Archive for local farms

Drop Your Food Scraps at the Medford Grower’s Market

Compost Bins at Medford Grower’s Market

What do you do with the food scraps from your kitchen? Are you trying to find the best way to put your food scraps to good use? Instead of throwing them in the trash, Rogue Produce collects this valuable material and donates it to local farms. You can now bring your kitchen food scraps to Hawthorne Park on Thursdays when you visit the Medford Grower’s Market, and Rogue Produce will transfer the material to local farms who need it! Instead of rotting in the landfill, your scraps can help local farmers create nutrient rich compost for their soil, or use as supplemental feed for their animals.

Medford Grower's Market

It’s Easy

Rogue Produce places bins at the Medford Grower’s Market every Thursday morning. All you have to do is bring your veggie scraps (but no meat or fish) to the Market and dump your scraps into the bins we provide – and we do the rest! Sign-up today!

Supporting Local Farms

The benefit these food scraps provide to local farms is no small matter – it helps, tons! Listen to what Thomas Petersen, of Evers Ridge Farm, in Medford, has to say about the importance of receiving food scraps from Rogue Produce:

Thomas and Hannah of Evers Ridge Farm

Thomas and Hannah of Evers Ridge Farm

“Starting our farm from scratch we realized the immense need for quality compost to improve soil health and increase water retention. When we found the food compost program from Rogue Produce it turned a huge expense into an affordable partnership. We’ve been able to process over 60k pounds of food scraps in the past couple of years then mix it with manure or leaves to make over 100k lbs. of compost for our farm, and we could use much more. As a local farmer in the valley, we need more of these food waste programs so we can decrease the cost of compost for farmers and help return the waste in our systems back into soil health.”

Free Market Bucks!

As an incentive to join our compost service, we’re providing the first 20 new subscribers with $5 in Market Tokens to spend at the Market! Sign-up today and we’ll be in touch to let you know how to collect your $5 in tokens.

Compost History

Rogue Produce has been collecting food scraps from homes in Ashland since 2011. In 2022 we started our first Community Compost Drop Site at the Ashland Grower’s Market as a lower-cost option to our customers. In 2024 we opened the same kind of drop site at the Medford Grower’s Market. Your participation helps our community utilize our resources in an optimal way, by diverting the valuable material of food scraps from the landfill and bringing this powerful soil amendment to local people who know how to use it best – the farmers! Help us grow our program by signing up for the Medford Grower’s Market Drop Site for less than $4 a week!

Rogue Produce also offers direct home pick up of your food scraps if you live in Ashland or Talent. Click here to learn more about direct home pick up and to explore other drop site locations.

Farm to School, Local Produce for Kids – Let’s Make it Happen!

A Campaign for Kids

Connecting kids and farms since 2009!

It’s fair to say that many of us can take our eyes off the ball when it comes to the nutrition of our kids. It’s challenging enough within the home to provide children with a healthy breakfast, lunch, and dinner – and perhaps even more challenging to make sure kids are eating healthy foods at school. You may go to the effort of packing your child a healthy lunch, only to have them toss it aside and grab the cheese pizza or nachos at their school cafeteria. Rogue Valley Farm to School has been addressing nutrition issues like these by leading an effort in Southern Oregon to get local foods into school cafeterias, and now you can help support this cause by becoming a Farmers Market Member with Rogue Produce and shopping local at our Online Farmers Market.

Rogue Produce has started a focused campaign to get the Medford School District on board with Rogue Valley Farm to School. This effort will help get more locally grown foods into the cafeterias of Medford schools, and give students an opportunity to engage with our local small farm community through a variety of enriching and educational activities throughout the school year.

Rogue Produce is now donating 100% of fees collected from NEW MEMBERSHIPS (become a member now) through the month of April to Rogue Valley Farm to School to help them build a partnership with the Medford School District. And, for the month of April, Rogue Produce is also donating 3% of ALL produce sales to this effort!

