About Our Work

Thank you so much for checking out my labors of love! My goal for both the HeathGlen site (our products) and the Farm to Jar site (recipes and gardening information) is to share my years of experience in farming, cooking and health.

The problem (or benefit) in describing what you will find on my two websites is that over the years I have taken so many turns and pivots that it is difficult to share information on just one topic. There is one thing all of the pivots have in common however…FOOD.

To better describe these pivots, I’m merging the areas of my expertise into 5 categories. The overarching topics that I share on the blog include:

• Low carb, slow carb and Mediterranean recipes
• Growing your own food at home (with or without a garden)
• Diet help on a variety of diets or lifestyles
• Mixology using shrub syrups
• Easy Seasonal Cooking with occasional fancy recipes

The HeathGlen site shares the products we make and sell in our commercial kitchen on the farm.

It is my hope to help make your life healthier and happier by continuing to share what I have learned around food, drink and health.

Now, to get a little more personal, below is a bit more about me personally and my journey to health, fitness and delicious living.

My Journey

I started my interest in food and drink in my 20’s working as a bartender and a server in some quality restaurants in Portland, Oregon. The road took a few turns after that….

I got married to the love of my life, finished a graduate degree in environmental planning, and moved to Minnesota to a property of 23 acres and started working for a state environmental agency.

I had my first child (a daughter) just after moving to Minnesota. As it turned out my daughter had a serious heart defect that required major surgeries at Boston Children’s Hospital (a Fontan to be specific). It quickly became clear that she was going to need hands-on care from a parent as she developed.

Since we had some acreage, I quit my state job and started growing blueberries and produce on our land. Fast forward 3 years and we had another child and the berry and produce project turned into a small but productive organic farm, specializing in blueberries, heirloom tomatoes and chile peppers.

While my daughter is not “cured” with a normal heart, she is now a beautiful young adult living a good life in Denver Colorado, as is her brother.

In the meantime, the farm kept growing, we established a commercial kitchen on the farm and started making preserves out of the fruit we grew. You can see our whole range of award-winning preserves, our spice blends and our shrub syrups at our thriving online store.

The last real pivot was becoming an online diet and health coach. The farm work had definitely kept me healthy, but it wasn’t until my kids were older that I realized (or cared) about how much weight I had gained.

In 2014 I started eating slow carb (Tim Ferriss’s plan), lost 30 pounds and became an online diet coach at a wonderful platform called Coach.me. I loved helping people one-to-one and over the past years I have coached over 400 people to health and fitness, primarily through low carb, slow carb or keto types of lifestyles. While I no longer coach, I am happy to share referrals to some of the online coaches I worked with over the years. You can email me at dsheathglen@gmail.com for referrals to the coaches that reflect the values you see on my sites.

The one thing most of my clients had in common however, was the fact that they didn’t cook. They were either too busy, didn’t know how, or didn’t know how to modify their cooking to lower carb options. So…….

My latest addition is to share easy cooking tutorials (video). You can now find a list of cooking and gardening tutorials on my You Tube channel.

In summary, my two websites (HeathGlen and Farm to Jar) are an effort to share some of the knowledge accumulated from all of these previous life experiences (and research) in cooking, gardening and health.

Whew! Enough about me already!

Cheers! Ciao! Happy Trails!

Explore the sites, comment if you want to start a conversation, and remember…..

“You don’t have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces — just good food from fresh ingredients.” ——Julia Child