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?

The David Austin roses I planted this Spring continue to impress me.  "The Generous Gardener" seems to never be without pale-pink blooms, and "Gertrude Jekyll" has the strongest, sweetest fragrance of any rose I've ever grown.  I'm out there every week trying to keep them tied to the fence and arbor.  I cringed when I paid for them, but they've been worth every penny!

Mostly, August was so hot that I didn't do much beyond mowing the grass and hand-watering the shrubs that I transplanted in early July.  I have never been able to take the heat, and it's really a toss-up between which is worse:  the over-100 temps with dry air but constant wind, or the over 90 temps with shade, a breeze and high humidity.  Much as I love garden season, I always look forward to wood stove weather!

Why do you come here?

It’s not because your stomach told your brain that it was time to re-fuel. Not that you aren’t hungry. Of course you’re hungry. But why are you here, at the Ironstone Cottage Tea Room & Garden, instead of one of the myriad other places you could be eating? They’re cheaper. They’re faster. You can just drive through in your pajamas. They have burgers, or fries, or ice cream, or coffee, or soda, or all of the above. Why are you here?

Maybe you’re here because it’s quiet. You want to have a nice meal and visit with your best friend or your sister or your husband or your daughter, and you know you can’t find that anywhere else. Or maybe you want to meet with a client over lunch, without having a circus going on in the background. We certainly try to create a peaceful atmosphere--but if that’s what you’re looking for, you’re not going to find it unless you turn your phone off, and neither is anybody else in the dining room.

Maybe you want to eat real food that doesn’t leave you feeling hungry or miserable. That fast, fried, carbonated stuff isn’t as fast or as cheap as it used to be, is it? Maybe we’re the only place in town that makes desserts that your body can tolerate. Maybe you just want to treat yourself to a pork-free meal out for once. Maybe you know you should be eating healthier, but you didn’t have the time to fix a healthy lunch on your way out the door this morning.

Maybe you want to be pampered: To sit at a table with a real tablecloth, on a comfortable chair, and be served by someone who is glad to see you, makes eye contact, speaks in a friendly voice, and doesn’t try to rush you out the door. Maybe you came to be entertained by a girl who loves cats and belongs in the theater.

We open our doors 4 days a week to serve people who want more than the minimum: Good Relationships. Good food. Good service. Good atmosphere. Good Tea & Good Company.



Now it's your turn to tell us, why are you here?