Rocky Point Farm grows blueberries, mainly for customers in our area who pick their own. Our website tells about us, about picking and enjoying blueberries, and about the health benefits of blueberries. You can also find links to other sites, including sources of recipes. We even offer tips on growing your own blueberries. And we introduce you to another fruit, pawpaw, that is new to Rhode Islanders.
Changes! This year Paula Palumbo will be running the sales stand. Paula is the friendly person who has been helping us for years. This year she is buying the crop, so customers will deal with her. She will continue the same prices and the frequent picker program as before. And she will provide email and website updates during the season.
But we will continue to handle all aspects of production--pruning, mulching, spraying, fertilizing, weeding--to maintain the quality and quantity of blueberries that we and our customers count on. And we will often be on hand during the picking season to greet the many blueberry friends we have made--and to help Paula when needed. This arrangement will help assure that as the years add up, we can continue to maintain our family-friendly blueberry patch.
Mark and Betty Garrison
July 2, 2009: The bushes are heavily laden, but the cool rainy weather has slowed their ripening. Usually they are ripe to begin picking around the middle of July, but may be later this year unless the next two weeks are hotter than usual. Watch this space for the beginning date and updates throughout the harvest season.
Last season's blueberry harvest: Just under 13 tons were picked by customers last year. The champion frequent picker group last year in the institutional bracket again was the team of doctors, nurses and staff from Hasbro Children's Hospital (566 lbs.). And in the family category, the winner again was the Rakhlin family (480 lbs.), followed by the Cain family (239 lbs.). Several other groups or individuals went over the 100 lb. mark: Jefferson Diner friends, Hope (Nadezhda), Three Sisters, the Denning family, Sonny's team, the Cesario family, the Cheney-Gould family, the Wolf family, the Pederson family, Mrs. Makovska, the Pond family, and Barbara A. Winners and honorable mention teams should make sure we recognize them at the beginning of next season. Let's hope for another good year!
Pawpaws: In addition to the fruit from our seedling and named variety trees. we hope to harvest the first fruit from trees developed by pawpaw guru Neal Peterson: Shenandoah and Susquehana. And we will be grafting his Wabash variety on some of our seedlings. See our pawpaw page for more information about this interesting fruit.
Thanks to your donations for our recipe book last summer, we collected over $1200 to send to the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund, to help discover ways to catch this stealth disease early and to treat it effectively.
Contact us. Email us at farm130@cox.net if you wish to receive update messages at the beginning and during the season and/or send us your address to receive a postcard at the beginning of the season. (To make sure our email messages get through your spam filters, put us in your address book.)