We’ve had everything from 26 degrees, to 75 and glorious, followed by 35 degrees with high winds and rain. The chickens are thankful for the roll down sides on their coops and the pigs are happier when its raining. The cattle hardly notice, they care most about the flies, and those have slowed down with a few heavy frost mornings.
You can see in this picture what a few days of rain and hungry pigs will do: there’s not much green left. Racey took this picture right before setting up a new fence that gives them a much larger area. It takes them almost a month to learn and respect the boundary of an electric fence. This week they were ready and we gave them a big swath to play in. They have since been enjoying tunneling through the tall weeds around the barn and digging up dandelion, thistle and goldenrod.
In light of November’s imminent arrival, but first some Halloween costumes, we are planning some improvements and adjustments for the upcoming holidays. If you have any other thoughts or feedback from this year or last year’s holiday season we would love to hear so we can continue to improve. Here’s a sneak preview of some of what to expect:
Maple Syrup
- Inventory. Last year we ran out of some syrup sizes right before the holidays, and this year we will be well stocked for all your holiday needs!
- Easy Syrup Shipping. Our website and E-commerce platform has some difficulty with the fact that we sell both frozen meat, which we ship in insulated boxes with dry ice…AND we sell syrup, which we can ship anywhere:). With frozen items it is important to have a certain amount of thermal mass to keep everything frozen during transit, so we have order minimums. But this conflicts with the customer who wants to order a few pints of syrup as a gift, or send one syrup. I’m working on an idea that I plan to roll out in the next week or so, to basically have a separate “Pickup Location” that is for syrup shipping only. I’ll explain this more when I have it all figured out, but this should allow for anyone to order syrup for delivery anywhere, no minimums.
- Ordering Gifts! We had a lot of requests last year to send gifts, but the website gets confused if one customer is trying to place multiple orders in the same order cycle. I haven’t figured out a good work around, so I’m going to setup a simple form that any existing customer can fill out and we’ll send the order with a gift note. This can be done for both syrup or meat orders! If any one is interested in giving RRF gifts on a larger scale like corporate holiday gifts, let us know, we would love to work with you.
Farm Store Freezer
- We had repair technicians out last week to look into the beautiful, shiny and no longer working display freezer and they determined that the start capacitor, run capacitor and relay were bad. This week they came back to replace those parts, and it still did not run! BAH! So they ordered a new compressor (the main motor that compresses the refrigerant and makes the thing work) and after some much appreciated sleuthing by the service manager she found the part from a distributor that could get it here next week. So if I’m optimistic (and I often am) and have to re-plan, then we should have the freezer up and running and a soft opening of the store by next weekend (11/6 – 11/7). I’ll believe it when I see it and I’ll be sure to post on FB and instagram when it’s up and running. Cross your fingers for us.
Reber Rock Farm Blog 