Member Update Letter
Dear Members,
I am writing this update from the porch of the Spring House. Wendy and I are assessing the position of some new porch furniture. The wisteria on the western column of the porch has finally breached the rail. The trumpet honeysuckle on the easternmost column (nearest the Writer’s Hut) is hosting near constant hummingbird skirmishes. A pair of Carolina Wrens keep hopping around, completely unconcerned with our presence. At 82 degrees, it’s about as hot as it’s going to get this summer.
Here’s the rest of the news from Big Ridge Mountain Club.
The Barn Loft is open
The Barn Loft is a two-bedroom, one-bath apartment on the upper floor of the barn. It has a full kitchen, a wood stove, and a big porch with a long view of the pasture. A laundry room, workshop, gym, and additional bathroom are below the loft on the main floor of the barn.
The master bedroom (pictured below) has a king and a Spring-House-style daybed. The second bedroom is set up with two twin beds by default, but just let us know if you’d like them pushed together and made up as a king (you can do this in the reservation notes). A ship’s ladder in that second bedroom climbs up to two small single beds in the loft-above-the-loft (LATL). The guardrail up there isn’t yet installed, so the LATL isn’t quite open for business.
Our friendly neighbors helped us move some of the larger things into the loft via the porch, and Wendy and I spent last week furnishing the place and working out its kinks. The Chemex arrived the morning of our first member’s arrival, and we lit up the wifi the night before.
By the end of the summer, the downstairs gym and workshop should be operational, as well as the loft’s small office (which is presently serving as interim supply storage while the lower level wraps up). Right now, we have the most basic of landscaping (grass), but are about to add in more stone steps leading up from the back door toward the greenhouse. Proper landscaping will follow when the temperatures start falling.
The barn loft has lots of openings available this summer and fall, so log in, toggle the calendar from “Spring House” to “Barn Loft”, and come visit!
A big shoutout to Wendy. This was her design from the footings to the fixtures, and the place looks and feels amazing. We’ll share good pictures soon.
Big Ridge Farm
For the last couple months, the greenhouse has been accepting furniture deliveries for the barn loft. With construction behind us, it can now graduate to its intended purpose: growing trees. We built the greenhouse to serve as headquarters for Big Ridge Farm, a tree growing operation that began in our Atlanta basement, moved to our back patio, and will now blossom into a proper business at Big Ridge.
The website is mostly a placeholder right now, as we won’t make any effort at sales until the fall, but if you are interested in little trees, check it out!
The Garden and Apiary
Early this spring, we added two hives and a garden. The potato harvest has already concluded, the kale is ready now and will keep producing til the early fall, and both the zinnias and dahlias have started blooming. There are garden scissors in the greenhouse. Generally speaking, the more they are cut, the more they will produce, so please help yourself.
Sunflowers will soon follow the zinnias and dahlias. Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, the our kale and potato harvests will be followed by carrots, lettuce, pole beans, half-runner beans, corn, and tomatoes. After that, we are hoping for cucumbers, squash, sweet potatoes, small melons, and—just in time for Halloween—pumpkins.
My cousin’s son and his best friend are the garden’s caretakers, and they’re halfway through a two week vacation. It’s going to take them a month or so to retake the field from the weeds, so if you see our beds soon, please don’t judge.
Here’s a diagram showing the planting plan and the honeybee flight pattern:
Entrances to the garden and greenhouse are in blue. Honeybee flight pattern is in red. If you’d like to cut flowers while entirely avoiding the honeybees, enter the garden via the downward pointing blue arrow.
Here’s a picture of the garden from a simpler, more naive time way back three months ago.
A note about the honeybees
The bees are very active and pretty far along in filling their honey supers. I am a novice beekeeper, but not so inexperienced as to be confident that we’ll have enough honey to harvest this year. We might, though! If we have harvested by your next visit, we’ll make sure you get a jar to bring home.
If you are curious, please do go check out the bees, but know that they might sting you, especially if you obstruct their southward flight pattern. I am regularly stung while messing with the hives, and I’ve gotten tagged a few times while working in the garden (and in the way of their flight pattern). If you aren’t allergic to bees, honeybee stings aren’t a big deal, but if that concerns you, there are veils, jackets, and gloves in the greenhouse.
Right after takeoff, the honeybees quickly ascend to altitude, so if you’re behind the hives, outside their flight pattern, or far in front of it, they are generally unaware of or unconcerned with your presence. But if one of the girls casually bumps into you while she’s searching for flowers, she will probably get annoyed and she might get ornery. The bees sleep from dusk to about 7:00am and they don’t really wake up until they’ve had time for coffee and attended to their morning routine. The hum of the hives is magical. If you’re out strolling after sunset or early in the morning, I encourage you to go sit by the hives. It’s absolutely wild.
The hives and the garden have taught me a lot so far this year. First: Don’t buy garden soil by the truck load; if you do that, you are just buying a bunch of weed seeds. Second: Don’t put your hives in the middle of your garden; early next spring, we’ll move the hives to the outer edge so anyone who wants to cut flowers or harvest tomatoes won’t have to worry about the time of day, the prevailing winds, etc.
Marketing, Membership Growth, Capacity, and Referrals
With the completion of the Barn Loft, we’ve nearly doubled our reasonable membership capacity to somewhere around 30 members (assuming all of them are at the medium level).
As completion approached, we began doing some “real” marketing. If you are on Instagram, you’ve probably seen our ads. Well, I am delighted (honestly, I am astonished) to report that the ads work really well. In the last four months, they’ve generated about 150 inquiries. Those inquiries have resulted in about 70 requests to visit, 10 trial visits scheduled (so far), 8 visits, and 7 new members.
It’s been important to me that our prospective members become fully-informed about what they’re joining before they buy, hence the trial visit. Though it imposes a long sales cycle, it seems to be working pretty well and I expect we’ll continue doing it for the foreseeable future—at least until they either stop converting at a very high rate, or their visits begin crowding out opportunities for our members to visit.
With that said, I am sure there are better, faster, and more cost effective ways to grow our membership. Among them would be membership referrals, and while I continue to have high hopes for this in the long term (we built some cool referral functionality right into your accounts!), I don’t think it’s something we can rely on now. The reality is that our members simply bring their friends with them or gift visits to their friends, so there is a sort of mild disincentive to refer folks. With that said, please do refer your friends!
Plans for the rest of the year
In the immediate future, we’re going to finish the barn’s workshop and gym, landscape it, and add some more furnishings to the loft. We’ll also complete the greenhouse, prepare it for winter, and attend to a little deferred maintenance in the Spring House that we pushed til after the summer busy season. After that, we’ll turn our attention from building back to tending. We will have pumpkins to harvest before too long!
Lodge plans
People ask me all the time about when we plan to build the lodge? I’ll give you the same answer here in writing that I’ve been sharing with folks for the last year or so: We’ll break ground when we hit $30,000 per month in recurring revenue. Assuming we maintain our current pace of membership growth, that will be around early 2028, with construction wrapping up some time 2029. Why wait? Well, we won’t be able to pay for the lodge with honey, apples, and dahlias and we don’t plan to take on any partners for Big Ridge Mountain Club, so that means a debt financing. I want us to be able to comfortably service that debt from our operating income.
Thinking about more Big Ridges
Though Big Ridge Mountain Club will remain a wholly Graham-owned venture, I have been thinking about additional Big Ridges in other parts of the country, and if we pursue that, we’d probably finance them with small partnerships. We’ve learned a good bit in building this place, and I think we can apply those lessons to lovely properties in the Shenandoah Valley, Texas Hill Country, or some other wonderful slightly-off-the-beaten-path little corner of our beautiful country. Who knows? Right now, it’s not much more than an idea, and I love to chat about ideas, so if any of you would like to bat around ideas with me (or anything Big Ridge-related) over coffee or lunch, let me know. It’d be my treat.
I hope y’all enjoy the rest of the summer, and I look forward to your next visit to Big Ridge Mountain Club.