NEWBURG, MINN. — Driving down a winding road dotted with farms, churches and roadside produce stands, it can be easy to miss the only business in town here, an old red shop tucked behind rows of flowers and hanging ferns.

But make no mistake, behind those century-and-a-half-old walls is one of the top food destinations in Minnesota’s Driftless Area.

For the past seven years, Irene Fishburn has been delighting locals and road-trippers alike with made-from-scratch delicacies at Newburg Vintage Home and Garden and Small Batch Bakery.

Fishburn opened the business after she and her husband, Glenn, moved to southeastern Minnesota to be closer to family in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. After leaving the grind of their corporate careers in California, the couple settled on a former general store where Irene, a former merchandise buyer for more than 35 stores, could sell garden gifts and baked goods, and Glenn could fish in a nearby trout stream.

Their retirement was set — at least that was the plan.

“When we first bought it, we imagined sitting on the front porch and having coffee with neighbors who stopped by,” Irene said. “We had no idea that it would become a destination-type business.”

Open only on select Saturdays — and then for only three hours — the Newburg bakery regularly draws scores of people willing to stand in line for up to an hour during the busiest summer months to get a taste of authentic French baking. Others come from just down the road.

Mike and Cheryl Erickson, both retired military members, spend their summers in nearby Mabel, Minn., where Mike grew up. He remembers getting ice cream as a kid outside of the same building and said he initially came to the bakery with low expectations.

Any kind of art — from the Mona Lisa to your family snapshots — can look better in a nice frame.

To elevate, protect and display paintings, photos and other prizes, you’ll either need to find a good shop to do the work or buy supplies and DIY. Many local framing shops provide expert advice, take care of your precious items and don’t charge high prices. If you want to frame yourself, online businesses offer products and instructions, or you can buy supplies from an arts and crafts store and watch online instructional videos for an assist on putting everything together.

If someone else will do the work, you’ll want a skilled pro who offers sage advice. Staff at the best shops will spend time with you exploring framing options (single or double mat? Metal or wood? Plexiglass or real glass?) and eventually give you a fine-looking final product.

Until Nov. 5, Checkbook is offering free access to its ratings of area framing shops to the Minnesota Star Tribune readers via Checkbook.org/StarTribune/framing. Checkbook surveyed its own subscribers plus other randomly selected individuals. You’ll notice big shop-to-shop differences for customer satisfaction and prices.

You can hire a local shop to do your framing, ship your stuff to an internet-based outfit or do some or all the work yourself. DIY options are usually the cheapest. You can buy inexpensive frames at stores like Target, Pottery Barn and IKEA, and they often look pretty good.

“I do kid artwork walls for some of my clients, and cheaper frames like this are a great option,” says Allison Marvin, an art consultant whose firm, Sightline, helps people buy and mount art.

Make sure you use acid- and lignin-free mats that won’t damage artwork through time. Check on this sign of quality when buying from online outfits or when picking up an inexpensive premade frame. Most pro framers use nothing but acid-free materials.

If you have odd-sized art or want customized frames and mats, several websites allow you to enter measurements and shop from hundreds of frames. Plus, you can buy custom-cut mats, glass or plexiglass fronts and more. The store ships your products, and you assemble everything. In our experience, this is a relatively simple but not totally goof-proof transaction.

Richfield resident Alex Asmus doesn’t agree with Hayford Oleary. As someone who has a degree in construction management, Asmus said he believes reducing parking minimums will give developers an incentive to build less parking than needed because it doesn’t generate much revenue for them.

Asmus said the council’s emphasis on adding large apartment buildings has made parts of Richfield, including his once-quiet neighborhood, busier than they were designed to be, something he’s concerned lower parking requirements could exacerbate. Because many neighborhoods in Richfield don’t have sidewalks, pedestrians and kids on bikes use the streets, and more cars parked on streets present more obstacles. And in the winter, he said, snow plows struggled to get through.

“Cars have just flooded into our neighborhood,” he said. “We have a lot of young children, when they try to exit their driveways on their bikes into the street, cars fly by and they can’t see a child coming out of their driveway. Because there’s so many cars parked, it’s hard to have that kind of visibility.”