Fresh Produce + Outdoor Kitchen = Cooking at Its Best

May 8, 2017

It’s a great time to be outdoors in Minnesota. We love spending time in our garden or at a farmer’s market, and there’s nothing better than cooking with locally grown fresh produce, meat and preserves.

Like many of you, we like to cook outside as often as we can. Check out this Pizza Party project we completed for a family last year – it’s a dream outdoor kitchen and a great place to entertain!

Our Bees are Here!

Setting up “nucs” for our new batch of honeybees.

We’re excited to start beekeeping again this year at Magnolia Farm.

Here’s Nicole helping one of the bees into its new home!

We replace refined sugar with honey all the time, and find that almost any recipe can be modified to substitute with this natural sweetener.

Our shipment of bees arrived last week and we installed the nucs over the weekend. Nucs, or nucleus colonies, are small honey bee colonies created from larger colonies. The term refers both to the smaller size box and the colony of honeybees within it. The name is derived from the fact that a nuc hive is centered on a queen, the nucleus of the honey bee colony.

Here’s a short video of the bees fanning the hive – they do this when it’s hot to keep temperature down – isn’t that amazing?