What Happens When I Become a Member?

Get kids to the farm!

First of all, your membership fees from now through April will be donated to Rogue Valley Farm to School. Once a member, you can start ordering produce from our Online Farmers Market and receive HOME DELIVERY with NO FEES! You also get access to all of the sale prices we post on our site every week. 3% of your produce purchases in April are also going to Rogue Valley Farm to School. When you participate in this campaign, you and your community benefit by:

  • Educating children about our food system through hands-on farm and garden programs!
  • Increasing local foods in school meals!
  • Enjoying shopping at our Online Farmers Market and purchasing local foods from your favorite farmers, bakers, ranchers, fisherman, and more!

Supporting Local on Many Fronts

Serving Southern Oregon Since 2011!

From its inception, the mission of Rogue Produce has been to support local agriculture. Every week we purchase fresh produce, fresh baked breads, local meats, cheeses and much more – supporting many of the small local farms and businesses our community loves. We also support local farms by bringing them fresh food-scraps through our Community Compost program. But, we must do more! We love the fact that we bring local foods to your kitchen table, but we want to do the same thing for the kids in our schools!

That’s why we’ve decided to partner with Rogue Valley Farm to School (RVF2S), who has been working for years to get the kids in our schools out to local farms, and local foods into our school cafeterias. Check out what RVF2S has achieved, just in the last year, by reading their latest 2023/2024 Impact Report.

By becoming a Farmers Market Member today, your dollars go toward supporting local in a big way, and you get to enjoy amazing foods from small farms and businesses, with FREE HOME DELIVERY! Check out some of these great local products available at our Online Farmers Market:

That’s just a small sample of the huge variety of produce available at our Online Farmers Market. We source locally year round, and purchase organic produce not available in our region through an Oregon based distributor, Organically Grown Company.

Efforts Will Continue – Stay Informed!

This is just the beginning of our campaign for kids. At the conclusion of this initial fund-raiser we will continue to assist in the effort of getting local and healthy food options on the menu at our schools. To Rogue Produce, healthy food for our kids is one of those “no-brainers,” and we’re grateful that we have an organization in our community like Rogue Valley Farm to School that is working effectively to achieve this goal.

Stay tuned by signing up for our email newsletter. We will be sending out regular reports after our initial fund-raiser concludes and sharing ideas about our next steps. RVF2S has been successful in working with several of the school districts in our area, and we’re confident they can be successful in Medford too.

Please help us in this campaign by becoming a Farmers Market Member, and we look forward to serving you with the best of local! And, if you have any questions or would just like to drop us a line, send us an email to localtolocal@rogueproduce.com.

 

Composting Food Scraps, You’ve Got Options!

Composting Food Scraps, Your Way

Rogue Produce has been collecting food scraps from homes and businesses in Southern Oregon for over a decade. Recently, we’ve added new service options to make it easy to get your kitchen scraps off the path to the landfill, and on the road to local farms. Our local farms place a high value on your food scraps, because it lowers their costs by providing needed nutrients to their soil, and their animals.

Our farmers regularly express their gratitude for our Community Compost program, and everyone who makes the effort to participate. This appreciation continues to inspire us to be innovative with our service, so that we can get the greatest amount of food scraps diverted from the land fill and delivered to creative and hard working farmers.

Check out our latest innovations, and explore our traditional service options, and see if they might be a good fit for you! We’ll get started with the latest in Community Compost Creativity!

Belview  Grange  Drop  SiteCompost drop site at Belview Grange.

Every Thursday, between 9:00am and 1:00pm, we set out bins to collect your scraps. This service costs you only $10 a month, and you can learn more, or sign-up by clicking here.

After you sign-up, we’ll be in touch to go over logistics and answer any questions you may have.

Compost bins at Ashland Grower's MarketAshland Grower’s Market

This option doesn’t cost you a dime! Through the efforts of the Ashland Climate Collaborative, and with funding from the Ashland Food Co-Op, we’ve been providing food scrap collection bins at the Ashland Grower’s Market (behind Science Works) every Tuesday, between 8:30am and 1:00pm.

