January, 2025
HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM AGATE ACRES!
Season four here we come! 2025 will be our fifth summer here at Agate Acres and our fourth in production. We are so astoundingly grateful to call this little chunk of land home and to get to share it with you and to grow veggies and flowers for you. Thank you so much for your support, encouragement, business, generosity, and ideas over these last seasons. Our community is truly the driving force leading this work of stewarding the land, growing food and flowers, and cultivating space for folks to gather.
These last three seasons have been wonderful and hard. We have had many successes and learned LOADS. With these achievements and challenges, we deeply believe that reflection and evaluation is healthy and necessary. We are proud of the work we have done, the relationships made, and the mountain of food grown. However, change is the only constant, and with change comes opportunity. We are diving into season four with evolution as a mindset. And with this, we are SO EXCITED for what is to come and to share these changes with you. Thank you for being along for the ride!
HERE ARE THE BIG CHANGES IN 2025:
We are no longer doing our vegetable CSA. Yes, this is a BIG change. 2024 was Emily’s 9th season of vegetable CSA farming and Kyle’s 4th. Mostly, we need a break and a refresh. There is a good chance that this program will come back in the future. Also, never fear! There are still TWO WAYS TO GET YOUR HANDS ON OUR VEGGIES! Read on below about our farm stand and veggie boxes.
Flower deep dive!! One of the wonderful successes we have found over the last couple years is flower growing for wholesale, bouquet subscriptions, and weddings. And oh what fun we are having with this! Most flowers in the world come from very very very far away, so to offer exceptionally fresh blooms to our community is such a joy. The design work is such a fantastic creative outlet as well!
The team is getting bigger!! Holy buckets are we stoked for this! We are on the search for a Field Manager, several Field Hands, and a couple Event Staff. Check out the section below with all the details.
Build it and they will get married! This fall and winter has been less restful then others because we have been hard at work upgrading and building new infrastructure for weddings and events. HIGHLY recommend checking out the section below if you’re engaged or just like really cool greenhouse spaces.
We want to see you at our FARM STAND this summer! Get signed up below to get all the delicious updates!
Ok, there it is folks, the BIG CHANGES coming to Agate Acres in 2025. Thank you for reading this very long, but chock full newsletter. Reach out if you have more questions, event ideas, desire for veggies or flowers, or feedback. We LOVE to hear from and connect with you.
With wintery joy,
Emily & Kyle
WEDDING AVAILABILITY
Engaged? Or soon to be? Congratulations! We are so excited for you and would be so honored to be your venue! We have a small amount of dates left in 2025 - six to be exact! These dates are all in July and August, such a beautiful time here on the farm for a wedding. High summer is full of gorgeous florals, deep greens, the babbling river, good weather, and phenomenal golden hour sunsets. Inquire HERE if you’d like to learn more!
As mentioned above, we have been busy bees this winter building out new infrastructure for the venue! This includes a reception hoophouse space, similar to this THIS ONE (trust me, you want to check this out!), sprucing up the almost 100 year old barn, building 2 get ready spaces, and dreaming up spectacular landscaping for the spring time. We are so excited to share this space with you and to celebrate!
We are also booking 2026 - even those dates are filling up quick!
WEDDING & EVENT FLOWERS!
Local, pesticide free flowers for your local wedding or event? Yes, please! There are several dates still available for 2025 to get on the calendar for Agate Acres event flowers! (And of course dates in 2026!)
We offer three package styles:
Complete DIY: We work with you figure out the number of stems you need. You receive DIY buckets of flowers. Each bucket has ~100 stems consisting of focal flowers, filler flowers, and foliage. You design all your pieces.
Half & Half: Agate Acres staff designs and creates all held, worn, and attached pieces (bouquets, boutonnieres, corsages, arbor sprays, etc), but you still receive a few DIY buckets of flowers to create you centerpieces.
Full Design: Agate Acres staff designs and creates all floral pieces.
Each package is priced according to your weddings needs (eg. some couples have no wedding party, and some have 12 people). Our minimum is $600 and we take wedding and event customers for events from June 1 - October 11.
Oh, and these flowers don’t have to just be for weddings - bridal showers, baby showers, grad parties, birthday celebrations, retirement parties - all events go good with flowers!
We’re HIRING!
As Agate Acres enters our fourth season, we are THRILLED to be hiring this season! We are looking for an awesome field manager. This position will be the right hand person at the farm and will have lots of growth opportunities within the business. We’d love to find someone who is interested in working with us for multiple seasons.
We are also hiring field hands and events staff! These roles are VITAL to the success of the season and also have lots of room for growth. These positions are superb for someone looking to be involved in Agate Acres happenings, to learn about farming and/or events, and is looking for a part time gig
FLOWER CSA
As we lean into growing more and more flowers here at Agate Acres, we are very eager to share them with you! Sign up for a flower subscription for a summer full of blooms! We are offering two different subscription types:
SIGN UP FOR A TULIP BOUQUET SUBSCRIPTION!
SIGN UP FOR A CUT FLOWER BOUQUET SUBSCRIPTION!
Fill your spring with tulips! We plan to have them blooming for Easter, Mothers Day, and the first of June. This subscription would make a FABULOUS valentines gift or early mothers day gift for your sweetie or the mamas in your life.
Over the course of the summer you can sign up for either 6 weeks or 8 weeks of bouquets! These blooms will be different each week, with the plant varieties and color platte changing with the season. Again, this subscription makes a GREAT GIFT or ya know, treat yourself to these gorgeous blooms!
These subscriptions can be picked up either at the farm or in Lakeside Duluth.
VEGGIE BOXES
Just because we are not doing the Vegetable CSA this year, does not mean we are not growing veggies! We are still, and always will be a veggie growing farm. We are exploring a more sustainable business model and the best way to get produce to our customers. We are leveraging our farm stand much more this season (get the details on this below!!). We will still offer veggie boxes to our community, but will sell them by a weekly sign up and they will be picked up in our farm stand on Sundays. Check out our website now and sign up for the weeks this summer you’d like a veggie box!
RESERVE YOUR VEGGIE BOXES HERE NOW!
These are perfect for when you know you have guests coming, for meal prep, for purchasing as a gift, and of course, for enjoying and feeding your family with! Each box will be exactly like a CSA share box - filled with a $40 value of in season vegetables ranging from greens, to carrots, to peas, to squash, to onions, and more! Please reach out with any questions!
FARM STAND
Have you visited our farm stand!? We are part of the Clover Valley Farm Trail, is a co-operative group of locally-owned, small farms between Duluth and Two Harbors, Minnesota. All 10+ farm stands are open on Sundays from 12pm-5pm, from June 15 - early October.
Want to know what will be in the farm stand each week? We will tell you! Sign up for our farm stand email to get the info on what will be for sale each Sunday. The email will be short and sweet and arrive in your inbox on Thursday evenings.
COMMUNITY EVENTS!
Community is what makes the world a better place. So, we want to cultivate community! Over the course of the summer we will host a handful of public events. These will range from a Spring Potluck, to yoga classes, to workshops! Have an idea for a community building event - great! We’d love to hear your idea, send us an email!
