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The Roots
We are a red seal chef and herbalist team passionately running a small scale homestead in the village of Tatamagouche. Our goal is to introduce food as medicine and offer healthy homegrown produce, artisanal soups, preserves, ferments and herbal tonics to nourish our community. We use minimal input and work with nature to get the most out of our soil. Our product line flows with the seasons to ensure you get the ultimate local flavour experience and your body gets what it needs to thrive in each one.
Shawn Crouse is a certified red seal chef who grew up on his family farm and is no stranger to having fresh food all around him. His mother also ran a bakery from home and being surrounded by real food and community working together became his goal. Once he finished culinary school and moved to Nova Scotia, he became passionate about growing his own vegetables to put into his creations and started a small scale homestead. Teamed up with his wife of 17 years, who is a self taught food alchemist also training to be his sous chef, they create magical + authentic farm to table comfort food they bring to life through fermentation.
In January 2020 they started their farm, Moth + Moon, not knowing a worldwide pandemic was coming a few months later. They set up a booth at the local farmers market selling soup and ferments, but unfortunately the market was struggling. The couple signed on as co-managers and spent the first year of the pandemic bringing the market back to life and turning it into an essential service to support the local economy and create more food security in the community. Now almost 3 years later, the market along with their own farm, has become the best place to source almost all of their ingredients.
At the beginning of 2022 they opened their farm to table soup + sandwich shop named The Fermentary at the farmers market with great success and are now expanding it into a food truck business to make their creations more accessible to the community. The foods they offer are created with their own line of fermented products such as seasonal misos, kombucha and kimchi, all made traditionally with locally grown or wild foraged ingredients. His wife’s training as an herbalist also allows them to incorporate strange and nutritious plant medicines from her gardens like nettles + burdock + tulsi to create true food medicine.
They have recently leased a 2 acre farm and plan to create a space to offer affordable food sources and education to everyone to help tackle the rising issue of food insecurity in the province.