We are so grateful for the support of local businesses and non-profits that have made this service option come alive. We currently divert 8 large bins of food scraps every Tuesday! That equates to around 100 households that utilize this option to get their scraps to local farms.

Medford Grower’s Market

With inspiration from the Ashland Grower’s Market project, we’ve started the same operation at the Grower’s Market in Medford, at Hawthorne Park. Bins are out from 8:30am to 1:00pm every Thursday, if you’d like to take advantage of this option!

Direct Pick Up

We understand that it’s not always easy to get to a drop site, so we also offer direct pick up at your home. Currently, this service is available for residents living in Ashland and Talent. On your designated pick up day, just leave out a container with your scraps. We’ll come collect the contents, leave you your container, and get the scraps to local farms!

If the direct pick up option sounds right for you, here’s where you can sign-up.

Neighborhood Drop Site Bins for CompostBut Wait, There’s One More Way!

To lower costs for customers, we have Neighborhood Drop Sites at some locations in Ashland and Talent. You may have a neighbor that hosts a community collection bin that lives nearby!

If you’d like to explore this option, give us a call (541) 301-3426, and we can see if there’s a convenient Neighborhood Drop Site near you. Or, perhaps you’d like to start one?

If you want to read a fun story about a resident in Ashland who started a Neighborhood Drop Site in his area, have a look at this recent article he shared about his experience: The Millpond “Compost Man.”

Other Ways You Can Support, and Enjoy!

At Rogue Produce, we make the effort to go “full circle,” by purchasing produce from our local farms and selling it to you at our Online Farmers Market. You can support our Community Compost efforts, and enjoy the best of local produce, delivered directly to your door!

When you become a Farmers Market Member with Rogue Produce and begin purchasing local produce from our Online Market, you immediately support our community-building, soil-sustaining, farm-helping, and small-business-partnering efforts.


Stay in the LOOP!

If you’re not currently interested in our services, you can still sign up for our weekly newsletter to stay informed. We’ll keep you posted on farm events, local food stories, compost lore, farm work parties, promotions, and so much more!

Subscribe to the Rogue Produce Newsletter Today!


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Food Scraps in the News!

Thanks to the growing enthusiasm about Rogue Produce’s “Community Compost” program, we’ve recently been the subject of two local news stories! In this blog post we want to share these stories with you and outline the options available to you to participate in the adventure of diverting food-scraps from businesses and households and donating this resource to local farmers. Our local farms put the scraps to good use to benefit their own operations and our community as a whole!

Step 1: Check out the stories and share them through your social media!

Please check out these great stories, and share them through your social media channels. The more we spread the word, the more good things happen, such as:

  • New farms hear of our program and begin receiving scraps.
  • New residents and business owners discover Community Compost and begin participating in the program.
  • Our farm partners become free drop-sites for leaves, horse manure, food-scraps, and other materials to integrate into their compost operation.
  • New compost options sprout up, such as the free drop-site at the Medford Growers Market beginning in the Spring of 2024.
  • The more our region comes together as a community to reduce waste and support local agriculture!

KOBI Story by Taylar Ansures

https://kobi5.com/news/rogue-produce-turns-food-waste-into-farming-gold-217688/

JPR Story, by Roman Battaglia

Rogue Valley Entrepreneur Turns Food Waste into Black Gold

Step 2: Find out how you can participate

The process of building our Community Compost program has been, naturally, an organic one. As a result, our service options are diverse in order to meet the needs of all who wish to participate. We recommend the best place to get started is to give us a call at 541-301-3426 to see which of the options below works best for you.

Direct Food Scrap Pick-Up

If you want pick-up directly from your home in Ashland, Talent, or Phoenix, you can sign-up here at our current new-customer discounted rate of $14.95 per month.

