News and Updates
Updated June 22, 2010
2010 SEED ORDERS
All seed availabilities in our online seed catalog have been updated as of April 28, 2010.
POULTRY ORDERS FOR 2010
Poultry breed availability for 2010 has been updated as of May 16, 2010.
You may place your order for 2010 at any time now. Please include your payment in the form of a check or money order. You will know that your check has been cashed when you get your confirmation letter in the mail. We deposit your check as soon as your order is set up and do not hold your check until your order is shipped. The Poultry catalog and Poultry order form have both been updated for 2010.
PLEASE NOTE: We will not be shipping any poultry orders to U.S. border towns for transport into Canada. We have had too many problems this year with Canadian orders and just cannot handle the paperwork and extra time that it takes to fill these orders any more.
SWEET POTATO SLIP AVAILABILITY
June 22, 2010 UPDATE - As of this date, we will not be taking any more orders for sweet potatoes for the 2010 season (not even the "Season Closeout" assortments). Once again this year we are having horrible rains and are having a lot of trouble getting the "Regular Season" orders mailed out. Monday night we had almost 2.5 inches of rain in an hour's time and hail ranging from pea size to golf ball size. We pull slips to mail out on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and we have just been having continuous rains. We can not pack and ship out slips that are wet because they will turn to mush enroute to their destination. By mid-July we should have plenty of sweet potato slips to send out (but most people think that is too late to plant them). If you have ordered "Regular Season" slips to be shipped out by June 25, but could take them up to a week later than that, please e-mail us and let us know. Be sure to give us your confirmation number so that we don't have to look it up. That would save us a lot of time.
June 12, 2010 UPDATE - Many of our customers are calling and e-mailing and asking why they haven't gotten their sweet potato slips yet. We fill orders in the order in which your order was placed (but also there are some additional delays if you ordered the Purple Assortment or the Rainbow Assortment which contains Purple varieties as these are very slow to break dormancy and start sprouting). Many of you have not understood how this shipping works. Every place we talk about sweet potatoes in our catalog it indicates that the "regular season" slips will be shipped BETWEEN MAY 25 AND JUNE 25. Every order CAN NOT be shipped on May 25. If you will please go back and take a look at the information telling how we start the slips it will help you to understand the process better. If your confirmation number is something like 453, that means that 452 other people placed their order before you did and you will not be one of those in the first week of shipping. We pull slips to ship out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We have to wait a couple of days for the sweet potatoes to produce more slips so that we can send out more. All the slips are not produced at one time. It is a process that happens over about a four week period. We are trying our best to get the sweet potato orders out just as quickly as we can. If you absolutely need to contact us about your order because an emergency has come up or you are going on vacation, PLEASE GIVE US YOUR CONFIRMATION NUMBER AND SOME IDEA OF WHICH ASSORTMENT YOU HAVE ORDERED.
June 7, 2010 UPDATE - The beginning of our sweet potato slip shipments was delayed by the cool weather of a couple of weeks in May. We started to ship out slips on Wednesday, June 2, 2010. We will ship slips out on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and will proceed in the order in which your order arrived in our office by mail. Please check here for further updates. We will try to make weekly updates to this website.
NOTE: As of April 1, 2010, we are totally booked up on Regular Season Sweet Potato slips and will be accepting no additional orders to be shipped between May 25 and July 1. We will still be accepting orders for Assortments Only for the Season Closeout Assortments which will be shipped after July 1.
NOTE - THERE WILL BE NO INDIVIDUAL VARIETIES AVAILABLE TO ORDER FOR 2010. WE WILL BE TAKING ORDERS FOR ASSORTMENTS ONLY (OUR CHOICE). YOU MAY NOT SPECIFY ANY INDIVIDUAL VARIETIES THIS YEAR. The Sweet Potato order form has now been updated for 2010.
We feel that the only way that we can offer any slips at all for 2010 is to offer them in a variety of assortments. We will be adding a new Heirloom Variety Assortment to the catalog for 2010. We hope to have the sweet potato portion of the online catalog updated soon. We also will be taking only a limited number of orders for these assortments. Once that limit is reached, your order (and payment) will be returned to you. For that reason, we would ask that this year (2010) you would please submit separate checks for your seed and sweet potato orders instead of including both payments in one check.
