Podcast: Postcards From Palisade

Iriana Medina, Executive Director of La Plaza, explains how the H-2A visa program helps provide the seasonal agricultural labor for the valley’s farmers, orchardists, and grape growers. Migrant agricultural workers using the H-2A visa program are here legally. Listen to learn more about the H-2A program, what La Plaza does, and how you can get involved.  

Theme Music: Riverbend by Geoff Roper  

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Transcript:

Welcome to the Postcards From Palisade podcast. I’m Lisa McNamara. Palisade is most famous for its peaches, but there’s so much more happening in our little town. Join me as I chat with our community members to hear about how they are making Palisade a great place to live and visit.

What is the H-2A visa program and why is it so important for Palisade and the Grand Valley? Today, Iriana Medina, Executive Director of La Plaza,

Iriana: Hola. Hello.

Lisa: OK, looks good.

Iriana: OK.

joins me to talk about why this visa program is crucial to our town and how it helps provide the seasonal agricultural labor that meets the needs of the valley’s farmers, orchardists, and grape growers.

Migrant agricultural workers using the H-2A visa program are here legally. I wanted to chat with Iriana to understand more about the people the valley relies on to help harvest our crops and to clear up any misconceptions about these workers who play a crucial role in Palisade’s ecosystem.

Lisa: thank you so much for being here with me today.

Iriana: Of course, thank you, Lisa. my name is Iriana Medina and I am the Executive Director at La Plaza here in Palisade.

Lisa: I really appreciate you being here today and the main reason I reached out to you originally was to talk about migrant workers and the H-2A program and to get a little bit better understanding of that and how it works today. But before we jump right into that, I’d love to talk more about your role at La Plaza and what the organization does. anybody who’s been listening to this podcast for a while knows that I talked to Nelly Garcia, the former executive director, almost two years ago in episode number four about what she was working on at La Plaza. And at that time it was reorganizing, rebranding from Child and Migrant Services to La Plaza. So much has happened since then in the last two years. So as the current executive director, I’m curious about what your vision is for the organization, how you want to engage with the community and how you want the organization to support migrants and immigrants.

Iriana: Thank you. Yeah. So just like how you just mentioned in two years a lot have happened. and well, you mentioned Nelly. Nelly, our former director, is the person that envisioned La Plaza. Just because Child and Migrant Services had a lot of names and there wasn’t a unified name or a way to identify one place. So she made the rebranding happen. And with the rebranding, the mission and vision of the organization expanded. I wouldn’t say it changed. I would say it expanded because like you’re saying, we have been known to be the entity that takes care of the migrant workers for 67 years. Then at year 67 is when the rebranding started to happen and with this game changer idea that Nelly had. And yes, we’re still taking care of the migrant workers. That’s the core of the organization still and it’s the core of this town. But we also wanted to be there for families that live in the valley too. Not just in Palisade, but in the valley.

Basically what we did was like I said, expand in our services and because many of the families that were migrant workers became immigrants. So they were migrant families that decided to stay at some point and they had La Plaza to be their peer of guidance and the place that they would come to still get food supplies from the food pantry and clothing from the migrant thrift store and things like, and other services too. Navigation services, guidance on how to, where to go if I need to renew a driver’s license, how to get an appointment for the DMV, that kind of thing. The need of being open year round was there and we also. So it kind of like organically merged to taking care of migrant to taking care of immigrants too. So this was a necessity just because we, the Child and Migrant Services was already doing that taking care of immigrants that one point were migrants. And so we weren’t including them in our mission. So that’s why it evolved to what it is now.

Lisa: I noticed that La Plaza is hosting more events now. Like there’s the tamale making class, there’s the food services courses, there’s the English conversation group. So how do all those things fit into how you want La Plaza to kind of be a part of the community?

Iriana: Yeah, exactly. this kind of activities just foster community. You just said it. So basically incorporating our migrant and immigrant community into activities that would encourage exchange, culture, values, customs, way of living and make it a whole. This country is made out of multiple cultures. This country is made out of, forged by immigrants of all origins. And so we basically were seeing the need of making it normal, making it a, like a habitual thing to have activities where folks from different cultures were just unite and I believe it’s a way of promoting peace too because understanding the culture of other people different than yours and living it, living it somehow, whether it’s through cooking tamales or having a concert with music that is different from what you’re used to, then you have a taste of it and kind of like get used to it and incorporate it hopefully to what your normal for a person would be. So basically it comes down to empowering, mixing cultures and having people be okay with being surrounded by something that’s different.