Bellview Grange Winter Drop-Site

Because the Farmer’s Market drop-site in Ashland has closed for the Winter, we set-up this alternative location. Between the hours of 9am and 1pm every Tuesday, you can drop your scraps off at the Bellview Grange in Ashland. This service is $10 per month, and we ask that you call us to set-up service.

Food Scrap Pick-up for Businesses

We are excited to work with any restaurant, market, cafe, or the like, to get you set-up with our program. Give us a call at 541-301-3426 to set up a trial.

Free Food Scrap Drop-Sites

These will resume in March of 2024, at the Ashland Growers Market at the Ashland Armory, and at the Medford Growers Market in Hawthorne Park. We have enough funding to get the program in Medford launched, but we are still seeking donations to make sure we can provide the service through the entire Market season. Please support this effort by making a donation.

Other Ways to Support

Rogue Produce goes full-circle by selling produce from our local farm partners through our Online Farmers Market. You can place an order online and we deliver orders to your home every week!

We have a special Autumn promotion that gets you a free “Farmers Market” membership to remove delivery fees, and also gets you a 20% coupon to use on your first order! Take advantage of our promotion by clicking the link below – it’s one more way to support local farms, local businesses, smart food-scrap management, and stay connected with your community!

Free Membership and 20% Coupon

FREE Food Scrap Pick Up Coming to Medford!

FREE food scrap drop off at the Medford Grower’s Market is in the works!

Communities throughout the country are converting food scrap material into compost to reduce the need for artificial fertilizers and to prevent the environmental problems that happen when food scraps go to landfills or into water treatment facilities. In Southern Oregon there is a system in place to get food scraps directly to local farms to be processed into nutrient rich soil amendments. This system not only prevents waste and environmental harm, it also provides a significant benefit to local farms and local soils! Read on to see how you can support our efforts!

Who’s involved locally

This year, Rogue Valley Food System Network is supporting the efforts of the Community Compost Coalition (CCC) to help local farms expand their composting activities. The project collaborators are Rogue Produce & Community Compost for transport and logistics, Ashland Community Composting for transport and bokashi composting, Southern Oregon Food Solutions (SOFS) for Community Outreach, and three receiving farms: Fry Family Farm, Evers Ridge Farm and Joy Luck Farm for the composting process.

How it works

The primary working model is a subscription curbside service for collecting food scraps from residents, businesses and schools, and then transporting the scraps to local farms to be composted. In 2022, the Ashland Rotary Club sponsored a FREE food scrap drop off service at the Ashland Grower’s market to provide more residents with a way to keep food scraps out of the trash and to give it to local farms instead. This service continues to be  provided by Rogue Produce & Community Compost and it has been so well received and appreciated that it has been renewed for 2023. Also this year, when the Britt Festival signaled that it wanted to become the “greenest concert venue on the west coast,” Ashland Community Composting worked out the logistics to collect food scraps from each event throughout the summer.

Moving forward

With the help of an Ashland Food Co-Op Community Grant, and with support from Rogue Valley Food System Network, the Community Compost Coalition is setting up a second FREE food scrap drop off service at the Medford Grower’s Market starting in the Spring of 2024!

We need your support!

We are currently raising funds in order to fully cover the cost of the food scrap drop off service for the entire Medford Grower’s Market season in 2024. We would love to receive your help in making sure we can fund this service for 2024 and beyond! In a typical pick-up at the Ashland Grower’s Market, we divert 180 gallons (6 large garbage bins) of food scrap material from the landfill and donate this valuable resource to local farms that are working hard to grow the food we all love.

Donate today!

If you’d like to help ensure that this valuable service remains available for the long-term, you can make a donation by following this link.

 

Thank you, and see you at the Grower’s Markets!

Compost, Let’s Keep it Local.