Many of you who have ordered sweet potatoes from mainline nursery catalogs in the past cannot understand why, when you have ordered from a company in the northern United States, you are able to get your sweet potato slips more quickly than when you order from us. The reason for this is that with other companies, they are "drop shipped" from growers in the South. This practice is also the reason that some companies are not able to send sweet potato slips to California as we are able to do. Ours is an entirely different operation where the slips are started here on our farm in Iowa from roots that are grown the previous year here on our farm in Iowa. We cannot start the beds any earlier than the first part of May. It is simply too cold.
We start the slips by placing the roots in a slightly dug out area. then cover with peat moss and wet it down. Number nine wire hoops are placed over the area and the whole area is covered in clear plastic (forming a grow tunnel). We lay a soaker hose down the 2-3 foot wide bed and bury the edges of the 50-75 foot long tunnels on both sides with dirt. In the garden it looks like long, clear worms. The beds are not disturbed for the first 2 weeks. Then the plastic is lifted and any weeds removed and a check is made for slip development. Generally 3 weeks after bedding down the first slips are ready to be shipped out. (If we have not had any heat or sunshine during that time, it takes longer for the potatoes to start sprouting.) When those slips are pulled, then more develop and are ready to go out about every 5 days. PLEASE NOTE: The slips for each individual order are all pulled within a few minutes of each other and the order is mailed out that same day. There has been an indication on a gardening forum recently that we pull part of an order on one day and hold those slips over until the remainder of the order is ready to pull a few days later. THIS IS TOTALLY UNTRUE. Technically (and then again it depends upon the variety) every 5 days we have a fresh supply from any given potato. This allows us to make slip pickings about 5-6 times during our normal shipping season of May 25 to June 25. This year June 17 was the first day that we broke 80 degrees and the first day that some of the varieties of sweet potatoes finally took off sprouting well. We are truly thankful we were able to get as many slips from the beds in the cool weather as we did. It was great for taking data on which varieties are more cool tolerant.
Quantity limit on orders: The maximum number of slips you may order of a variety assortment package is the number in parentheses following that assortment's description.
Seed Orders to Canada and Other Foreign Countries
We have always requested that orders from Canada and other foreign countries be sent to us with payment in U.S. DOLLARS ONLY. We have continued to receive foreign orders in Canadian funds and in Euros. It has been very difficult for us to get these payments converted to U.S. dollars, sometimes receiving a 10% to 15% discount for the conversion. THIS MEANS THAT WE HAVE BEEN LOSING MONEY ON FOREIGN SEED ORDERS. We have been notified by our bank that as of March 1, 2009, the fees for converting foreign funds to U.S. dollars are increasing greatly (sometimes up to $100.00 US per request).
Therefore, WE WILL NO LONGER ACCEPT ANY FOREIGN ORDER FOR SEEDS WHICH IS ACCOMPANIED BY A PAYMENT IN FOREIGN FUNDS. If you send us a foreign order with payment in anything other than US dollars, your order will be returned to you immediately. We are very sorry for this situation and for any inconvenience that it may cause. We were informed by our bank that "US Dollars" must be pre-printed on the check or money order and that it may not be written in by hand. It is our understanding that most any foreign bank (or possibly your local postal facility) is capable of selling you an "International Money Order" made out in U.S. Dollars. We just can not continue to incur this loss any more.
THE 2010 PRINTED CATALOG
The third mailing of printed catalogs should go out around the end of March.
ORDERING A FREE 2010 PRINTED CATALOG (sent by bulk rate mail only)
You may request a printed catalog for 2010 by contacting us by regular mail, e-mail, or by telephone. Please give us your name and mailing address. We will be sending out the April mailing of catalogs on April 29. We will send one more bulk mailing sometime in May. Then we will be out of catalogs until January, 2011. If you have placed an order or requested a catalog in either 2009 or 2010, you will automatically be on the 2011 mailing list for a printed catalog.
To e-mail your catalog request, write to us at Sand Hill Preservation Center. PLEASE BE SURE TO INCLUDE YOUR NAME AND MAILING ADDRESS IN THE BODY OF THE E-MAIL. Catalogs sent in response to e-mail requests are sent out by bulk rate mail the first week of the month for the next Bulk Mailing.
ORGANIC CERTIFICATION UPDATE:
We are now listing everything that we grow here at our farm as Certified Organic. We have many varieties in this year's catalog which are being offered as CERTIFIED ORGANIC. If the item is being offered as CERTIFIED ORGANIC, it will have an OG after the price of the seeds. If it does not have an OG listed after the price of the seed, it is not CERTIFIED ORGANIC.