Lisa: Appreciating the culture. So I recently spoke with I don’t know if you know JoAnn Rasmussen. She’s the chair of the Palisade Historical Society. So I recently spoke with JoAnn about migrant labor in the past. So, you know, who were these people who came to work in Palisade around the harvest and the past, like before the 1960s and you know, I think what’s interesting is like, in that time, like up until the 1960s, there was a migrant camp, and there was a migrant camp in Riverbend park. And there was actually an area supported to housing migrants. There were community services as part of that park. you know, there’s all of this support system kind of in place there, provided by people who lived there, local residents, you know, churches, other local organizations.

And it seems like when, you know, late 1960s, that changed where, the park was forced to be disbanded. It definitely was not, you know, sanitary. They didn’t have like, running water, things like that. Very important things. And at that time, the farm owners were then expected to house their migrant workers. And things started shifting about where people came from. Basically what I was thinking about listening to that, that function that La Plaza provides to people who come here to work or people who move here, after coming here to work, is that community center that used to be provided in one way. And so it’s just really interesting to me that it became more of like an individualized thing for the farm owners to actually have to house their own workers, we lost that kind of communal support system. And it just makes me think that really La Plaza is that place now, that center where everyone can come to be together instead of being separated out.

Iriana: Yeah, well, the legislation around H-2A workers have changed over the years. And so, and that’s why at this point, we only have migrant workers. Back in the day, we used to have migrant families. And so that’s how it all started out, some wives of some of the local growers seeing the need in the fields families and entire families, including kids, underage kids, waiting for the parents to finish their journey in harsh conditions, whether it was snow, rain, or sun, heat. And so yes, it started out as an organization or just a community effort thing. And it evolved to become a nonprofit at some point. But, yeah, the beginning, it was about providing the basic needs of services of basic needs for these families. Like, and that’s why the name was Child and Migrant Services. Because the first of all the specifically for kids of these families that were in the fields with their parents while they were working. So there was a need of child care and then other services.

So migrant services. What does a migrant need? So they, they need clothing depending on the season. They need a food pantry. So let’s get a food pantry. There was a food pantry still. There still is. But that, that is not our main thing right now because we have evolved from basic services to now empowering people. So it’s, it’s all about making a platform so they could feel safe, so they could feel like they belong. And if, if it’s a brand new person say that there is a young adult that started coming as an H-2A worker, I’ve seen them. It’s, it’s a scary thing. You know they even though they’re men and they’re around men only, for a young kid it could be intimidating definitely. Just the work itself. Just being in a place where I don’t speak the language that everyone else speaks outside of the orchard and where do I go if I need to go to the bank, how do I open a bank account, and things like that. So those are overwhelming questions and things that could go through a young adult mind once they start coming here. Those guys that have been coming here for 8 years, 10 years, 15 years, 30 years we have, we see people at La Plaza that have been coming for over 30 years to serve this community and they have it more clear although they keep coming to us because of this sensation of being surrounded by people that is just like them. That will provide them with the information they need and anything that they need to do. And that feels good on our end because that’s what we’re here for. For people to feel confident, safe, and to be in a place that they belong.

Lisa: That’s so important because like I mean I can’t if you. I picture myself going somewhere to work where I don’t know anybody, I don’t have any friends, I don’t speak the language just even. It’s a really scary thought. So yeah knowing that there’s a place to go to have resources would be really important.

Iriana: And the good thing is that there is a cooperative sense of acting or being around the orchard workers because they encourage brand new people to come to us and to yeah to come to us for resources. And so that feels, that feels good. I mean it’s a recommendation, a word of mouth recommendation. And so we’re very happy to know, that some of these people are encouraged to come to us when they’re. Especially when they’re new in the area.

Lisa: How are you preparing for this upcoming season at La Plaza?