It’s not everyday that a community comes together to support a cause they all can agree on. Usually this phenomena only occurs when there’s a crisis of some kind, and a community recognizes an urgent need and rallies to meet it. In Southern Oregon (and in many other communities) there is an urgent need to support small local farms. In many ways we rise to meet this need: by shopping at a farmers market, joining a CSA, etc. But there’s another substantial way to support small local farms on the other end of the food cycle – by contributing our food-scraps to their compost operations. We have the power in our hands to make sure that the food-scraps from our households and businesses find their way to local farms, but the window of opportunity to keep this power may be closing.

At a recent meeting of the Ashland city council in March, Recology (who is contracted by the cities of Ashland and Talent for waste collection) announced that it is planning to implement a city wide pick-up of food-scraps. Recology presented a variety of options it is considering for how this new service will be modeled. Depending on which model is chosen, Recology stated that it could take anywhere from 6-months to 3 years for the service to take effect. This offers the people of Ashland and Talent a short period of time to sustain other options for managing the valuable resource of our region’s food-scraps. This article offers an alternative option to Recology’s, one that is already in operation and allows for greater freedom and local control of a resource that broadly benefits our community.

Recology’s Proposal

At the Ashland city council meeting in March, Recology outlined three models for their food-scrap pick-up.

  1.  Food-scraps would be collected from residents and brought to a local landfill, where the material would be used to create compost to sell commercially.
  2.  Recology would establish their own composting facility where the food-scraps would be made into compost.
  3.  The food-scraps would be transported out of our area to composting facilities outside of our region. This is what is done in the Portland metro area, where the food-scraps collected are transported to a facility near Eugene.

Recology also mentioned 2 options for how this service would be offered to their customers.

  1.  The food-scrap collection would be integrated with their current services of waste and recycling pick-up, effectively mandating that all customers participate and pay any increase in service fees.
  2.  Establish a separate subscription option for the food-scrap pick-up, so the service would not be mandated to all customers.

Community Compost

Community Compost is a local small business that has been operating in Ashland and Talent since 2011. Customers of this company receive a weekly pick-up of their kitchen food-scraps. Community Compost also provides service to commercial clients such as grocery markets and restaurants. Here are some of the important differences between Community Compost and Recology’s proposed food-scrap collection program.

  1.  Community Compost does not mandate customers to participate, with the understanding that many households and businesses utilize their food-scraps in their own back yard composting operation or donate them to local community gardens or farms.
  2.  Recology would, at best, bring the food-scraps they collect to a location to be processed into compost. That compost would be sold commercially and provide an additional profit to Recology, and/or the organization(s) they work with to develop the compost. Community Compost, on the other hand, transports and donates the food-scraps they collect directly to small local farms. In this manner, Community Compost provides a direct economic benefit to local farms, and a nutritional benefit to the soil they farm on.

Other Points to Consider

Community Compost and its local farm partners have plans to eventually sell compost products created from the food-scraps collected in the community. When this scale of production is achieved, customers will receive a yearly dividend from a percentage of the sales of these compost products. Here’s how that would work.

    • Community Compost brings local farms food-scraps.
    • Local farms process the food-scraps into compost to use on their farm.
    • Surplus compost created by local farms can be sold locally by farms. This would provide an additional economic benefit to local farms, and spread more nutrients to local soil.
    • Community Compost customers receive a percentage of the sales of these compost products back as a yearly dividend.

The Effects of a Mandate

Many households in our region already use the food-scraps from their kitchens to create compost in their own back yards. Many farmers collect food-scraps from grocery markets to feed to their live-stock; and even some local schools collect food-scraps from their cafeterias to create compost for their school gardens. Community Compost has been operating for over a decade, and there’s a reason why not every household is a customer. Households that compost their own food-scraps are performing the optimum model for managing this resource – why would we want to reduce the incentive for individuals to do that, or make them pay for a service they wouldn’t use?

