I have posted these pics before, but someone was asking about our order packing area, so I am re-posting. We pack loads of orders in a tiny area, which is very possible - when you are organized. Our packing area takes up the footprint of a 6-foot long table. On the top of the table is a small pine shelf which holds all 5 sizes of priority mail boxes and enelopes that we use, plus padded envelopes. We also have rolls of packing tape on the shelves, plus 2 colors ofelectrical tape that we use to seal lids and bottles. The small white plastic shelves hold 4 sizes of plastic bags, used to seal and ship anything that can leak. A small organizational tray holds all manner of USPS forms. We have lots of scisscors, and pens, and our shipping scale lives under the pine shelf on the table. The file on the right holds all the organizational brochures we ship out with our products. Under the table: box of recycled/reused peanuts, box of bubblewrap, and shipping boxes to be reused. All items for any given order are gathered, brought here, and can be safely and efficiently wrapped in a very short amount of time.


This is one order. Yes, really. It would be daunting to pack if we didn't have a system in place!

Shown here is a typical days' worth of mailing boxes. Actually, it's maybe a bit less than usual. If we don't spend at least $100 at the post office every day, our postal staff gives us a hard time about how they're going to lose their jobs. :)

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.

A Day on the Farm

It's wintertime, and we've gotten past the holiday craziness. I thought I'd try and post a little bit about what a winter day on the herb farm is like.

Donna is an earlybird, so she is always up and about and doing stuff WAAAAAAAY before John and maggie arrive. She usually goes out early to feed the cats and let Beaker the Wondergoose out of his pen (we have to keep him penned up at night for his own safety, due to the neighbor dogs). She usually starts up the computer and does some emailing and pulls some orders before the shop is open at 10.

John and Maggie usually arrive 10ish (heavy on the ISH). We say hi to Beaker and all the dogs and cats (that takes a while...there are lots of dogs and cats at PLH).

The rhythm of our day is changeable, depending on what needs to be done. Filling orders and getting them in the mail are always our first priority. Donna usually pulls the orders, prints them, and answers the emails. This can take quite a while! All day, if it is a busy "order" day. Or only an hour if there are just a few orders.

Usually, while Donna is printing the orders, John will pack them while Maggie makes stuff. Of course this can change at any time depending on what needs to be done. If we need candles made, John will be in the classroom/chandlery doing that. If we are in the midst of making a TON of stuff (thousands of lip balms, let's say), then Donna will help with the laborious task of labelling and shrinkwrapping them. All in all, we do whatever needs to be done.

Of course one of the most important tasks is letting the dogs and cats in and out of the door. Those of you who have pets know what I am talking about!! Maggie has 2 dogs that come to work with her, and Donna has 3 dogs that live on the farm with her. We have assorted cats that live in the shop, Donna's house, or the barn (as they please). We don't let the pets in the manufacturing area, but they are allowed in the shop as they please. So plenty of time is alloted each day for letting the pets in an out, assuring everyone has proper "blankies", and generally spoiling them rotten.

Other things that may occur on any given day: Answering phones, setting up bus tours or classes, ordering the hundreds of packaging items or raw materials we use in our production, cleaning, organizing, bill-paying, filling wholesale orders, making deliveries, shopping, unpacking and putting away delivered items, working on the blog or website, discussing new products/changes/renovations, shoveling snow, researching, creating an enewsletter, taking photographs, designing labels, stocking the shelves, and a million other things that go into running a farm and small business.

We are a family business, and our family is VERY important to us! Donna's dad lives with her, and so of course he is part of the general action too. He likes to make us lunch, and we LOVE it when he cooks and bakes for us! Lunch is a kind of random affair. We are near a teensy town with hardly any restaurants and such....and Maggie is vegetarian which cuts down even further on food options in our tiny town. So we might get pizza once a week, or eat some goodies from our neighbors at Picket Fence Creamery (their cheeseball is a staple of our lunch diet!). Sometimes we don't have time to eat at all. Only one thing is guaranteed: if there is a lunch, the SECOND we sit down to eat, customers will arrive. No matter if it's at noon or at 3 or anytime in between! It's just guaranteed. Murphy's law, right?

Speaking of customers. We are a small store located in the middle of nowhere! So on a "normal' day, we may not have any customers are all. We may have TONS of customers. It is completely random! Generally speaking, Saturday's are our busier days in terms of having customers in the store. But in the winter especially, a day or two or perhaps even three might pass without us seeing a single customer in the store!

Toby, Donna's grandson, gets out of school and off the bus about 3:45, so from that time on, there's extra activity (generally involving action figures, playing in the snow, radio-controlled cars or possibly cartoon watching) that goes on between 3:45 and closing time. He is a good kid and loves to "help" make bath salts and such. :)

4:00 is post office time! The little post office in woodward closes at 4:30, so at 4:00 maggie loads the van with the day's packages and heads into town (about a mile drive). Our postal folks are AWESOME, we cannot say enough nice things about how helpful, pleasant, fun and wonderful they are!

After that, we finish up any projects we're working on (or get to a stopping point), and get ready to close down at 5:00.

Yep, it's December. And while recent weather events (stupid ice storm! stupid snow!) have kept our retail folks from getting to our shop....well, folks have certainly been shoppin' online. Here is the load we took to the post office today!


Also, i don't think I've ever posted a picture of our cash register? It's really cool - big, old and heavy, and people coming into our shop often comment on it. So here it is, for you folks in the rest of the world! :)

It was VERY rainy the other day, and Beaker LOVED it! He spend hours out in the pouring rain, just enjoying himself. Then he found a mud puddle to splash in - ohhhh boy did he love that!



