So much has happened in one short day! We finally have a location for our store. I signed the lease today. We have a lot of work to do to get it ready to open in May, but it is a great location and a great building. It used to be a service station and it has great big glass bay doors that will open to provide an open air market during the day. At night we can close it up to secure the store. It is light and airy and will be a wonderful market. It’s located in downtown Columbus at the corner of 8th and Washington. We plan to open in May as soon as we have produce to sell. Hopefully this cold weather will be over soon and we won’t have any late freezes.

The second part of this exciting day is that we are going to be featured in the local paper “The Republic”. The story will come out in March. It is a real blessing to have the news coverage and the advertising will be priceless.

I was going to update the website tonight with the new store information, but the web host site is unavailable. I won’t get a chance to make the changes until next week so this has caused a little frustration. But, I guess it will wait.

So why a store in town? There are two very good reasons. First our farm is on a steep hill. We carve out niches in which to plant, but there is no way we could set up a store. Negotiating the steep driveway is hard enough for one car, for multiple customers it would be impossible. Second, we want to bring our great products to our customers. So many more people will be able to access our store by having it close to home, work and public transportation.

Tomorrow we will visit the Healy families. We have to finalize a few partnership legalities. We also get to visit our Amish friends. The Graber’s greenhouse should be up by now and I plan to take plenty of pictures to post on the website so check back soon!

Lori M