Iriana: At La Plaza, we’re educating our people on their rights. So we are an organization that serves migrants and immigrants. And this year we have been working really hard on educating our community what their rights are as an immigrant. Because everyone, even if it’s a not undocumented immigrant, have rights in the amendments in the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution of the United States and its amendments are good for US citizens and immigrants too. So we are educating them around this and we are letting them know what are the specific amendments that will protect them in any possible case of facing an immigrant officer. And we’re equipping them with what we call a ‘know your rights’ card. It has the amendments that protects them and it also has what’s called the magic words. And basically the magic words are questions that they could ask an officer like, have I done something wrong, am I good to go? Things like that.

Lisa: So it fits into the broader picture of empowering people. So you’re empowering people to know their rights and exercise them.

Iriana: correct again. La Plaza, the focus of La Plaza have shift to empowering the community that we serve. And whether, like I said, whether it is through an activity to do with the general community, the opportunity for them to share a story or their background or what they cook at home and/or for them to know their rights, which is, it’s a basic need but at the same time it’s a tool that could empower someone.

Lisa: So for you, what’s your background or like, how did you get to this position? What made you interested in working in this field?

Iriana: I am an immigrant myself. I’ve always been around nonprofits. I’ve always worked for nonprofits volunteering for many years. I volunteer for an organization called AFS which is American Field Services. It’s an exchange student program. And I was an exchange student once. And when, when I came back to my country, I started working for them as a volunteer and I volunteered there for ten years. I’m originally from Venezuela and in Venezuela I finished school for HR, so I got a masters in human resources. And my family in Venezuela are farmers. I come from a state where, farming is big as long as oil. But my family were focused on farming and working the land and having cattle and things like that.

So, I’ve been around farm workers my whole life and this kind of programs and organizations to support workers that work in the field doesn’t exist in Venezuela. So when I saw this, I just loved it. I, when I first applied to work for La Plaza, I applied for the coordination and community engagement coordination. And I got it and I, was very excited. It was a very exciting news when I heard that I, when they called me and offered me the position. So I’ve been doing this, from the love of my heart because I’m working with people that are just like me, an immigrant just like me and people that work in the fields.

Back in, back home, I was born and raised in the city. I come from a city of 3 million people. So it’s Maracaibo. Maracaibo is the second largest city after Caracas. And my, the farms of my family were in the country of my home state. And so I used to ride five hours to the town where my mother was born, which is where the farms of my family are, still are. and I would go there two times or three times a year because I needed to get out of the city. I mean I love, I love my hometown dearly, but I had to go back to the country as many times as I could just to take a break from the city. And I just love, I just love town life. I just love slow paced town lifestyle. So this, this was just a perfect fit for me, really.

Lisa: Yeah, it’s like a perfect combination of everything. And you’re doing awesome work. It just seems like you’re really, just stepped into the role and you’re really thriving in it.

Iriana: Thank you. I’m in a very, steep learning curve right now and I try to keep it humble. I know what I can bring to the table. And this, even though this was a challenging position for me, I knew consciously the challenge I was embracing. And the people that I’m serving, they can be sure that I am doing the best I can as a person, as a professional and as a service provider.

Lisa: I love that. I mean, that’s kind of the best we can do, right?

Iriana: Yeah, exactly.

Lisa: Let’s get into the main reason that I wanted to talk to you, which is to just get a better understanding of what the H-2A program is. We were at a lunch and learn a few months ago and I think I felt like a couple of the questions that people were asking, after the main presentation, it did feel like there are a few people in the room and probably just because of what they did, but you know, they just didn’t know what the H-2A program was. And I think if you’re not maybe directly tied into a farm or farm owner or a relative or somebody who works on a farm you might not really have a good idea of. They might not be as visible to you of what happens here and how important this program is to the farm owners in the town of Palisade. So, can you just talk about what the H-2A program is and then we can get into kind of what the steps are that it involves.

