Season Update

Sorry for the delay on posting. The past two weeks I’ve been in
festival mode and I haven’t had a lot of spare time (imagine that).
Everything continues to be going smoothly, minus the weather, snow,
frigid temperatures, and ice. We had record low temperatures the week
of February 16th. One weather station said that it was the coldest
weather on record since 1936. The other station said 1996 so I’m not
sure who is correct.

This was taken Thursday, the 19th.

Between two snow storms, we have about 4-6” of snow at the farm. Fear
not, my wonderful hubby got the tractor out and spent the weekend
scraping, scooping, and pushing a majority of the snow off the
festival area. Yes, there is still snow on the ground, but hopefully
the little that is left will melt before this weekend. The roads to
the farm were 90% clear on Sunday afternoon, so I would say it’s safe
to conclude that they will be totally clear by the weekend. The
parking fields are still snow covered and frozen, but the guys have a
game plan, several tractors, a gator, straw, gravel, and a lot of
strong guys to try to make parking go as smoothly as possible. I know
the parking area is our downside of attending the festival. We really
try to do everything we can to make the parking less muddy. However,
we cannot control the weather and putting gravel down on our entire
parking area just isn’t an option. The muddy fields you see in the
winter are our hay fields in the summer!!

The store is getting there. Jenny and Nic spent the weekend bottling
syrup for the store and it is beginning to look like a store instead
of an empty cabin. I spent all weekend cleaning, organizing, and
setting up everything. We have moved, removed, or rebuilt so many
things in the store this year. I can’t wait for people to see it. I
think our customers are going to be very happy with our improvements!!
We unexpectedly decided to upgrade our credit card machines and
registers onto tablets this year. We will still have the regular cash
registers for back-up in case the tablets don’t work out for any
reason. I’m pretty excited about it. We will be able to track
inventory more efficiently which will make re-ordering supplies and
tracking our syrup sales so much easier.

I’m taking off work on Wednesday (maybe a half day), Thursday and
Friday this week to finish up all of the last minute things. I feel
like I’m in good shape now, but I’m sure I’ll be having a panic attack
later in the week. Everything really is going so well this year. We
still have to map out our vendor area and make some last minute
changes, but we are getting there!!

I do have to say that I got a call from a customer last week and she
asked if I was one of the people in the blog. I was like OMG – SOMEONE
READS IT!!! I felt famous and I was so excited. I know a lot of people
read the blog (I can see the number of views through my blogger
account) but I was super excited that someone asked me about it.

Hope to see you this weekend. Brave the cold and come enjoy the farm.
Dress warmly and wear boots. Drive a truck or SUV. This is a farm, so
please don’t drive a smart car or a super fancy car. Come see me in
the store and say hi to Robert at the evaporator. Take a tour and say
hi to Jenny. Check out all of our super awesome vendors. IT’S FESTIVAL
TIME!!!