It Can be Done

Food-Scraps to FarmsCommunity Compost has been growing since it’s beginning, and particularly in recent years with the establishment of local drop-sites, including one at the Tuesday Farmers Market, in Ashland. The Neighborhood Compost Project is in development, which determines a drop-site within walking distance for customers to drop-off their full bucket of food-scraps and pick-up an empty one. Picking up 5-gallon buckets of food-scraps, especially when they are consolidated at drop-site locations, is a totally manageable endeavor for Community Compost, and doesn’t require dump trucks and large containers utilized for waste collection.

Action Steps

So now’s your chance, and our chance. If you feel like this is a cause worth advocating for, here are a few steps you can take to make your voice heard and stay informed.

  1.  Contact your city councilor in Ashland or Talent and ask them to allow for adequate time to consider all options available to our community when it comes to managing the local resource of our food-scraps. If you wish to do so, ask them to ensure that Recology will not be able to mandate the collection of food-scraps city-wide.
  2.  Sign-up for Community Compost if you’re not already composting at your residence.
  3.  Subscribe to the newsletter for Community Compost. You’ll also receive emails regarding the Rogue Produce Online Farmers Market, but this is the best way for you to stay up to date on this issue at the current time until a separate newsletter is created.
  4.  Share this article.

This post was written by Adam Holtey, owner of Rogue Produce and Community Compost. Feel free to reach out to Adam directly by emailing adam@rogueproduce.com if you have questions regarding the content.

 

Neighborhood Compost Project

Food-Scraps to Farms

The Neighborhood Compost Project makes it easier and more affordable than ever to get the food-scraps from your kitchen to local farms. Community Compost transports the food-scraps to local farms that use the material to make compost to feed their soil. Instead of this valuable resource being dumped in the landfill, we make sure it completes the natural cycle and becomes nutrition for locally grown produce.

How it Works

The way the Neighborhood Compost Project works is simple. We provide you with a 5-gallon bucket to collect your household food-scraps. Each week, you bring the bucket to the designated drop-site in your neighborhood. There will be a clean bucket for you to pick-up when you drop off your scraps. This new model enables Community Compost to pick-up more food-scraps from fewer locations, which allows us to lower our rates to customers.

How to Join

To participate in the Neighborhood Compost Project, simply sign-up here. We will determine the ideal drop-site closest to your home, supply you with a bucket, and get you started with our service. If we don’t yet have a drop-site designated for your neighborhood, we will pick-up directly from your home each week until we do (this is part of our current promotion to build our Neighborhood model)! The monthly rate is only $14.95 ($3.45 per pick-up).

Food-Scraps Feed the Soil

When you participate in Community Compost you are providing a real and substantial benefit to local farms. Evers Ridge Farm, in Medford, is one of our newest partners. Evers Ridge is planting acres and acres of drought resistant fruit and nut trees. They just finished planting their first 500 trees! Every row of trees is being nourished from a compost mixture produced with the help of food-scraps collected from residents and local businesses. Check out this video interview (or view the video below) we created with Evers Ridge Farm to see how the process works.

Contact us today to get started in the Neighborhood Compost Project by Community Compost, and please share this post with your friends and neighbors!

Where The Food Scraps Go

It’s a Win All Around

Community Compost has been collecting residential and commercial food scraps in Southern Oregon for over 10 years. With the help of local farms we’ve come up with smart systems for returning food scraps back to the soil to grow the fruits and veggies we all enjoy. We’d like to share this video showing you where some of the food scraps go to continue their journey in the local agricultural cycle. Check out our interview with one of our new Farm Partners, Evers Ridge Farm, and meet our new friends: Thomas, Hannah, Jessica, and Gus!

http://https://youtu.be/SZzFqpFQUAQ

 

Support our Partners

We are ever grateful to the residents and businesses of Southern Oregon that support the Community Compost program. Here’s a list of some of the restaurants and markets that participate in our regular food scrap collection. Not only are these partners smart with their food scraps – they also make delicious food! Visit these local businesses to support a smart system that reduces waste in our landfills and supports our local farms.

