Melons are the main crop and just starting to hit their summer peak.
Renee and Mindy handle the rest, along with Mindy’s husband, Tom, his older brother, Martin, and his wife, Jami, who also live on the property.Īs Renee rattles off everything else they grow, it sounds like an inventory of a grocery store produce section: apples, plums, marionberries, tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, radishes, zucchini and peaches, which are in short supply this year due to the cool wet spring. Sarah farms flowers, including 13 varieties of zinnias, which are sold in hallmark 3-pound tin cans and are often what market shoppers notice first. The 3½-acre farm is tucked into a bend on a quiet lane with a clear view of River Rock Casino in the distance. Renee, her daughter, Sarah Kiff, and daughter-in-law, Mindy Kiff, were harvesting for the Saturday Healdsburg market and Windsor’s Sunday market. One recent Friday morning, the women of the Kiff family already were at work in the cool hours before the day’s heat descended. “The first tomatoes we had, we didn’t stake.” Bountiful summer harvest “We had a lot to learn,” she said of some of their early mistakes. Joel had lived on a cattle ranch in Montana, but Renee said farming was new to him. Kiff and Joel, who taught at Healdsburg High School and died in 2013, grew the farm somewhat by trial and error. Kiff also was the market’s manager from 1990 to 2004. Kiff’s Ridgeview Farm is one of the two original vendors from that 1978 market, the other being Bernier Farms, that’s still doing business there today.
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