, bringing comfort food with character—one jar, one pie, one loaf at a time.

 Thank you, Sunny Side Down, for creating from the heart and feeding the community with true craft.

Not too many people will look you in the eye and tell you that farming is easy.
 
Farming is, in fact, incredibly hard work from start to finish. And by “start” we’re not just talking about the crack of dawn although there’s that, too; it’s awfully difficult to farm without land, and gaining access to land is one of the very toughest barriers to entry you’ll ever come across. Between the difficulty in getting started and the hard work and uncertainty once you’re there, a lot of people can give you a lot of good reasons to try something – anything – else before you try to start a farm
 
And yet, for some people, farming is as necessary to life as breathing.
 
People like Sam Hsieh, who says, “I couldn’t go back to a life without farming.”
 
Sam (he/him, they/them) and Katie Schofield (she/her) are the hands and hearts behind Jumping Spider Farm and the newest produce vendors on the block – the 300 block of E Main Street, that is, where we are thrilled to welcome them to the Mount Horeb Farmers Market family for their very first season!

To farm, to be dependent on the land, is to be vulnerable. Vulnerability can be met (and even embraced) in many different ways. If we were to do a word search through all of these posts about the Mount Horeb Farmers Market, it’s a good bet that one of the most oft-repeated words would be ‘community.’ 

In our own farming community just this season we’ve seen weather and pests destroy most of Bures’ strawberry yield, and with it the financial security of their largest yearly crop that draws people to their farm. Strawberry season might be a blip on the calendar if you’re looking at the entire year, but there's a Bulgarian saying - about people and industries that rely on short, intense periods of business - that translates roughly to ‘one day that feeds the year.'

What can this community do for our farmers when their 'one day' is disrupted?

Well, to continue with the example of Bures this season, we can remember that they grow many other crops - this week they've got green beans and German butterball potatoes coming to the market, and before we know it, sweet corn season will be here! - and double down on our commitment to buying local and rearranging our shopping habits to choose local over convenience.
 
We see the acronym CSA so often it’s easy to forget that it has a meaning beyond “A weekly box of vegetables that we feel guilty about not finishing.” In concrete terms a CSA share puts money in the hands of the farmers at the start of the season when they need it the most, and more abstractly it’s the soil in which a beautiful, reciprocal relationship can begin to grow.

(Squashington  and Jumping Spider both offer CSAs - something to think about for next season!)

In a broader sense, everything we’re doing at the Mount Horeb Farmers Market is about Community Supported Agriculture; we are supporting our community’s agriculture, building a web of interconnectedness. A robust local food system is so important because community – collaboration, reciprocity, sharing – breeds resilience, a small farmer's antidote to vulnerability. The farmers at our little market all speak eloquently to this truth, that everything they do is in collaboration, not competition, with the land and with each other. 

As Sam and Katie say about their work on Jumping Spider Farm, “We love dreaming up and building sustainable, local, caring food systems, [and] we really appreciate the local food community of growers, farmers and customers who have welcomed, supported and mentored us.”​

​As new farmers, access to capital and land could have been insurmountable obstacles to Jumping Spider Farm growing roots. Fortunately, they found the Farley Center in Verona, which has a farming collaborative program to support immigrant and aspiring farmers, or farmers who want to start or continue farming but don't have the necessary capital or experience.  
 
From the Farley Center’s website:
“The Linda and Gene Farley Center for Peace, Justice and Sustainability launched its farm incubator in 2010, expanding upon the community gardening projects supported for 15 years. Through the farm incubator, aspiring farmers are supported with land, tools, education, and marketing assistance. Training takes place while maintaining full respect for the cultural crops and practices of the growers involved. All production is Certified Organic through Midwest Organic Services Association.”
 
