What is community?

At its simplest, Community is a group, large or small, of folks that you share a feeling of fellowship with. It is a group with common interests, attitudes, goals, ideas, etc. For us, community is the sense of gathering around and sharing an experience formed from regeneratively grown meats, grains, and vegetables when we host you for dinner or brunch. It is the feeling of unity when we see you weekly at our Summer CSA pickups and share your excitement about what our corner of Central Oregon produced and what can be done with it. It is the shared sense of discovery and joy from eating and cooking off the farm year round with ourFull Diet members. Community for us is the support that we all mutually give each other in the ways that we can and need: emotional and physical nourishment, exchanging ideas and recipes, satisfying economic and environmental needs together.

We at Rainshadow are very excited about how our community has grown in the last few years. You all have continued supporting us and our CSA numbers have increased, Longtable dinners and brunches continue to sell out, and our Farm Store and Farmers Market stand and the Wednesday Bend Farmers Market are part of your weekly and monthly provisioning.

Let us introduce our Community Partners

This past year we broadened our community and invited some new farmers and business to join us at the Farm Store. These are folks that we are proud to partner with to bring some of those crops and goods to you that we don’t or can’t grow. These partnerships have added something new and special to our menus, diversified the diets of our Full Diet members, and created more options for shoppers at our Farm Store. It feels amazing to be able to partner with these other like minded small businesses, farms, and cooperatives. We are excited for what the next year holds as we continue to host partnership meals and offer their goods in our Farm Store. We would love to a take few moments and introduce them!

Port Orford Sustainable Seafood 

POSS is a values driven seafood company dedicated to our local fleet of family-owned day boats and to our seafood loving Oregonian membership.

Port Orford is a one of a kind coastal community where more than 1/3 of the local economy is still tied to commercial fishing. It’s fair to say that we are a fishing town. We have pride in our culture of fishing and pride in the traceable, high-quality seafood products we provide to our members.

In an effort to tie consumers more directly to the seafood they eat, we’ve formed a Community Supported Fishery – based on the Community Supported Agriculture model – that gives our members a window into our world and provides access to everything we catch. Members place their orders and fill out their monthly share through our online storefront and then retrieve their fish from one of our many wonderful community partner pick-up locations. (That is us!)

When you become a member, you select a share size of $200 or greater and that becomes your starting balance for the year. As you curate your share and place orders, your balance is reduced. There is no order minimum or requirement that you place an order at all. If you run out of funds you can always add more. That’s our system for getting Port Orford caught seafood into as many Oregon homes as we can.

We at the farm were very excited to discover Port Orford Sustainable Seafood last year! A few of us on the farm joined their CSF and enjoyed the variety, quality, and ethics of it! We all also really appreciated having the choice of what we got and when. Last spring we started partnering with POSS to offer Seafood dinners. This has been a particularly wonderful partnership showcasing POSS’s high quality, conscientiously sourced seafood and the glories of Rainshadow.

Join the RevolOcean and sign up for a Community Supported Fishery share today (you can pick up at the Farm Store or at Locavore in Bend!) and we’ll keep you posted about when our next Seafood Dinner is!

We discovered Mt Hood Organic Farms late last summer and have been selling their apples and pears since in our Farm Store and enjoying their periodic appearance in our longtable and brunch menus since.  

First and foremost, Mt. Hood Organic Farms is a family run farm, operated by Brady and John Jacobson, which just happens to be situated in a stunningly beautiful location at the base of Mt. Hood in the Upper Hood River Valley. (When you drive from Mt Hood to Hood River, these folks are the first orchard you come to!)

Inspired by European techniques and committed to sustainable land use, the Jacobsons undertook an extensive orchard renovation starting in 1981 and transitioned to organic farming that resulted in full organic certification in 1989—the first farm in the valley to achieve this status. Brady and John were pioneers in the organic movement and Mt. Hood Organic Farms was the first certified organic commercial orchard in the state of Oregon. The farm is also a Demeter certified Biodynamic® farm, which is considered natural land stewardship at its best. It is the highest paradigm of sustainable farming, offering one of the smallest carbon footprints of any agricultural method. Biodynamic® farmers work in cooperation with nature’s rhythms, using organic, holistic methods to create a self-contained, self-sustaining ecosystem, while producing the most vital food available.

The 50 acres of apple and pear orchards on the farm’s 205 acre grows 87 varieties of apples, pears and quince. The 70 varieties of apples are grown on dwarfing root stocks and planted 3 feet apart in a tall slender spindle trellised system. John has grafted and made many of the thousands of trees.

Summer CSAs still available!

(click on the image for more information!)