Clyde’s Corner, Phoenix

Rooted, Medford

Higher Power Raw Foods, Ashland

Market of Choice, Medford

Vida Baking Company, Ashland

 

Public Schools

Community Compost also collects food scraps from several local Elementary Schools: Talent, Phoenix, and Orchard Hill. Students get involved and learn about what goes in the compost bin and how the food scraps end up turning into food for the soil. The students also make some pretty awesome art on the collection bins!

 

Sign-Up, and Spread the Word

We’re always happy to take on new partners! You can sign-up for our residential pick-up service, or encourage a local restaurant, market, or school to sign-up for our commercial collection program.

The Toil for Healthy Soil

Happy Dirt Veggie Patch is a drop off point for Community Compost. We are a small 3 acre farm in Phoenix that grows a wide variety of vegetables. We maintain healthy soil with compost made on site. Your peels and pits, leftovers and less-than-their-best veggie scraps arrive at the farm in trash barrels that get dumped into big piles for processing.

The first thing we do is look through the fresh droppings for anything that doesn’t belong. Almost any naturally produced item can contribute to building healthy soil – but plastics, metal or any other questionable trash that won’t break down is picked out and put in the regular trash. Meat and dairy products can theoretically be composted, but as a practical matter we exclude them as much as possible because they attract critters that we would rather not have to contend with.

Packaging items that are labeled as “compostable” typically don’t work very well in our system, so we pick most of those out too. Thin green compostable bags work ok, but compostable cutlery and dishes, etc that are more substantial take much too long to digest in our small operation. So into the trash they go.

Another indigestible item is the plastic stickers that come on produce. We have to let these go through at this early point in the process, because trying to remove them all is impractical. We have found that it is easier to remove them from finished compost than at the beginning of the process. Still, this is the biggest contamination issue we deal with. Thousands of stickers, still sticking to their morsel of compost! It is a huge headache trying to remove them all, not to mention hours of labor. We would love it if customers could remove stickers from their produce before tossing them. An even better solution would be  for the industry to go to paper stickers. After all – the entire purpose of the sticker is to exist for a fraction of a second to speed things up at the checkout stand. After that nobody cares. So why do we make stickers that last for generations? The simplest thing with a very simple solution ends up being a blight upon the land. Paper breaks down easily in compost – plastic does not. 

One more irksome item is plastic teabags. They absolutely do not break down, and pop up in otherwise finished compost with amazing frequency. Each one requires bending over, emptying their enclosed contents, and getting it to a proper disposal receptacle. Much easier would be for everyone to use paper tea bags which easily return to the Earth.

Once we have the compost spread out on the piles, we let it sit in the sun for a day or so, weather permitting, to dry it a bit. In Winter we often cover with tarps to keep excess rain off the piles. Compost needs some moisture to work properly, but too much moisture prevents enough air from getting into the pile. While the food is drying in the air, it is very attractive to a variety of birds in the area. Throughout the day, flocks of birds come visit the compost – taking some and pooping some – stirring it up and speeding the digestion process. Some come for the ripe fruits, some for the multitude of bugs and worms.

At night, there are other critters which visit the piles, mainly skunks, raccoons, and opossums. Feral cats are also on the prowl. These animals also like to feed on rodents, so there are no rats to be found and only rare sightings of mice.

When the latest dump load has dried, we cover it with straw, leaves, dry grass clippings or other farm clippings. This introduces the “brown” component that gives microbes the balance of nutrients they need to activate the digestion process. We layer the pile with additional loads of “fresh” produce until it is big enough to start cooking on its own. 

At this point we take our trusty old tractor and turn the pile and mix all the ingredients together. Once it is all mixed, the composting process really accelerates. Within 2-3 days the temperature of the pile will soar, eventually reaching 140-150 degrees. Thermophyllic bacteria do the work of eating it all and gradually turning it into beautiful brown humus. These bacteria also eat and digest any pathogenic microbes that may happen along the way. It takes a few weeks until the temperature goes back down. We then turn the pile (which is considerably smaller by now) one more time. The pile heats up once again , but reverts to ambient temperature more quickly. After the second turning, piles are left to finish for several months. This allows the beneficial fungi and earthworms to infiltrate and leaves us with a beautiful, rich, sweet-smelling compost that is pure nutrition for our crops and essential for maintaining healthy soil.

