Tomatoes are in the ground!

It was a good weekend on the farm! The weather stayed dry and warm(ish) which gave us the ability to begin planting our tomatoes! Over the weekend we planted close to 1,000 tomatoes plants! We are excited for the weather this week because it continues to warm up and highs in the 70s and even 80s! We will be planting thousands of plants through the week, and not only tomatoes. We have peppers, melons, cole crops and more to transplant to the fields.

We are very excited for the upcoming farm season and are expecting it to be one of the best we´ve had! Be sure to come by the Minneapolis Market on Saturday and Sunday to say hello and pick up some Maple Syrup!

Spring has sprung on the farm!

This weekend has been one for the record books! We have had a large portion of our snow cover melt with the warm weather and large amount of rainfall. When the snow melts this quick we get a lot of water flowing down the hill and it takes the path of least resistance. We have been hard at work helping the water navigate it´s way off the driveway. A couple culverts are still frozen so we have built small channels for the water to follow to bypass it. Who said playing in the mud is just for kids?

We have also started tapping trees and collecting sap for maple syrup! We are excited for this years syrup season. We have over 70 taps placed which is more than we´ve had in the past. We plan to start boiling syrup today, 3/18/19!

The pups have been loving this weather. Warm sun mixed with snow and mud is a recipe for a nasty mud pup filled with happiness! The full pond in the back is lookin´ gorgeous under the sunset.

Reminder- itś not too late to sign up for our 2019 CSA season, check out our CSA page for more information!

We look forward to keeping you updated on the 2019 season as things progress!

Spring Heat Wave & Maple Sugar!

Wow! This heatwave is getting us ready for a hot summer! 5 days in the low to mid 90s is enough to wear down even the most experienced farmer. When your livelihood is made by being a farmer you have to train yourself to overcome heat waves. It is important to balance your work with plenty of rest and hydration. We enjoy filling our cattle troughs with ice cold hose water and using it as an outdoor ice bath to help us cool off after hours in the hot sun.

In terms of farm work for the week; we haven't slowed down because of the heat! We have full removed all the stakes from last year's tomato field- which was over 2,000 stakes. We typically try to get that job done in the fall after the tomatoes have stopped producing, but unfortunately that doesn't always happen as we'd like it to and then we are stuck doing it in the spring. Over the last week we've had one of our former gymnasts, Ian, out here helping us on the farm. It's always a blessing having young muscle out here on the farm doing tasks like these!

Maple sugar; it's something we have never made before but we've always talked about doing. With this heat wave and the intermittent rainfalls we decided it was time to try it! We did a bit of research beforehand so we knew what to expect and what to look for. From there on we just went for it! It has been a fun experience learning how you can start with drilling a hole in a maple tree to get sap (which is essentially water) and end with fine crystalized pieces of maple sugar! Maple sugar can be used in recipes in the same way as cane sugar is used. It can be used to sweeten drinks, top oatmeal or incorporated into a flavorful rub for meats! Maple sugar is on average twice as sweet as cane sugar, so it makes for a wonderful substitue for making sweet treats and desserts!

4.24.18 Spring is here!

We have survived one of the snowiest springs in history and the largest April snowstorm! Spring time is here and we are busy at work to get the farm prepped outside! We are weeks behind because of the snow and mud, but between Friday and today we are almost dry enough to get into the fields!

Our maple trees have finished producing sap and we're boiling down the last of our sap/syrup, which means we'll have our final product soon! We worked hard yesterday taking down all the buckets and pulling taps from the trees. In the next couple of days we'll hand-wash nearly 100 buckets and lids and put them away for storage until next year.

We have started building our greenhouses and will finish up early this week. We have thousands of plants that will call the greenhouse home until the fields are ready and the weather is steady.

3.19.18 New boiling station!

This was a busy weekend for us! We spent Saturday and Sunday outside working on fixing up our driveway, carrying 5 gallon buckets of sap out of the woods to our boiling station and finally fixing up our boiling station!

50 degree days in March are always welcomed by us! It gives us the ability to get a head start on the season. It helps melt the snow, thaw the ground, dry the mud and lets the sap flow! We carried over 40 gallons of sap from our tapped trees out to the boiling station. The general rule of thumb is 40 to 1, meaning 40 gallons of sap is equal to 1 gallon of maple syrup! We collect our sap with 5 gallon bucks and then carry it to where it needs to be. This way does require a bit more physical labor, but we can get a cleaner end product using no chemicals. Another way to do it is collect sap via tubing and run downhill to a collection point. The issue with this is that those tubes have to be cleaned with chemicals, which we prefer to stay away from.

We started Saturday's work with trying to thaw out the previous boiling spot so we could dig it out a better spot. Well, that didn't go quite as planned.. We ran into 2 inches of thawed mud and then frozen solid ground. After taking a minute to look at the situation we decided it best to move the boiling station over in order to create a fresh clean spot. We had purchased new concrete blocks to reconstruct it all. With our new station we should be able to boil roughly 100 gallons of sap simultaneously.

Finally the fun got started! We had everything set up to start boiling the sap! Having a fire large enough to boil the quantity of sap we do requires a monumental amount of firewood. While the fire blazes on and the sap boils we make trip after trip in and out of the woods collecting fuel for the fire.

We have tapped more trees this year than any year before and we have a better boiling setup than any previous year. We anticipate this to be our best maple syrup season yet! We look forward to having some final product soon to share with all of you!

-The Gyslands