Iriana: Yeah. So H-2A, it’s the name of the visa. It’s an acronym basically. I know that A stands for agriculture. And so, yeah, H-2A is the name of the visa that these individuals come to the country with to work in the agriculture. In the fields. So they get granted anywhere in between three, six, to nine months, out of the year to be able to work in a farm, for this amount of time, with all the legal settings that it includes. So they do file taxes, pay taxes. They don’t get tax benefits though, because of the nature of the visa. But they do pay taxes for sure. So the growers need to put a notice out. Like. Is this called file? No, hold on. It’s when you put a notification for an ad.

Lisa: You put. Let’s see. Sorry. like a job posting.

Iriana: Job posting. That’s the word.

Lisa: Yeah. So they need to post their job to, they need to post it publicly.

Iriana: Yes. So the growers need to do a job posting here in the US, calling out for farm workers. They have to do this every year and they need to show proof that they have done the due diligence to be able to hire people here. So then they need to show that there was no interest and that they need to get labor from abroad to be able to operate their farms.

Lisa: I think one of the points you made too is that they have to actively recruit US workers. So it’s not like this, it’s not just like this paperwork thing. Like they don’t just post the job, take it down after a day and say, oh, sorry, nobody applied, oops. They actually have to actively try to recruit people. So it’s not, it’s not just to check the box. It’s like you actually have to try to find people that can work for you.

Iriana: Yeah. Yes. And that usually doesn’t happen. And the retention rates are pretty low when it comes down to having American workers in the fields. And so that’s why they relay so heavily in this H-2A program. So they need to go through the Department of Labor and get a certification to be able to go through the USCIS and be able to bring workers from abroad. Most of these individuals are from Mexico. And I believe it has to do with the proximity because they are the neighbors.

Lisa: but they could be from anywhere.

Iriana: But they could, they could be from anywhere. But here in Palisade most of them are Mexican citizens that come under the H-2A program. So then they have to go through this bureaucratic paperwork and fee thing. Usually there is, I believe there is like an agency back in some cities, main cities in Mexico and so they recruit people over there and then they have to go over to the US Embassy, sign their visas. They have like an interview process and signing process. They put their fingerprints, and then they, they’re good to come. And so they, many, most of them come in a bus or in a van and they ride all the way from their homes to Palisade. So that’s, that’s, that is. It sounds easy but it’s a very tedious process and, and a very time-consuming and money-consuming thing to do.

Lisa: Yeah, I know there’s kind of like a love hate relationship with it with for farm owners because it’s a great program but it’s also a lot of work.

Iriana: And then the regulations back to comparing to what it used to be and to what it is right now. Back in the day the growers didn’t have to provide with housing or any of the stuff that they do have to provide now. So they come and live in trailer homes within the premises of the property of the orchards. And so they pretty much live where they work. And this has to be, this is one of the regulations and the things that the program makes the growers do and it is provide housing for the people that they’re going to be bringing.

Lisa: I believe they also have to provide like a standard wage too. They can’t just you know, can’t pay less than what a minimum wage would be for that type of work.

Iriana: Yeah, correct.

Lisa: And then meals, transportation and just working conditions that meet federal and state standards.

Iriana: Yeah, there’s usually a van in each orchard. And so they usually there is scheduled times where they go out to town and they do grocery shopping or other errands that they have to do. And so other than that they will have to find a way to get out of the farm. And so that’s why we had, one of our programs is the bike lending program.

Lisa: I love it. So you don’t feel isolated. Like if even just you know again thinking about myself I would feel isolated. So just the fact that you’ll have that option for people to rent a bike and it’s for. I mean it’s lending for the season. Right. If they sign up.

Iriana: It really is lending program. It’s not renting. We lend them and we maintain them. We do the services. So once they. We have a volunteer that comes and makes a maintenance on the bikes and when they get here all the bikes are pretty much ready to go and to be ridden. And we are so happy and proud and excited about this program because we just love to see them around on the weekends when there’s a day off. Usually you could see them in town whether it’s in the laundromat or at the park or sometimes at the store. And they even go out to Clifton. They don’t stay here. They go out to places.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah. And just to have that freedom and flexibility is great because again that there’s a certain basic minimum that the farm owners have to do. But then beyond that just think about like just for the quality of your life. You know, you want to have that sense of freedom in your time off. So I love that program.

