Tuesday, March 3, 2015

One down....One to go!!

The first weekend is in the books….and it was an eventful weekend.
Lots of late nights, hard work, bloody fingers, and chapped lips!! I
think a majority of our customers thoroughly enjoyed attending the
festival and had a wonderful day at the farm.

I ended up taking a half day on Wednesday, and I was off all day on
Thursday and Friday. Robert was at the farm almost all week and Jen
and Nic worked as their work schedules allowed. Busy, busy, busy!!

Our first interesting debacle of the festival started earlier in the
week. We called our existing credit card service provider to turn on
our credit card machines. Since we are seasonal, we only have our
credit card machines activated for 3 weeks out of the year for our
Festival. We learned at this time that our credit card machines were
outdated and in order to use our existing service provider, we had to
purchase very pricy new machines. We started researching other
available options and decided to run all of our credit transactions
through the Square program, using tablets. We were able to purchase
tablets and download the Square program without any problems, only to
find out that our wifi-network didn’t have the range to run the
tablets in the store. We purchased a super fancy wifi booster and the
signal made it to the store. We thought we were all set up and ready
to go….until Friday evening. We attempted to connect all of the
tablets to the network, only to discover that our router wasn’t a dual
band router. We couldn’t connect multiple devices at the same time. So
Jen and I trucked it to Wal-Mart at 1:30am on Saturday morning….the
Saturday morning OF the festival. Jen and I stayed up until 3:30am
working on hooking up the new router, getting the booster and router
communicating with each other, and getting the tablets connected to
the network. With some help from Nic in the morning, we were able to
get our tablets ready. Talk about a stressful 12 hours. We were
slightly panicking that we would not be able to run cards in the
store. This would have been catastrophic. Thankfully, everything
worked out and the tablets worked all weekend in the store without a
single glitch.

Late night store work!!

Saturday turned out to be a very nice day. Yes, it was cold and there
was still snow on the ground, but our faithful fans still came out to
the farm. Everyone seemed appreciative of the changes in the store. We
had SO much more space for customers to browse around. We have a few
improvements that we will make before next weekend, namely moving the
cash registers and reconfiguring our cashier counters, but overall,
everything went extremely well in the store. We were short on our
supply of Grade B syrup due to our cold weather conditions, and we
sold out on Saturday afternoon. The weather looks promising for making
a lot of syrup this week, so keep your fingers crossed that we will
make a lot more!!

Photo credit: Wendy Gordon

Photo credit: Wendy Gordon

Parking held up as well as can be expected. The ground was frozen
solid on Saturday, but was muddy on Sunday. Our parking guys were
ready with several tractors, gravel, and straw and I think we made it
through without any major problems.

The food at the festival was being served by a new church group this
year. It was nerve wracking for everyone and there was a learning
curve, but I think the new group did an outstanding job. The tablets
were also being used in the check-out lines for the kitchen. We had a
few small issues with connectivity, but overall, nothing major. I had
waffles both days and they were delicious.

The vendors didn’t fare quite as well as everyone else. We had several
cancel due to sickness and the weather. Those who attended seemed to
be happy with the turnout on Saturday. Our new food tuck was AMAZING.
I had a calzone for lunch both days. Talk about yummy. For $8, I got a
huge calzone, large enough to feed two people. It was delicious.
Everything was made from scratch and tasted unbelievable. Russell, the
food truck owner, was a hoot and everyone enjoyed him. I got two
bottles of wine from the BEST Winery, located in the vendor cabin. I
got the Catawba and the Red Raspberry.



We are all pretty exhausted at this point, but it is totally worth it.
We got some helpful suggestions and feedback from our customers and we
will be making improvements before next weekend.

The maple tea will be available next weekend. Many were disappointed
that it was not available. Due to the extremely cold weather
conditions for the past two weeks, we finished boiling our maple sap
early on Saturday morning. The rest of the weekend we were running
water through the evaporator for demonstrating purposes only. Not very
tasty for maple tea. Jen and I had discussed putting out a sign
explaining why the maple tea would not be available this weekend, but
our 3 hours of sleep caught up to us and we didn’t get it made. Fear
not, the maple tea has not been permanently discontinued!!!

We were also informed that several GPS systems advised drivers to take
Walker Road to reach the farm. Walker Road is a gravel road which
connects several very rural farms. It was a solid sheet of ice and
completely impassable. We were not aware that GPS would even know
Walker Road existed. We will be updating our website directions
advising people not to turn onto Walker Road, as well as posting signs
on the road itself not to turn.

Seeing people enjoy our farm makes all of the blood, sweat and tears
shed totally worth it. We greatly appreciate every one of you who
brave the cold weather and share our little farm in the woods!!

6 comments:

  1. You guys did an awesome job as always! Like the new store configuration. Several in my party commented that our waffles were served hotter this year than every before, and we've been coming for 13 years :) My kids were not happy that they had to have tickets this year for some of the activities. But I appreciate all of the hard work and expense involved in putting this thing on year after year so I didn't mind and thought the prices were reasonable.
    Ginny

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ginny,

      Thank you for the feedback. I agree, the food was nice and hot this year. The kitchen is always fighting a losing battle trying to keep food warm in such cold weather.

      We made the business decision to start charging a very small fee for some of the activities ($0.25-$1.00) to help cover our labor costs. It takes a lot of manpower to run the game area. We will always have free parking and no admission fees. We try to keep it low cost and family friendly!!

      Delete
  2. This is the first year since 2006 that we've seriously considered not coming due to weather. How can we get syrup if we can't come and get it ourselves?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We have extended the festival for a third weekend on March 14 & 15 if you are unable to attend this weekend. We also ship our maple products !!

      Delete
  3. We had a great time Saturday! Pork chops and pulled pork were delicious as usual. Looking forward to a return trip Saturday...hope to see Crooked Paw and the kettle corn lady this weekend.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Crooked Paw will not be attending this year due to his health. Hopefully Ma's Kettle Corn will be there this weekend. She's been under the weather as well.

      Delete

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