Archive for Farm Collective

Composting, It’s Elementary

Schools are Composting!

Students got to decorate their own bins!

Thanks to the efforts of Rogue Valley Farm to School, a compost pick-up at Talent and Phoenix Elementary Schools is on! The initial project was funded by a grant from the DEQ, and now the school district is taking it on with the help of our Community Compost program.

Students are learning the ways of composting, leaving their scraps in designated bins during lunch in the cafeteria. Rogue Produce picks up those bins on a regular basis and transports to composting operations at local farms.

An additional benefit of this program is that the schools received a small portion of finished compost to nourish their gardens! The natural benefits of this program will continue to expand, and we will keep you posted!

“Rooted,” A New Composting Partner

Delicious, healthy, veggie options at Rooted, in Medford!

We got a call recently from a small business in Medford in need of a regular food scrap pick-up. We are delighted to be acquainted with “Rooted,” a vegetarian restaurant located at 1325 Center Drive, suite 108. And, they’re happy to be a part of our composting program!

Rooted has an incredible menu of burritos, salads, wraps, bowls, paninis, organic juices, and more! Rooted is a supporter of small farms and works to purchase locally whenever possible.  

On my first visit I enjoyed the “Nourish” burrito, with brown rice, spinach, spicy tofu, red onion, pumpkin seeds, edamame, avocado, and creamy chipotle sauce! I will definitely be returning for more healthy and delicious eats!

RP Farm Collective Update

You can see your reflection in the shiny skin of the eggplant growing at the Rogue Produce Farm Collective!

Crops are starting to pop up at the Rogue Produce Farm Collective, in Talent! We’re expecting that for our delivery next week we’ll have: burpless cucumbers, Asian eggplant, globe eggplant, crookneck squash, mixed cherry tomatoes, sungold cherry tomatoes, dried fenugreek, red kale, and maybe even some heirloom tomatoes (we have some delicious varieties)!

If we harvest produce that we don’t sell, you know where it’s going – the Economy Bundle! We’ll be working on stoking this bundle with as much local produce as possible!

It’s somewhat surreal to be harvesting now after all the work we’ve put in thus far. We appreciate all of you supporting our efforts with your regular produce orders! If you’re new to Rogue Produce, place your first order and use coupon code save20 at check out to receive $20 off your order of $75 or more!

Clyde’s Corner, Compost Connection!

Clyde’s Corner, Newest Compost Partner!

Yummy woodfired pizzas!

We’ve been reaching out to local restaurants and markets to see share about our Community Compost program, and we’re happy to announce that Clyde’s Corner, in Phoenix, is our latest new customer! Here are a few words from the owners at Clyde’s Corner:

Clyde’s Corner is a woodfired pizza restaurant located at the heart of Southern Oregon in the City of Phoenix. We work with top quality companies to source the ingredients used to create our sauces, dressings, sourdough, sausage and more. Though we are known by many for our food, we also feature biodynamic and organic wines from around the world, northwest beers and hand-crafted cocktails made with fresh squeezed ingredients.

The food scraps left over from our in-house preparations such as onion peels, lettuce, herb stalks and citrus peels are not usable at the restaurant. While our employees utilize some suitable scraps for chicken feed, the majority has been going to the landfill since our opening two years ago. We were very excited when Community Compost reached out to us about joining their composting program. Our food scraps are now being brought to local farms and turned into top grade soil for their crops. Clyde’s Corner is proud to work with companies like Community Compost to be a part of a more sustainable future!

Benefits All Around

Clyde’s Corner owners, with their hands full!

It was a pleasure to meet the owners of this pizza paradise, a venue frequently enjoyed by the employees of Rogue Produce as a place to hang out with friends and family, and to enjoy great eats and drinks!

Not only is this restaurant a new member of Community Compost, but we also hope to provide this local restaurant with some of the bounty of our Farm Collective efforts.

Customers pay us to pick-up their food scraps because they care about our local farms and the smart management of our local resources. We support Clyde’s Corner by promoting their business, and (soon) by giving them great deals on local produce. We’d love it if you can show your support as well and head to their restaurant at 4495 S Pacific Hwy, in Phoenix. It’s a great environment with outdoor seating, great food, and a friendly staff.

You can also support our efforts by ordering local produce deliveries through our Online Farmers Market!

New Benefits for Farmers Market Members

New Farmers Market Benefits!

Since we’re making our first ever increase to our Farmers Market Memberships, we wanted to provide some additional benefits to soften the blow – and to make our service even more fun!

New Benefit #1, Rogue Produce Weekly Lottery

When you order from our Online Farmers Market, your home delivery gets an identifier , like “B-11,” which helps us organize our routes. We’ve decided that each week we will roll the dice to determine which order is the lucky winner of the Rogue Produce Lottery! Our standard weekly prize will be a $10 shopping credit to the winner. Of course, we’ll switch up the prize from time to time; maybe we’ll double the coupon once a month, or give away Rogue Produce Merchandise (see below).

New Benefit #2, Discounts on Merchandise

We’ve started our search for high quality, sustainable merchandise to sell on our store, and we’ll give Members a significant discount on these products (once we know the costs). We’re thinking we’ll start with t-shirts, caps, coffee mugs and water bottles; and we imagine we’ll find some more unique items as we shop around.

Farm Collective Update

It’s no joke when the excavator tips into a ditch! It took us a couple of mornings to pull this thing out, and to put back on the track that fell off one side – the crew is learning a lot about heavy equipment though.