What an amazing program for the time we live in! Just as none of us live in a vacuum, farming shouldn't happen in a vacuum, but food and farming practices aren’t necessarily passed down from parent to child anymore, or even through the communities we’re born into, where most of us grow up very disconnected from the food that nourishes us. So this kind of intentional cultivation of community and the preservation and dissemination of knowledge and wisdom from all over the world is exciting and necessary and a vital step towards small farm and farmer resilience.
 
“I love farming on shared land,” Sam says, “and appreciate the community of farmers and staff at the Farley Center, who bring wisdom and experience to the practice.”
 
And we appreciate them bringing their unique experience to the Mount Horeb Farmers Market!

Curious about how they chose the name? “Jumping Spider Farm was named after the Salticidae family of spiders. Jumping spiders are particularly friendly and curious, and quite bold – they will even appear to cock their head at you, and are known to leap great lengths to catch prey. They also hunt critters that would not be beneficial to growing vegetables, thus representing balance in an ecosystem. One day while reading in the grass, Sam saw a jumping spider tilt its head as if to look up in wonder. Since then, these spiders have appeared in times of transition to remind Sam that the universe has his back.”

We hope to see you at the Market this Thursday afternoon, and if you come by we hope you make time to stop and introduce yourself to Sam and Katie!

Good Morning, Mount Horeb!
 
In lieu of a featured vendor for you this week, I asked our vendors to recommend something in season that they’re especially excited about for me to highlight. Sarah of Squashington Farm said, “Garlic scapes! You can use them like you would regular garlic, especially good in cooking and salad dressings, or try drenching them in oil and either roasting or grilling them!”

Photos from BonAppetite.com (left) and KatieSping.com (right)

​I mentioned this to my mom, Lorna, who told me about being at one of the Madison markets recently when a fellow shopper was asking what these strange curly green stalks are, and not only the vendor but the several shoppers at her booth were falling all over themselves to sing the praises of garlic scapes.
 
Easier to use than bulb garlic! Great flavor! You can freeze them to use all winter! And, get this – they are low-FODMAP so people who are sensitive to/can’t eat garlic can use them to add that missing garlic flavor back into their favorite dishes.
 
But what the heck are they?? Well, they are the stalks that grow from the bulbs of garlic plants, and they are removed in the spring/early summer so that the plant will channel all its energy into its growing bulb. This means that garlic scapes are a kind of edible ephemeral; they’re there until they’re gone, so if you see ‘em, buy ‘em.

 A quick google search will yield dozens of ideas and recipes for cooking with garlic scapes, so I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here, but will just list a few of the easiest and most interesting ideas I’ve come across, and hope to pique your interest:

• Garlic scapes lightly sauteed and then added to a green salad or pasta salad (this is what we were eating when my mom and I started talking about garlic scapes and seasonality)
• Scape pesto
• Scape hummus
• Scapes added to soups, stir-fries, and sautees; or any dish where you’re throwing in all the extra veggies in your fridge from your CSA or farmers market haul

 
Lorna was reflecting on how she’s been cooking with garlic scapes for probably fifteen years but she remembers when she, like that shopper she saw at the market last week, was confronted by this strange plant for the first time, too. What is it, what do you do with it, and that question that most of us probably don’t ask as often as we could: where does it come from?
 
“When you only shop at the grocery store, everything is in season all the time,” Lorna said, adding that it was through going to farmers markets and talking to farmers that she cultivated an awareness of what was in season and when and from where – and especially an appreciation for those short-lived treasures like garlic scapes that strut their hour on the stage and then retreat to the wings until next year.
 
So, today’s lesson? (Besides ‘garlic scapes are great’?) Talk to your farmers! I’ve asked every single vendor at our little market, “What do you love about what you do?” and to a one they’ve replied with their own variation on, “We love making connections with the people who eat our food.”

“We love coming to Mount Horeb market in particular because of the strong sense of community. We have seen the same faces for 8 years now!!! It's incredible. We have watched babies grow into full fledged children and children become young adults. We love forging those long-term relationships with our customers and trying our best to be a reliable source of nutrition all year long.” -Squashington Farm, Sarah and Pat