Log In


Reset Password
Lifestyle

Salad spinners

Cyclists visit local gardens on annual Tour de Farms

A mob of bicyclists took over Durango on Saturday for the eighth annual Tour de Farms, an event designed to highlight what is healthy, homegrown and unique in the local agriculture and gardening community.

“The goal of the event is education,” said Celeste Greene, event coordinator for Growing Partners of Southwest Colorado, which organized the tour in conjunction with the Colorado State University Extension Office. “At each stop, the hosts are walking the riders through their garden and teaching them about what they’ve done ... That’s a really cool part of it, because we get to share knowledge and learn from each other’s experiences.

“The other key piece is to advocate for local food,” Greene said. “We are really trying to teach people and show how you can grow your own food and how it can work for you in this region.”

With two routes to choose from, about 40 participants opted for the longer 16-mile ride to visit five farms and gardens in the Falls Creek, Junction Creek and Turtle Lake area, and another 35 riders chose the shorter 5-mile ride through downtown Durango to visit two backyard gardens and three community gardens.

On the longer tour, participants visited three gardens with grow domes, geodesic greenhouses that enable year-round food production.

For tour host Jude Terry, installing a grow dome at her home seven years ago has enabled her and her husband to begin to achieve their self-sufficiency and sustainability goals.

“I was raised in the South,” Terry said. “And growing was real easy there, so I was a little daunted by how hard it is to grow food here sometimes. And the grow dome makes it a lot easier. It opens up the window, because we have a very tight, short season here.”

The Terrys’ grow dome is heated by solar thermal coils that enable them to grow crops through four seasons. They even are able to grow lime trees, melons and cherimoya, a tropical fruit grown in Hawaii.

The Terrys were excited to participate in Tour de Farms to show others what can be achieved in their own backyards.

“For me, it was this thing of really wanting people to see that you can grow your own food, you can eat outside of the grocery store,” she said.

After leaving the Terry farm, riders on the long tour made their way to Turtle Lake Refuge, an experience that greatly diverged from the more cultivated and organized feel of the Terrys’ garden.

More than 100 different types of plants grow in the Turtle Lake garden, from your common “weeds” to more traditional crops such as chard, kale, squash and tomatoes.

“When you walk into this space, it feels really welcoming and really chaotic, all mixed together,” said Turtle Lake Refuge volunteer Jessica Gellings. “We’re able to show people that there is actually tons of stuff growing here that is useful, whether it’s for food or medicine.”

A community garden that practices and promotes sustainable living, Turtle Lake offers a different approach – rather than fighting the weeds, they embrace them. Milk thistle, for example, the bane of many a gardener’s existence, is running rampant in the Turtle Lake garden, but instead of trying to eradicate it, the Turtle Lake gardeners harvest the leaves and roots and use them to make a tea to support liver health.

“Part of the magic of this community garden is that it is really a celebration and honoring of what gifts the wild plants have for us, in addition to the cultivated plants,” Gellings said.

A four-year veteran rider of Tour de Farms, La Plata County resident Frank Lockwood said he was a little skeptical as the tour pulled up to the Turtle Lake garden, but soon was wowed by its multifaceted approach.

“That was amazing,” Lockwood said. “We pulled up on it, and I said, ‘I already know how to grow weeds.’ That was the first thing out of my mouth to my wife, and then I realized they are using all of these weeds for so many different things.”

Just around the corner from Turtle Lake, tour participants met with James Plate of Fields to Plate Produce. Plate and his business partner, Max Fields, both are graduates of the Fort Lewis College agricultural program. They grow root vegetables on an acre of land at the Old Fort Lewis site in Hesperus, as well as garlic, shallots and winter squash on a half-acre of rented land in the Turtle Lake area.

Plate added a little extra excitement to his tour stop by herding his 10 Navajo-Churro sheep over to the group of riders. A rare heritage breed, the sheep were on the edge of extinction until recently. Plate likes the sheep, which he uses primarily for pasture management, for their unique history, as well as for their hardiness.

Plate said his goal for participating in Tour de Farms was to “educate people on the potential for production, how much volume you can pull off of a piece of property that’s not so large. Just really showing people the potential for growing food in the Southwest ... and for us as growers, getting our name out there.”

With a focus on root vegetables, Fields and Plate want to make local produce available in the shoulder seasons, so even in the winter, people still are able to access fresh, local foods. Last year, Fields to Plate Produce supplied products to its vendors until late in December.

The company’s produce can be found at the Durango, FLC and Mancos farmers markets, as well as in Durango grocery stores Durango Natural Foods and Nature’s Oasis, and Zuma Natural Foods in Mancos. Fields and Plate also sell to 15 restaurants in Cortez, Durango and Mancos and are one of the suppliers for the Durango 9R School District and FLC.

On the shorter tour, riders got a different peek into what backyard gardening can look like. Three of the gardens were community gardens at Manna Soup Kitchen, Needham Elementary School and the Powerhouse Science Center.

“The Needham garden is one of the Garden Project of Southwest Colorado’s showcase gardens, and we thought it would be a great addition to Tour de Farms to show what school-age kids are able to do in a garden space, what teachers are doing with curriculum, what kids are doing with their creativity, and what the community is able to do to give back,” said Sandhya Tillotson, director of the Garden Project of Southwest Colorado, which provides resources and support to school gardening programs.

The Needham garden has been transformed over the last year and a half, tripling in size and becoming much more functional, thanks to the donations and efforts of many community volunteers. There are 24 beds in the garden, one for each class at the school. The decision regarding what plants are grown is student-led but teacher-guided, with a focus on crops that can be planted in the spring before school releases and harvested in the fall when the kids return to class. The crops grown in the garden are served in the school’s cafeteria, and kids also have the opportunity to take produce home with them. In addition to promoting healthy eating, the garden is also used as a hands-on learning tool.

“The garden is tied intimately with the International Baccalaureate curriculum for the school, so all of the different classes research what plants they want to plant,” Tillotson said. “It’s really an outdoor learning laboratory, teaching kids where their food comes from and how to grow their own food.”

For Nora Stafford, a first-grade teacher at Needham, the garden is a great learning tool that addresses all of the different learning styles – auditory, kinesthetic and visual.

“We are able to teach the curriculum out of the classroom; we can bring it outside, and we can teach all of the different subjects,” Stafford said. “It’s not like reading a textbook – it’s really hands-on.”

So, what did participants think of this year’s edition of Tour de Farms?

“It inspires me more,” Durango resident Terra Brooke said. “I buy organic, buy local when I can; I believe in that. And it’s fun to hang out with a bunch of other people who believe in it, too. It was another adventure in Durango, a bunch of inspiring people doing great things.”



Reader Comments