I've decided to move my posts about the tea room's garden to their own domain.  Partially, this is because I know some of our followers aren't particularly interested in gardening.  The main reason though, is that I'll be writing more consistently about the plans, projects and progress in the garden, and I feel it deserves its' own blog space.  I hope you'll follow along at Ozark Garden Journal.

We began 2019 with a great deal of both hope and trepidation.  After spending nearly 18 months restoring the 102-year-old craftsman bungalow, we were excited to see how our dream would be received in the community.  We were also fearful that we might have missed the mark, and that our business model might not be as exciting to Mountain Grove as it was to us.

Looking back now, it's funny how so many of the things we feared never came to pass. 

With the exception of about 4 days all year, we never had more business than we could handle. 

Despite the many mistakes we've made, our guests have always been gracious, patient and cheerful while we did our best to fix things.

When I had to take a couple of days off due to a sinus infection, my family did just fine in my absence.

Nobody ever reacted negatively to the menu changes we introduced each month.

No children have managed to lock themselves in the bathroom. (but we've got a spare key squirreled away just in case!)

I have not, thus far, managed to spill hot tea on anyone.

The Japanese beetles did not demolish the garden.

A plague of weeds did not take over the garden.

The evil black walnut trees did not kill everything I planted near them.

Almost universally, the bulbs I planted in the fall came up and bloomed their little hearts out in the Spring.

The Dahlias that I forgot to dig up in the Fall came back in the Spring.

With a year behind us, we now have a much better idea of what our guests want from us.  We've been able to determine what makes the most positive impact on our guests, and what interferes with our ability to deliver the kind of guest experience that we want to be known for.

Now as I look ahead to 2020, my word for the year for The Ironstone Cottage is "Simplify".  That's not something that comes easily to me.  My natural inclination is toward "more".  More details, more options, more projects, never mind the toll that "more" takes.

We will be making changes to our menu, the services that we offer and our business hours.  We hope these changes will allow us to balance the needs of our family with the wants of our guests.  We'll be sharing some of those changes in the next few days.

If you want to stay informed, please join our email list here.

My tea journey began in childhood.  Not with tea parties with my sister or my dolls, but with a cold.  My mom often gave and received handmade gifts, and a popular one was "Spice Tea".  It consisted of instant tea, instant orange juice, and a combination of spices similar to pumpkin pie spice.  Most of the time, our own supply sat in a French-style glass canning jar in a kitchen cupboard.  When I had a bad enough cold to be home from school though, I spent the day on the couch with a hot cup of Spice Tea.

I definitely liked Spice Tea, but I can't honestly recall ever drinking it when I wasn't sick.  I'm not sure why.

Fast forward about 15 years, and I had another cold, complete with sore throat.  On the advice of my Dad, who to this day never drinks hot tea unless he has a sore throat (or happens to be eating lunch on a cold day at the tea room), I headed to the grocery store to find some tea bags and honey.  I came home with some Lipton Orange and Spice.  Which they don't make any more.

At that point in my life, I was working a minimum-wage job, and out of necessity, lived with two roommates (who were also young, single and broke).  On the rare occasion when we were all off work during daylight hours, we could be found sitting in our living room, drinking tea and working on a cross-stitch project or just chatting while a fluffy orange cat napped on the couch.

I eventually received a job promotion, with a substantial raise and a required transfer to a different state.  My tea drinking became a more solitary pursuit, though the fluffy orange cat was good company.

I later married a rancher who loved coffee, green tea and Earl Grey (I will never understand the coffee and Earl Grey, but I have come to appreciate properly-made green tea) and moved to a ranch near the end of the Earth.  I became a stay-at-home mom by both choice and practicality.  I often pondered how I might make a side income that wouldn't necessitate an outside job and daycare.  I knew I did not want to get involved with a MLM company.  My thoughts always circled back to tea.

In the fall of 2007, with my husband's encouragement, I began selling loose teas at local craft fairs.  It wasn't particularly lucrative, but I learned a lot of valuable skills, including how to design and print labels, how to display merchandise for sale, how to create a product catalog, and how to package loose tea by hand.  I didn't learn a whole lot about tea itself though.  I found the tea world more than a little intimidating, and I really didn't have money in the budget to pay for training.  I muddled along this way, until 2016.

In 2013 my husband and I evaluated where we were in life, and where we wanted to be, and decided that commercial ranching was not for us any longer.  We sold the cattle and equipment, leased the land, and moved with our children and our personal livestock (Dexter cattle, chickens, ducks, cats, the dog, it was a regular Noah's Ark!) to a much smaller, neglected farm in the Missouri Ozarks. 

We spent a couple of years rehabbing the farm, and began selling our beef and my teas at farmers' markets (or at least, trying to).  We eventually concluded that farmers' markets were not for us.  About the same time, my husband's seasonal allergies became a real problem.  He could not be out maintaining the pastures (it's a constant battle to keep ahead of the brush and fescue here) when his allergies were bad, which unfortunately was when they most needed attention.  We tried every natural, homeopathic and pharmaceutical remedy in the book, and he still couldn't breathe if he spent any time at all trying to brush hog the pastures. 

Again we evaluated where we were, and where we wanted to be.

I had always known that one of the biggest obstacles in my tiny tea business was being able to interact with my customers face to face.  Since we keep the Saturday Sabbath, I was unable to participate in the vast majority of craft shows, farmers' markets, and community shopping events.  There was little chance of making a bricks & mortar tea business work in our very remote, sparsely-populated area of South Dakota, and no spare cash to work with in Missouri. 

Two things happened in 2017 that finally made the prospect of opening a bricks & mortar location possible.  The first was that I met a woman who would absolutely transform my understanding of tea and business.  The second was that in the fall, we were able to finally sell our house (not the land, just the house) back in South Dakota. 

I began learning the things that can be taught (some things of course, you have to learn through experience) about building a successful tea business.  My family and I spent the winter of 2017 and most of 2018 rehabbing a 100-year-old house that would become our tea room.  By December of 2018, we were ready to open our doors.

September brought back a little rain, and occasionally cooler days than August, but it was still plenty hot.  I eventually ran out of patience with the constant mowing and scalped the parking strips awfully short.  I don't hate mowing the lawn, but I'm over having to break it up into two sessions due to the heat.

I'm looking forward to turning some of the front lawn into a paver patio.  I think it will be a bit friendlier for people who'd like to wander and enjoy the flowers, and anything that reduces lawn mowing is OK by me!

You wouldn't think that the slightly cooler weather would make a lot of difference, but it was just enough for big blooms and more intense colors on the rose bushes.

I picked up (which is to say, John picked up, because he's much better at lifting heavy objects than I am) a vintage bird bath at E. Marie's during Junk fest this year.  I'd been looking for a second one to put out front, but I didn't want plastic, and I wasn't in love with the concrete ones that I'd come across.  This one looks like it's been here for years!

I didn't take very many garden photos in September, being busier than usual with other things like attending the Midwest Tea Festival in Kansas City.  If you've never been, you should definitely check it out next year. 

Can you identify the man I'm standing next to in the very blurry photo?