You’ll be happy to know that everyone employed with Rogue Produce is part of the Farm Collective, and it is an endeavor that is proving to bring us all much closer together. Each of us have our own specialties of sorts, and we’re all interested in growing different things and applying our unique skills to the work that needs being done – whether that’s planting, weed whacking, watering, pruning, harvesting, digging, bookkeeping, or administrative work. It all needs getting done!

We have one new commercial client on board with our Community Compost service, Cartwright’s Market, in Medford. We are very grateful for these types of arrangements, because it allows us to pick up a whole lot of food scraps in one trip! Thank you Cartwright’s!

We should be harvesting some more basil in the weeks to come. We’ll also have a few varieties of heirloom and cherry tomatoes; zucchini, potatoes, peppers, cucumbers, melons, Winter squash, and herbs of many varieties soon!

Most of the work we’ve been up to these first few months has been cleaning up the farm and doing fire prevention work, and we did our best with the Summer crop plantings mentioned above. We are all new-comers to farming, but with helpful guidance of our mentor we are confident we’ll have some high quality harvests.

Thank you for your support! Your orders make all this happen  : )

Yard Waste, Evers Ridge Farm

Yard Waste Collection

The most recent addition to Rogue Produce’s team of Farm Partners is Evers Ridge Farm, in Medford, owned by Thomas and Hannah Peterson. We first connected with them because they have a giant worm bin and they needed our food-scraps to feed the worms.

Thomas and Hannah’s vision is long term. They are working on beginning a nursery of trees, and they plan on planting veggies between the trees. As part of their preparation, they are creating a giant composting operation to support the soil for the drought-resistant farming techniques they will utilize.

As you are probably now aware, the mission of Rogue Produce’s new initiative, the “1 and 3 Farm Project,” is helping small farms like Evers Ridge; and what they need right now are the food-scraps we currently provide through our Community Compost program, as well as yard waste materials: wood chips, horse manure, leaves, etc. to integrate into their compost operation. If you can use a hand clearing any materials like these from your home or property, please let us know and we will come pick them up! You can call us at 541-301-3426, or email us at info@rogueproduce.com. We will pick-up free of charge, but if you want to donate toward the cause, we’d be happy to accept anything you’d like to give!

The Project at Evers Ridge

So here’s how Evers Ridge Farm is beginning to play into the bigger picture with Rogue Produce, Community Compost, and the RP Farm Collective. The RP Farm Collective is currently farming at Joyluck Farm, in Talent, and we’ll be needing nutrients for the soil to keep feeding our aspiring plants. Evers Ridge is going to help us make this happen!

Our Community Compost program currently drops food scraps at Joyluck Farm, Happy Dirt Veggie Patch, and now, Evers Ridge Farm. Happy Dirt is the first location to reach the goal of creating a nutrient rich final compost product. Matt, the owner, has been feeding his seedlings, and donated a small portion to some of the gardens at our public schools.

We plan to replicate Matt’s composting methods at Joyluck Farm, and Thomas and Hannah have their own unique methods at their place.

Our initial agreement with Evers Ridge Farm is to help them in the collection of supplemental materials (leaves, wood chips, horse manure, yard clippings, etc.), in exchange for small amounts of the final compost product for our farming operations at Joyluck. In addition, Thomas and Hannah would love to offer the finished product to customers of Rogue Produce, eventually. It’s always been our goal to get Compost to our customers to use at their homes. Is that “full-circle” or what!

We’ve got a lot more great news coming soon. Thank you for all of your support: placing orders regularly at Rogue Produce, and participating in our Community Compost program are what make the magic continue to happen!

Farm Project, Plastic Reduction

We’re Farming!

We’ve started a new initiative, the “1 and 3 Farm Project,” born from the desire to help many of the small local farms we’ve worked with over the years. The “1” is the farm we’re helping, and the “3” represents the number of new farms we hope to start with each project.

The first project is at Joyluck Farm, in Talent. The owner has some big dreams for the farm, but she hasn’t been able to manifest them because of a lack of people power. But now, the employees of Rogue Produce have teamed up to tackle projects on her land, in exchange for a plot to farm themselves.

The ”RP Farm Collective,” now has plants in the ground and we’re looking forward to our first harvest soon! It’s been a true joy for all of us to begin farming, and for Joyluck Farm to have the support it needs to get all the projects done!

We’ve got more farms in cue to replicate this project, and we’ll keep you posted!

Plastic Reduction

We’re working on developing an option in our ordering process that allows you to choose “reduced plastic” when we bundle your produce. With this option, we will place your fresh produce directly into a paper bag lined with wax paper to keep in moisture.

It’s a little more work on our end, but we’d love to reduce our use of plastics in the bundling process.

We originally had thought to institute the reduced plastic method with all our orders, but realized that the plastic bags not only maintain freshness during delivery – but continue to do so when you place the items in your refrigerator. We didn’t want to leave any of you with a bag of produce that you couldn’t keep fresh!

During the brainstorm on this topic, we’ve come up with the idea of selling re-usable refrigerator storage bags on our online store. We will also direct you to resources (once we find them) for this type of product.

We hope to have all of the pieces together for this new option within the next month or so. For now, you can just leave us a note that you want reduced plastic when you check out of our online store. As always, we would love to hear your feedback. Is this an option you would choose, or not choose? Leave us a comment to let us know!