Iriana: Exactly. And that’s empowering too just for a person to have the freedom to go down to the river, I don’t know, to throw rocks in the river, just to watch the geese flying and landing in the river. I mean I just. Just leisure time, time time for yourself. It’s. It’s detrimental for the well being of a human being.

Lisa: Absolutely. Yeah so that’s a lot of steps in the process. And then even once they have hired workers they still have to show and prove that they’re complying with all the standards. The farm owners have to show that they’re complying with all the standards.

Iriana: It is a very taxing program for the growers. I have no doubt of that.

Lisa: Yeah. About how many H-2A visas do we typically have here in Palisade? Average?

Iriana: Anywhere around 400 to 500. It can vary depending on many things. You know some people sell their farms, some people, you know, and then climate change is the thing that, that takes place in this decision too on how many people we’re bringing.

Lisa: Sure, yeah. Some years there’s a huge crop, some years there’s less. And then right as it, the farmer is going to know what they’re go going to need each year. So that makes sense. But that’s a lot of people. 400 to 500 average.

Iriana: I believe that most of them have kind of like in their numbers down. For the amount of trees that they’re going to be taken care of. So.

Lisa: So obviously we still. There are other people working the fields too. There’d be other workers who live here. But what would the impact be to Palisade this if like the H-2A program was changed or eliminated?

Iriana: Well, I hope this program stays intact because we all depend on it. Not just growers, but the town. Like you could probably feel and see that whenever the harvest system is over, everything pretty much goes dormant. And, and so that’s how important it is. It is for the sake not just of the growers, but for everyone around this town because, and I would say the county because the economy of this area relies heavily on the agriculture. And so it is a very important thing that everyone should be taking care of and supporting.

Lisa: So how can anybody in the community who wants to get involved to help. Like what’s the best way for people to help support your mission?

Iriana: Supporting La Plaza, there’s many different ways to do it. So one way to support La Plaza is through donations. There is a site on our website, laplazapalisade.org. People can donate money through the website. Another way to support La Plaza is coming in and volunteering for us. Whether it is to help make tamales or helping the food pantry make sure the pantry is organized, clean and stock. We have what we call resource dinners during the harvest season and this is pretty much an open house. So we we have a chef volunteer that is pretty much the head of the kitchen and we love her dearly because she’s the person who actually makes the tamales, the fundraising with the tamales happen.

Lisa: Give a shout out to Chef Lynn.

Iriana: Yeah, shout out Lynn. So she makes these dinners happen too. And we feed anywhere in between 50 to 80 people at a time. And this dinners take place once a month starting in April all the way until September. And this is a very fun and enjoyable way to come to La Plaza and see La Plaza in action. Like we love our resource dinners because it feels like a party even though it is not. It’s an activity where agencies of the town that provide with other services that we don’t have. They come and present themselves in a very casual way. Very like, you know, in a very comfortable setting. Sharing a meal and having a very casual conversation over a meal about what they do and what services they provide and they can connect directly with the clients or potential clients to provide these services. And it’s just fun. It’s, it’s nice. They come many of the times the workers come right after they finish their journey and it’s nice for them to provide a very delicious dinner made by a chef. I mean it’s gourmet. It’s a gourmet meal. You know, like it’s a way to pamper them too somehow, and giving back a little bit of thank you. It’s a way to say thank you pretty much too.

Lisa: And if there’s anything specific thing because I know a lot of the times people ask, oh I have this to drop off or do you need a bike or do you need so and so.

Iriana: Well, many times we put notifications out and this usually happens through Facebook. And by the way, we have two Facebook pages. One is called La Plaza Staff and the other one is called La Plaza Palisade. And through Facebook we make notes sometimes or flyer sometimes whenever someone comes and say, I need to borrow a wheelchair. Things like that. So we get random requests at times and like for example, like a couple of weeks ago we put a notification out because there was a family who was transitioning from the Pathway shelter, family shelter to a house. And so it’s a family that had nothing. And so they came to us saying, do you think you guys can help us getting mattresses? These things or. The list was long. And we’re like, okay, we can give you some vouchers so you can get some stuff from the thrift store next door to us. And then the rest, big things like mattresses and stuff like that. We could put a notification so whomever has a spare mattress that can give to you guys. Then we just connect them that way.

