Newsletters from Raccoon Forks Farms

Dear Friends of Raccoon Forks Farms –

Season’s greetings! Can you believe it’s the end of the year, already? We hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and that you’re enjoying the holidays thus far.

It’s been another busy and productive year at the Farms. As we wrote last month, it turned out to be a pretty good year for produce, particularly later in the summer. We had big crops of tomatoes, peppers, okra, garlic, potatoes, beans, and other vegetables – and 2018 will definitely live in our memories as “The Year of the Squash!”

Our squashes grew with exuberance last summer!

Dear Friends and CSA Partners –

We hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving! Were you affected by the amazing snow that hit southern Iowa over the weekend? We hope it didn’t complicate your travels.

Well, it’s happened again! This week is the last week of our fall vegetables and summer eggs CSA share seasons. It’s astonishing how fast the time goes! We hope you’ve enjoyed your eggs and your fall vegetables as much as we’ve enjoyed bringing them to you! We’re a little bit sad for it to be the end of the season, but we’re also looking forward to our winter work and to preparing for next year’s growing season. We have some exciting updates:

First, we have a new CSA brochure! Download it from our web site, or find one at your CSA pick-up site.

Dear Friends and CSA Partners –

Happy Thanksgiving week! One last reminder about this week’s deliveries – all shares will be delivered on Wednesday, even for those of you who normally receive your shares on Thursdays. Please pick up all shares between 3-6 p.m. on Wednesday, or have someone pick them up for you.

At our Runnells farm, we’re busy with regular chores – tending chickens and gathering, cleaning, and packing eggs – and continuing to work on our big goat fencing project. Not surprisingly, perhaps, considering how much wood we’ve been cutting, our chainsaw broke! So we’re working on fixing the chainsaw, too. But the fencing is progressing: almost all the corner posts, and their supports, are in, and we’re working on the intermediate posts. We hope to start putting up the wire fencing next week.

We received 342 new chicks today! Over the next few weeks, we’ll receive hundreds more. When they’re grown up, these chicks will be our next flock of laying hens. Here they are, settling into the fancy holding pen we built for them in the high tunnel at the Redfield farm: