Youth Night. Amazing Turnout.

Over 400 youth from the Farr West Poplar Stake showed up at the orchard tonight. An absolutely wonderful turnout. I’m going to compare some numbers from tonight, just 1 night compared to the total turnout of all Stakes for March. Now it’s not a completely fair comparison due to many factors including the time of the day for volunteering, the weather, and the challenge of pruining. So…

For all of March from all 16 stakes the total number of volunteers was a bit over 1000 people. These include those who took time off from work, mothers and fathers who brought their young children, and many who came several times. I’m now on a first name basis with so many of you because of that. And that’s not a bad thing. The pruning was done, done well, and the orchard looks good.

But in one night, tonight, we had 464 people from 1 stake. That’s almost half of the total for all of March. And how having so many was truly a blessing that is hard to express in words. So much more was done than we expected. Grass was planted in areas that really needs grass. Hundreds of trees were painted. This painting protects the trees from some of the herbicides that we spray to control weeds. Raking was done to help us add mulch between the rows. All of it needed. All of it appreciated.

So tonight you all are our heroes. You have lightened our load more than you know. And we appreciate it.

The orchard service missionaries.

PS. Charlie Brown really liked the snow cones.

Pruning is still finished…

Yes. It’s done. Do you see that big grin on our faces. Thanks to the hundreds of volunteers who pruned over 9000 trees. Thanks to all who raked and brought their children. Thanks to all who took the time to work in the orchard and give of themselves. We are finished with the pruning. The orchard looks good this year. The efforts of everyone last year and this year have certainly paid off. The trees look good, the rows between the trees are wider. The service missionaries replaced the old irrigation system. Roads are leveled out and the ruts are filled in. It’s been a good year plus. We have been blessed and we hope you feel blessed.

So the next few weeks before thinning starts, the orchard will be spraying, fertilizing, and putting out pheromone bands. All to help produce a good yield. So enjoy the month. We hope to see you soon.

The service missionaries.

Pruning is finished.

We finished pruning Wednesday evening. There is no need to show up Thursday to prune,

One last push to finish pruning…

The following was sent to all the stake leaders last Saturday…

From Bruce to the leaders

Sent to your Stake Leaders

Stake Leaders,  we will need a large pruning on Wednesday April 2 and Thursday April 3 of this coming week.  We are not working on Tuesday because of possible weather conditions.  Please encourage your membership to get as large a group as they can out on these days.  If we can get a big turnout we could finish early.  Please help us finish before conference weekend.  Thanks Bruce

Changes are being made…

This is a long read. But I feel it’s needed so everyone understands why we are doing, or trying to do things differently.

In the past month the orchard has moved to take records from paper to digital. Everyone is feeling the change and everyone has their thoughts about it all. Today, after reviewing what has been done, and what needs to be done, and taking into account many suggestions for improvements, we are making some additional changes to the forms and processes.

If you don’t want to read more, here are the changes.

• First, the ‘Sign Up’ form has changed by removing the safety requirement section. These are being moved to the ‘Check In’ form.

• Second, a new ‘Sign Up’ form has been created for people who are entering multiple entries and was primarily designed for those helping others to sign in. It’s not exactly what I would like to see, but limitations of the web building application prevent me from doing more. This may change in the future.

• Third, the ‘Check In’ form is being disabled from direct access at this time, and those who have ‘Signed Up’ will be sent a text with link to the ‘Check In’ form. (Yep, I can’t get rid of it due to reasons I mention below.)

• There are other changes that probably won’t be visible to you as a volunteer.

Now onto the long winded stuff….

As background the orchard must meet several legal requirements. These come from

• the IRS (they want to know who is working at the orchard and how many hours are being donated.)

• the FDA who wants to make sure we are doing what is required to keep volunteers safe

• the Church who wants to make sure we meet all legal requirements.

These are not optional. So to meet these requirements we try to design the user forms and datasets to comply with these. We also try to make the forms as easy to use as possible.

There are two datasets. One is the ‘Sign Up’ form which allows us to know how many have signed up for any day. The second is the dataset that contains all the legal stuff we need to have when audited. And we do get audited. This data set is the ‘Check In’ form. What has to be in this data set is the persons name, date served, and acknowledgment they have watched the safety videos. In the past we have used paper forms to do this, and a signature was needed.

Those requirements are still valid. But in place of a signature, the use of an electronic form submission is suitable for audit purposes. I was hoping to replace the ‘Check In’ form as we have been doing this last week. However, the powers that be are more comfortable with the actual volunteer filling out the form and submitting it.

Finally because it is so much faster and easier to audit digitally, the orchard is moving to having all documents in a digital system.

If you have thoughts, suggestions, questions, or improvements, please volunteer at the orchard and see me. I’m usually doing the parking.