In this issue:
Featured
farm - Columbia Gorge Organics
Contact us
Past issues online
Columbia Gorge Organics
This week, Goodness
Greeness is featuring organic pears from one of the premier
fruit growers in North America - Columbia Gorge Organics.
Look for elegant Star Crimson pears and delicious Bartlett
pears from Columbia Gorge Organics at your local market.
Located in Hood River,
Oregon, in a beautiful valley in the shadows of Mount Hood,
Columbia Gorge Organics is a family owned and operated
business. What's unique about this week's featured
farm is:
1.
They have some of the highest quality fruit available
in North America,
2. They are a model of organic growing practices.
Committed to organics
In this newsletter, we
write each week about organic produce, family farms and
organic growing methods. Columbia Gorge serves as a
superb example of the organic principles that we emphasize
each week. They are truly committed to sustainable
agriculture and they practice their beliefs in a consistent
and demonstrable way.
Columbia Gorge is 100%
organic, with 150 acres of certified organic fruit,
producing apples. pears, cherries, peaches, nectarines and
plums. They sell their organic harvest as fresh-packed
fruit, canned fruit and super premium organic fruit juices.
They believe (as we do)
that sustainable agriculture begins with how a farmer treats
the soil. Here's what they say about soil on their
website (www.columbiagorgeorganics.com):
"Soil fertility is our prime goal and we believe that a
healthy soil produces food that has the proper balance
of vitamins and minerals promoting better health. This
is why we have an on-site compost facility that produces
the highest quality humus that we apply to our soils
annually. Organic farming is not about letting nature
farm the planet, but rather, relying upon highly-skilled
farmers to bring our worlds’ food supply to a new level."
They build and maintain
soil fertility in their orchards through an advanced
composting program and a set of exemplary organic practices.
Composting
Columbia Gorge makes
about 2000 tons of compost annually on their farm, half of
which is applied to their orchards to maintain fertility for
their fruit trees. The other half goes to local
growers and processors.
There are two key points
about this serious composting effort. The first is
that compost provides a number of key ingredients for the
long term health and fertility of the soil. And these
ingredients are critically important for the sustained
health of the plants (in this case trees) growing in the
soil.
If you are interested in
more details about the impressive composting process at
Columbia Gorge and the resulting benefits, check out their
composting page at:
http://www.columbiagorgeorganic.com/facts_composting.html
The second key point
about their composting effort is that they make their high
quality compost from community wastes, like yard wastes,
manure, sawdust, ground wood and paper waste.
In doing so, they keep
these wastes from going to the community landfill and they
keep related wastewater runoff from manure piles from
polluting streams, rivers and the community aquifer.
Organic
practices
In addition to
the composting program, Columbia Gorge applies an equally
impressive set of proven organic practices to their farm,
soils and trees.
These
practices include:
Fertilization - use of cover crops, fish and kelp
fertilizers,
Mineralization - use of rock powder amendments,
Release of beneficial insects,
Monitoring of insect populations,
Disruption of pest insect breeding cycles,
Foliar feeding of nutrients (intake via the tree leaf).
These
practices keep plants healthy and minimize pest damage.
To read more
detail on these organic practices at Columbia Gorge, go to:
http://www.columbiagorgeorganic.com/facts_growing.html
Take away
The bottom
line here is this - when you buy organic Bartlett pears and
Star Crimson pears (or any other of their products) from
Columbia Gorge organics, you are getting the highest quality
fruit grown on a family farm practicing the highest
standards of organic farming. What can be better?
Contact
us
You can find
Columbia Gorge Organics pears, along with a rich variety of
other organic
fruits and vegetables, many grown by local and family
farmers, from Goodness Greeness at your local market.
Email us
at
newsletter@goodnessgreeness.com if you can't find them and we'll help you
locate them.
Past
issues online
As you know if you've
been reading this weekly newsletter for awhile, there is a
lot of information provided on organic fruits and vegetables, their
nutritional qualities, availability, shopping and
preparation tips, as well as some recipes.
You can now access most of
the past issues of Organics for you on our web site (www.goodnessgreeness.com).
Click on the Newsletter link at the top of any page on the
site. There you'll find a quick index of all past
issues. Select the back issue you want, click on the
issue # and you'll find that tip that you were looking for.
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