Our family farm supplies a pair of Chicago restaurants, Smyth and The Loyalist. The relationship began in 2015, when chef John Shields put out a call for black walnuts on Twitter. We responded. Today, we grow more than 200 different edible plants in Bourbonnais, Illinois. We call our experiment in heartland agriculture The Farm.

My clippings go into the Dry House, a ten-foot-square space where we preserve Illinois flavor and aroma starting in October. Hanging herbs and flowers crowd the half-inch tubing on the ceiling. The first year, when the room was full, the aroma was so intoxicating that I decided to make it into something that would intoxicate us later—an herbal elixir that we call The Farm Spirit.

Our 2018 vintage is an infusion of marigolds, basil, dill, lemon verbena, and Sweet Annie. We thought it would taste like absinthe, because Sweet Annie is a cousin to one of absinthe’s key ingredients, grand wormwood, grown by distillers in Switzerland and France. Instead, the sweet, green flavor of the first bottle we opened in early winter evoked another place-based infusion from across the Atlantic: Chartreuse, a botanical liqueur produced by French monks since 1737.

Most of all, it tastes like our twenty acres in northern Illinois. The assertive perfume and bitterness of our Sweet Annie mingled with other sweet and spicy flavors from our property transports us to the Dry House as we plant the herbs and flowers that will flavor this year’s Farm Spirit.