127 yard Sale; Day 4

It's all over for 2008 and I am glad about that. Overall the sale went swimmingly. The weather was great, lots of people from all over the USA stopped in, had lots of fun. But man, am I tired.

Today was slow, between 8am and noon we had maybe 25 cars stop. Things picked up quite a bit in the afternoon but there were long stretches of time with no one stopping. Even though it was slow, we still sold quite a bit of stuff including the bed/desk thing Mark Jackson left with us at the 2006 127 yard sale because he did not want to haul it around any longer. It is big and heavy and was taking up a lot of room in the back of the store. Granted, we were using it to store stuff but it is better that it is gone. We will figure out new storage in the next couple of days

We also sold a lot of produce today including 12 pounds of beets that were harvested about 2 weeks ago and not selling, at all. So I cut off the greens (which I will happily eat tonight or tomorrow, if we decide to go out to eat somewhere) and within 20 minutes the things were sold. Watermelons sold well as did the sweet corn we bought for the sale.

We did not have Adam's Rib today but Pete and his son Christopher stopped by to drop off raw milk (both our families have cow shares with the same farm and trade off on pick-up so we only have to do it once a month). He asked how it was going and I replied it was very slow today and it was good that he does not work Sundays as he likely would not have made many sales.

We were informed by several salers that most of the sales north of us closed down yesterday. I don't know if the sales to the south did also. I know the past two years most places around us did not do Sunday and it was probably the same this year. Oh well, their loss. It may be a lot slower than the other 3 days but still very much worth it to stay open on Sunday.

This morning a man from California, who has done this sale every year for the past 21 years, said we should open up on Monday like they do down south. He told me this sale used to run 8 days and after the 5th year or so they shortened it to 4 days but a lot of places who are on the original route still do the 8 days. I do not think that will be happening here at Boulder Belt any time soon. 4 days is enough, the farm could not survive an 8 day sale without a couple of full time field workers working with Eugene to keep up with the harvesting.

Now it is time to clean up and plan what we will be doing for next year. It will be, as alway, an improvement over this year.