Preparing

Fall has been kind to us, we have had cool nights perfect for sleeping, chilly mornings to get your blood moving, and grand sunny afternoons with sunsets over the technicolored mountains in full fall splendor. I’ve tried many afternoons this week to capture the image, and the digital medium just doesn’t seem to cut it. Even with fancy filters and color editing, you’ll just have to take my word for it: it is inspiring every time.

The view is an exercise in a way, I continue to feel less pain during my daily routine and yet without the pain it is all too easy to get lost in the process of doing and completing. Nothing like a spectacular fall view of the mountains to keep perspective in check. One of our projects this week has been training the new batch of pigs to an electric fence so they can venture out into the green world beyond the barn. We’ve also been cleaning up the barn and putting to bed all the chicken brooding equipment to make room so the pigs can have the full barn.

I’ve been plugging away on setting up the display freezer in the new “mini farm store.” The question I have been researching for a few weeks now is how to effectively display a variety of frozen packages of meat, without freezer shelf chaos. Of course they make fancy floating shelves that have adjustable sides and a forwarding mechanism…but it would cost more than the freezer itself to outfit the thing. So I settled on some cardboard “organizer bins” that will have printed product labels on the front for easy viewing and price. They are cheap, easy to swap out, and probably have some major drawbacks that we’ll learn about soon enough.

With a shelf or two more I figure we can fit almost every frozen meat product we have to offer, that is over 60 different products! We’ll keep some of the more obscure products for order online but hopefully we can also make quick and easy adjustments based on what are actually popular.

I’m pleased with the large labels we’re able to use with the box system. I always struggle to read the package, or decipher the small price/unit label at the supermarket. So my hope is that in our store it will be clear what the product is, any details about it and how much it costs at the store. Then you can check out at the handy square terminal, just enter the weight if the product is priced by weight and away you go. Modern technology is amazing. Selling meat by weight seemed a daunting task when we had to ask the customer to weigh each item, calculate the price and then do so for the next item. The square kiosk knows the price per lb, just asks you to put in the weight and bingo.

In other preparations, Lovett’s 4th birthday is coming up. We have a book we love to read about a dragon and penguin, and the mother dragon tells her baby penguin that the greatest gift a parent can give is love and time. As I thought of how to put this into practice for her birthday I thought of trying to make a birthday present with her. We meandered down to the barn this morning to work on her birthday present. The dragon’s advice was clearly insightful, Lovett didn’t really care what we made or even if we made the present. It was just so much to fun to be together, on purpose.

We talked about different things we could make. Chairs, pots, shelves…etc. We started by cutting a small bucket to make a pot. Then she found a cookie tin, filled it with two 1 1/2″ PVC elbows and said it was a perfect present for her baby dolls. Lastly we found an old cover to an electrical junction box and added some wooden legs and table was born. After much sanding, discussing, drilling, more sanding, some sawdust sweeping, sawdust spreading, and then sawdust sweeping we returned home with an armful of presents and hearts full of love.