We are very thankful for all of those who contribute their compost through Community Compost. We are also very excited to now be getting leftovers from the new Market of Choice in Medford. This will increase our supply of home-made compost significantly, which will help increase our production of local veggies! All of the compost we make is used on-site to fertilize our crops and maintain healthy soil, eliminating most of the need for expensive fertilizers from faraway places.

Thank you for your support!

Local Farms Got Produce!

Wandering Fields Farm

Wandering Fields Farm in the Little Applegate Valley!

We’re ready for orders at Rogue Produce! We’ve got a host of your favorite local farms contributing the freshest and tastiest produce in our bundles this delivery. Ben Yohai from Wandering Fields makes his regular Autumn appearance bringing Rogue Produce a beautiful selection of yellow and purple potatoes (both with yellow flesh), shallots, onions, garlic, and leeks. Devon Benbrook at White Oak Ranch supplies the bulk of the protein in the bundles and features a new item—a 50/50 blend of ground beef and pork that is great for meatloaf and meatballs (time to use that tomato sauce you might have made this summer). Devon says the blend is great for hamburgers, too.

Valley View Orchard has their famous peaches (and sweet cherries, and you’ve got to get those fast) packaged frozen in beautiful 1-lb. bags, and Terra Sol Organics is ready once again with sunflower and pea shoots. Additional local farms represented on the list this week include Ella Bella Farm, Happy Dirt Veggie Patch, Wandering Roots Farm, Fry Family Farm, Sweet Creek Foods, Windborne Farm, Poetential Farm, By George, and Noble Coffee. Order now for a home delivery on Friday, October 4. Here’s a preview of our pre-bundled CSA Share selection.

Shallots

Shallots from Wandering Fields!

Veggie Bundle

This amazing autumn arrangement includes frozen peaches from Valley View Orchard; green kale and bunched carrots from Wandering Roots Farm; French breakfast radishes from HappyDirt Veggie Patch; pea shoots from TerraSol Organics; a potato medley, onions, and garlic from Wandering Fields; mixed Italian peppers and delicata squash from Ella Bella Farm; and organic broccolini.

Omnivore Bundle

It’s fiesta time with fresh corn tortillas from Jennifer at Windborne Farm; red or green enchilada sauce from Sweet Creek Foods; ground chorizo sausage from White Oak Ranch; mixed Italian peppers from Ella Bella Farm; slicer tomatoes from Fry Family Farm; cilantro from Wandering Roots Farm; onions and a potato medley from Wandering Fields; and organic avocados. It takes a whole village of local farms to make a fiesta!

Ella Bella Peppers

Ella Bella Peppers!

Keto Bundle

Stimulate your culinary creativity with the 50/50 blend of ground beef and pork from White Oak Ranch; a dozen eggs from Poetential Farm; a wedge of Swiss cheese from By George; organic avocado; pea shoots from Terra Sol Organics; slicer tomatoes from Fry Family Farm; organic broccolini; and mixed Italian peppers from Ella Bella Farm!

Breakfast Bundle

First priority at breakfast: choose your coffee! Pick your favorite from Noble Coffee Roasters in this Breakfast Bundle, which also includes your selection of bagels from Little Shop of Bagels, ground breakfast sausage from White Oak Ranch, a dozen eggs from Poetential Farm, frozen peaches from Valley View Orchard, and sunflower shoots from Terra Sol Organics (these last two items pair well in a yummy and nutritious smoothie)!

Get your orders in by Tuesday, October 1 at 10am for a home delivery on Friday, October 4. Enjoy the best from your favorite local farms!