2023 was a big year for us. With some partners we purchased the Alderbrook Golf Course which was closed for 1.5 years with threat of being turned into development. See golf course website at www.themook.com. We tripled the amount of golf played in the first year from prior owners best year ever and quadrupled the amount of memberships. We made a lot of improvements on the golf course, with a lot more to be made. The golf course is 100 years old in 2024.
We focused on reducing the thatch layer on the greens which consisted of verticutting and topdressing every two weeks during the growing season. We additionally trimmed the lower branches of the trees on the course to allow more light and air throughout the course. We additionally worked on drainage projects to improve drainage throughout the course. These were are top 3 focuses initially.
The next phase of improvement was smoothing out the fairways on the back 9 which were extremely bumpy. We then lowered green #15 and subsequently raised the tee box to make it a reasonable hill hole. The goal was to see the pin from the tee box without an extension. We further cleared a lot of brush from the golf course and created space on top of the hill. We additionally improved/rebuild several tee boxes.
2023 was a challenging year to sell flowering branches. After record breaking years subsequently in 2021 and 2022, flowering branch sales took a freefall. So many times before in our history, we’ve had to adjust to markets and change directions. We’ve come up with a good plan tackle this problem and we hope that demand picks up. Here are some photos of our flowers in 2023.
Nina Zweifel, our daughter is graduating in the spring of 2024 from Oregon State University in Agriculture Business Management. She has all A’s! We are extremely proud of her. She intends to come back to the business and improve it. She has a special interest in flower design and wild flowers. Here is her first arch she designed below. We attended the ASCFG conference in St. Louis together in November. It was a special time together. She was 3 days old when I attended my first conference, and now we attended together and she was the one carrying the business cards.
Nina is getting married July 27th with Logan Braxling. She will get married on top of the hill at the golf course and then the reception will be at the farm on the Hydrangea Ranch.
The Hydrangea Ranch continues to expand into a premier destination wedding venue on the Oregon Coast. Here are some photos of weddings we had this past year.
See this bridge we constructed that goes up into the main farm wedding venue:
And most exciting for me personally was our family trip to Switzerland. Monika and I met each other in Switzerland when we were 22. After college I went to work on a dairy farm and cheese factory for 6 months. It was an amazing time and much of my life work was inspired by my time in Switzerland. I didn’t realize it actually, until our return this summer with the whole family, including Logan. Here are some highlights of this trip:
Here is a photo of Monika and Cruise. Cruise is 4 year’s old and we love him very much.
