Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 9 October 2023…
Hey Y’all!
Good evening and happy Columbus Day Monday! I hope everyone had an awesome holiday. The weather here is amazing, cool in the mornings and low-mid 70s in the afternoon. We had our first frosts of the season Saturday and Sunday mornings. It didn’t stay around for long and the garden seems to have survived, so far. We’re still getting tomatoes and peppers, a few beans, and the okra is now producing like crazy. The animals are all doing very well. The biggest news of the past couple of days is that we integrated the two ewe flocks, pics. It was a big nothing-burger. We put the new ewe group in the calming pen, built a new paddock, walked the old ewe group into the new paddock, put the wire around them, and let the new ewes out of the pen. They hollered at each other while they were separated but within about 60 seconds of letting them mingle, they were one flock and completely integrated. It was as if they had always been together. We had a good market day on Saturday, although it was a bit cold. We’re starting to hand out papers describing our winter ops so folks know they can still get products when the market closes by placing orders throughout the week and then meeting us on Saturday mornings. Today, we built some containers out of pallets to hold firewood and started gathering it near the house.
We’re dialing-in the business side of the farm. Recently, we turned off shipping through the website. We’re about to turn off credit card payments through the website. We will still ship, and we will still accept credit cards…the difference is that we want to be involved in the process. We thought we would like the automatic process but it turns out that we don’t. It is also really expensive to ship frozen meat. From the couple dozen orders we shipped, the normal shipping expenses approach $100. We have to ship 2-day air and the orders normally weigh about 35 pounds by the time we add enough frozen gel-packs to keep things frozen. The normal shipping fee is around $65. The cardboard container, insulate material, and gel packs cost around $30. All of our research indicated that people like free shipping, so we attempted to make that happen. In order to do that, we had to incorporate the $100 shipping into the price of the items being shipped…since as a small business we can’t just eat that cost. It quickly became apparent why the big frozen meat shipping sites are so very expensive in their products, but offer free shipping. Where we’ve decided to go with this is to still offer to ship, but folks will have to communicate with us and we can describe the situation. We’ll describe the cost of the items and the cost of shipping. If they want to make the purchase, we’ll happily ship it to them! We may change our other minds in the future, but that’s where we’re going now.
Local Farm Report for 7 & 8 October 2023
Harvest:
11 Chicken eggs
16 Duck eggs
6 1/4 Gallons of milk
Cheers!
Psycho & Shelley
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