The 2 day heat wave passed. Saturday brought us cooler temps (mid 80s), and loads of happy holiday customers enjoying a long leisurely holiday weekend.

We are working on stocking the shop and filling some wholesale orders.

One of our generous and talented friends brought us a gift bag stuffed full
Of homemade yummies!! One side benefit of our job is knowing a lot of amazing crafty, creative, generous people that make and do amazing things.

Part of a wholesale order... More to make Tuesday!

Whew. Big order - finished. Shown here is the order we delivered to the Soap Opera in Iowa City. So, for you Prairieland Herbs fans in the Iowa City area - there's a ton of our stuff there just now, so stop on in and shop! It's a WONDERFUL store, I had a great time visiting it on Saturday!

For reference, those boxes are all full, and stacked as tall as me. :)

I thought I'd amuse you all with some shots of our ultra-fancy organizational systems. :) This is our brain - our calender for the year. This is where we mark all our events - classes, bus tours, farmer's markets,anything we have going on. We did without one of these for years, but I'm not sure how.

here is our ultra-organized (ha) inventory tracking system. A whiteboard, with a list of stuff we are getting low on. By "stuff", I mean raw materials such as tins, oils, butters, essential oils, etc.


And here are the "in process" wholesale orders. This one is a BIG one, which will go to Iowa city hopefully tomorrow.


And 2 small ones in progress.

In short - our systems are not fancy, but they WORK. See, if I wanted to run a bakery - I'd go work at a bakery, and learn the flow of it, then visit lots of bakeries to check out how they are set up and how they operate. We don't know anyone, in the area, who does what we do on our scale, so we had to make it all up from scratch, which is harder than you might think. We didn't know what kind of space we'd need, how to organize it, and how to anticipate our needs. So we guessed, and have learned to make do with what we have. I'll post some pictures of our work areas pretty soon so you can see what I mean.

So, in case you wonder what we've been doing lately, THIS is what we've been doing lately.

Our shop was nearly empty after filling several largeish wholesale order, then this BIG order came in, and we spent a week making everythign to fill it. In case you ever wondered, this is what $2400 of prairieland herbs merchandise looks like. I packed it in five very large, very heavy boxes!




In other news: the only members of the PLH family that actually *like* the rain we've been having every day (for almost a week straigh) are Beaker (shown enjoying the now-full pond), and the ducks. Normally the ducks are pretty boring but they are funny when they come out in the middle of a downpour and quack their way around the yard, just enjoying a little walk in the rain....