We have 4 kittens that need homes. This is Tori, cuddled up in Maggie's bag. Yes, they are all this cute. YES, they need to go live with you!!! But seriously - just email or call if you are interested in adopting one of them. They are used to kids, cats and dogs, are litterbox trained, and ready to go home!


Yesterday was a busy day! Donna did her annual impersonation of a swamp monster - she always crawls into the pond to get it cleaned out before the winter. It's a stinky, slimy job but this year she had "help" - Beaker thought it was a FABULOUS game! As you can see, he is thoroughly enjoying himself. He kept diving down into the muck to nibble on mom's toes! He even picked off her toenail polish in the process. Living with a goose is *quite* an experience, I'll have you know!



Meanwhile, some of the rest of the gang did some organizing in the shop. Even though we ship out about 75% of our business, we didn't have a very good shipping area. So with some reorganizing and cleaning, we managed to concoct (we think) a more organize d area for shipping your products. We'll be packing up some orders this afternoon, so we'll see how it works!



Then we cleaned up and raced off to teach our "Lovin' Lavender" class last night through the Des Moines Adult Ed program - always fun! So fabulous to share herbs with others!



Last but not least, we're starting a new thing. A friend of ours in New York makes fabulous, luxurious bars of soap, so we're going to be offering a Luxury Soap of the Month! We'll post it around the first of every month, and keep it online until they're gone. We'll only get 20-40 bars of each kind, so when it's gone, it's gone! They will rotate with the seasons, and all be different and wonderful! This month its "Golden Orient", made with shea butter, organic goat's milk, silk, calendula and clays! MMMMM.......

The good thing about having regular classes held in our classroom is that it regularly forces us to clean our classroom. Because otherwise it tends to be come the catch-all place where all manner of boxes, supplies, herbs, and other random strange things get dumped. So Friday, before our dyeing class, we spent ALL DAY cleaning the classroom! it's still not perfect, but we did clean and install the new fridge and stove we just got. We now have 2 full sized fridges and one large dorm fridge, and they're all 100% chock-full of oils, essential oils, and dried herbs. We had an orgaizing spree with the EO's and dried herbs, shown off in these pictures. Dried herbs are all on the top freezers - herbs starting with A through L are in the left freezer, and the rest in the right freezer. You can't see it, but on the front of each fridge/freezer door is a list of what herbs, eo's and hydrosols are in it, and what quantity. the thought being that if someone removed, say, a pound dried lavender or two lbs. of tea tree eo, then that person would mark it off the list on the front of the fridge/freezer, and that will help us keep better track of of all our stock. Instead of saying (as we do now) - "Hey! where is the dried lavender? are we out? did i have some in the back corner over there?" followed by much muttering, rummaging, swearing, hair-pulling, and frantic phonecalls to Ameriherb......

I'm working on our new website and shopping cart....and I've got ALOT of help!!!

Some days, we have more office "help" than we know what to do with. Mo (black and white kitty) loves to lay right in front of the printer, so we have to scooch him over every time an order needs to be printed (every few minutes). Violet (calico) loves to sit on top of the printer and attack the papers as they come out. They are a very effective duo!

Here are a bunch of pictures, in no particular order, from our Soapmaking 101 Class last Saturday. We had 6 people - 3 guys, and 3 girls, which we thought was really cool (we usually have far more women than men at our classes!). I think they all had a really good time!

BUSY day yesterday!!!

We had 100 lbs of shea delivered - 50 for us and 50 for Karla, our soapmaker friend. We get it from agbanga karite, they have lovely fair trade butters, oils, black soap and more. This is what 50 lbs of shea butter looks like - I put a 4 oz. bar of soap next to it, for perspective. Who knew owning a herb shop meant quite so much heavy lifting???



With that shea, I made tons of patchouli body balms. These are for soul-flower, and then I turned around and made another batch, just as big, for us. We LOVE shea butter. So creamy, so moisturizing!!!









Then I made some Just Plain Shea balm, and these samples - these are lavender body balm samples, I think about 100. These will go in our sample basket, and be given out to any customers that walk in the door, or shipped out with our orders.








Donna did TONS of orders - this is her, working in our teensy weensy office. Doesn't she look nice?? She remembered we had a photographer coming to take photos of us and our shop today. I, however, did not, so I wore grungy clothes and had a bad hair day. *sigh*







I got a picture of the photographer taking photos of our stuff too. :)

So last Friday was COLD, cold cold...we were baking a lasagna for lunch and happened to think...hmm..some nice local wine would go great with this! So we zipped over to Picket Fence Creamery for some Midnight Rain Wine (YUM!) from Madison County Winery (their Prairie Fire is a big fave of ours too).

Some days, it's not at all bad to be your own boss. :)

This is what our shop looks like about 4PM, just before we head to the post office. :)



And this is what our shop looked like Tuesday mornign when we got to work, after Paul, or fabulous UPS guy, delivered to us late Monday night. You are looking at: 250 lbs. of soywax, boxes full of organza bags and cello bags, about 600 solid perfume tins and shrink bands, 300 soy wax melt containers, 144 - 2 oz. tins, about 30 deodorants, 11 lbs. of eucalyptus oil, and a few other things which I've now forgotten. All in boxes and bubblewrap and peanuts of course.

Last week, I spent most of one day just ordering stuff - stuff to make stuff with. :) Like tins, jars, bottles, shea butter, oils, essential oils...that kind of stuff. So we can be all ready for the holidays. And it's started arriving! This lot of boxes was waiting for us on Monday morning when we opened. It took me 2 hours to unpack and put everything away!!! And there will probably be more today. :)