"It just keeps going on and on," Ashley Penton says of her father's coffee shop, "but that's my dad. He's a social butterfly, a builder, a do-er, a fixer, an embellisher."
Frank Richerand opened Giddy Up Folsom in March 2016 as a place to get coffee. Ten years later it is also a library, an art gallery, a farmers market, a bed and breakfast, and the closest thing the village has to a town square. None of that was the plan. It happened because Folsom is small enough that one address can absorb five jobs a bigger town would spread across five separate buildings, and because the people running it kept saying yes to whatever the community needed next. If you already live on acreage out here, you have probably pulled into the gravel lot at 82292 LA-25 for a coffee and left an hour later having browsed a book swap, looked at local art, and signed up for a market booth. The part fewer people track is that this place runs on a calendar with real gaps in it, and knowing where those gaps fall is the difference between showing up for something and showing up to a closed gate.
One Roof, Five Jobs
Frank's business before Giddy Up was Envirotech Systems, an oilfield manufacturing company that took him around the world. His family traveled with him. What came back to Folsom, a town of roughly 800 people, was a coffeehouse built with the instinct of someone who had seen how bigger places gather and decided a village of this size could do the same thing with less real estate. The result is a single property doing the work of several:
- A café, open daily, serving coffee, tea, smoothies, and light bites
- The Village Library Museum, an unofficial branch of the St. Tammany Parish library housed in what used to be a shed
- The Far Horizons Art Collective, a gallery for local painters, sculptors, and stained glass artists who used to have nowhere to show work
- The Paddock, a fenced outdoor venue behind the café that hosts the Saturday market and larger community events
- The Stables, a four-unit bed and breakfast in two century-old buildings across Broadway Street
Out front sit two EV chargers, free to use, the kind you would expect at a highway rest stop rather than a village coffee shop. It is a small detail that tells you something about the people who built this place. They were not thinking small.
The Calendar Underneath the Calendar
Here is the part that trips people up. Giddy Up looks like it runs on one continuous rhythm, but it actually runs on three separate seasonal windows that barely overlap, and the venue's own posted schedule draws the lines precisely.
First Friday live music, the monthly evening show that has featured acts with the caliber of Bonerama and Mark Mullins, does not run every month. According to the venue's own calendar, the spring season covers March, April, and May, and the fall season covers October and November. That leaves June, July, August, September, December, January, and February without a First Friday show. If you are reading this in early September and wondering why the paddock stayed quiet on the first Friday of the month, that is not an oversight. The fall season does not start until October.
Bee Sweet Snowballs, the seasonal stand that opens next door in a 19th century cottage, runs the opposite direction. It is a summer operation, serving ice cream and snowballs in flavors made from natural fruit purees and local honey during exactly the months when First Friday goes dark. The two programs were built to hand off to each other rather than compete for the same calendar slot.
| Season | Runs | Does not run |
|---|---|---|
| Spring (Mar–May) | First Friday live music | Bee Sweet Snowballs |
| Summer (Jun–Sep) | Bee Sweet Snowballs | First Friday live music |
| Fall (Oct–Nov) | First Friday live music | Bee Sweet Snowballs |
| Winter (Dec–Feb) | Neither | Both |
The one program that ignores all of this is the Saturday market in the Paddock, which the venue lists as running every Saturday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., year-round. That is the anchor. Everything else pivots around it depending on the month.
The Shed That Became a Library
Before it was a museum, the small building now called the Village Library Museum was a shed. It became the area's library for a generation of children, fell into disrepair, and has since been restored as what Giddy Up describes as the unofficial Folsom branch of the St. Tammany Parish Library. Local historian Jerry Laiche volunteers there. The permanent collection holds books donated before 1980, kept on hand for research rather than checkout, while more recent titles circulate through informal swaps. It is the kind of civic function that in a larger town would sit in its own building with its own hours and its own budget line. Here it shares a parking lot with a coffee counter and a snowball stand.
The Saturday That Doesn't Move
Walk into the Paddock on any given Saturday and you will find a rustic, fenced space with a tented stage and a mix of producers and shoppers moving through fresh produce, prepared food, local art, and handcrafted goods. The market has drawn support acts from groups like the Northshore Traditional Music Society, and it has doubled, at least once, as a St. Tammany Humane Society adoption event, meaning the animals for sale that day were not livestock but future pets. None of that is guaranteed to repeat on any given weekend, but it tells you the range this one space covers. It is not just a produce stand. It is the venue that absorbs whatever the community needs a public gathering for that particular week.
What stays fixed is the hour. Ten to one, every Saturday, all year. The market does not take a winter break the way First Friday does, and it does not hand off to a seasonal replacement the way the snowball stand does. For a resident planning a weekend, that consistency is worth more than any single vendor lineup. You can build a Saturday morning routine around it without checking a schedule first, which is more than you can say for the two programs stacked on either side of it.
Why the Gaps Matter More Than the Events
The easy version of this story is a list of things to do in Folsom. The more useful version is understanding that a single address absorbed the roles of a library board, an arts council, a farmers market association, and an event venue because the town is small enough to make that consolidation practical, and that the people running it built a real seasonal structure to manage it rather than letting everything run at once and burning out. That is not an accident of small-town charm. It is a specific operating pattern, and once you know where the gaps fall, you stop mistaking a scheduled break for a program that ended.
If you already live out here on a few acres and Giddy Up is your Saturday habit, the practical takeaway is simple. The market is the one thing you can count on every week. The music and the snowballs are worth planning around, not assuming.
If you're weighing a move to acreage in this part of St. Tammany Parish and want a clearer read on what daily life actually looks like here, not the version that shows up in a listing description, Puddy Robinson knows this stretch of the Northshore well enough to walk you through it property by property. Let's Connect.