Lisa: Is that usually on the La Plaza staff page or is it. Or could it be in both?

Iriana: It could be in both. We try to post on both sites. We’re still working on our how to manage all our social media stuff.

Lisa: Oh yeah, that’s like an ongoing thing.

Iriana: It’s getting better, but we’re still working on it. Since the rebranding we are still in a very growing process or journey in terms of taking care of immigrants. Like I said, the migrants are the core of La Plaza. But we need to think also around the other immigrants that live in the valley and that bring value to different industries. The hospitality industry, housekeepers, people that work in Airbnbs, motels, hotels. The construction industry relies heavily on immigrant labor. People doing roofing, cement. These kind of jobs are done by immigrants.

Lisa: And there’s a huge demand, growing demand for all of that, all of those services in the Grand Valley.

Iriana: This town is growing. Not just Palisade, but in Mesa County, Grand Junction. It’s growing faster than what we can grasp, I think and that what we can think of. So I don’t think that people, many people see Grand Junction like a small town or a big town. It is not a town anymore. It’s a city. And, hopefully we can all merge happily with knowing that growth brings diversity and that there is that diversity makes everything better, enriches everything, because it’s what brings all the nuances and all the different colors and foods and opportunities and all kinds of goodies, good things comes with, diversity. So hopefully everyone in this area embraces and gets encouraged with the growth that we’re having, because I don’t think it’s going to stop. And so we are, and we as La Plaza, we want to be the beam of light and guidance for every immigrant in the valley. And really anyone that can come and that wants to come and join us in this journey, we’re happy, we’re welcoming, we have our arms open to anybody that want to be part of us and our mission.

Lisa: Yeah. And I can personally attest to that too. Thank you so much for being here with me today and sharing the information. And I’m just looking forward to seeing you grow and seeing what else you have, what else you do with La Plaza, because I think it’s going to be really exciting.

Iriana: Yeah, we’re excited. I am very excited. I’m very happy too, where we’re at right now, despite everything, you know, it’s. I mean, there’s always gonna be shitty things happening. So you just need to focus and pivot towards what is good for the community and for yourself. Because there’s always gonna be antagonists that are gonna. Party poopers.

Lisa: I love that. And it’s so true. It’s so true.

Iriana: thanks.

Lisa: Here’s another way you can easily support La Plaza – this Saturday, April 26, Peach Street Distillery is hosting a nonprofit day, where 10% of their bar sales for the day will be donated to La Plaza.

There’s a question that Iriana poses on La Plaza’s website: “If the fruits and vegetables that we eat are a tribute of dedication and love, can we return this into tribute of grateful gratitude to those working in the American fields?” https://www.laplazapalisade.org/articles

In the Palisade of the past, there must have always been those who weren’t happy about the presence of “outsiders” in their community, but the impression that has made its way into our shared history and that is remembered today is one of gratitude. I can only assume that today’s workers will be viewed in the same way by those looking back in the future. But we can’t appreciate what we don’t know. So if you want to know more, get in touch with the awesome people at La Plaza.

The podcast’s theme music is Riverbend by Geoff Roper.

Thanks for listening. With love (and gratitude), from Palisade.

JoAnn Rasmussen, Chair of the Palisade Historical Society, takes a deep dive into how past generations of farmers and orchardists in Palisade and the Grand Valley met their ever-present need for seasonal agricultural workers.

We might sometimes feel isolated from international and national events here in Palisade, but the seasonal labor sources for this town have always been driven by outside circumstances. Listen to learn about the fascinating range of people who helped bring Palisade’s agricultural products to market.

Theme Music: Riverbend by Geoff Roper  

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Transcript:

Welcome to the Postcards From Palisade podcast. I’m your host, Lisa McNamara.

Today we’re taking a look back at a unique part of Palisade’s past with JoAnn Rasmussen, Chair of the Palisade Historical Society.

JoAnn returns to the podcast to take us on a deep dive into how past generations of farmers and orchardists in Palisade and the Grand Valley met their ever-present need for seasonal agricultural workers. Hear about who filled these roles, how and why these populations changed over time, and the impact these individuals had on Palisade.

Our conversation owes a huge debt of gratitude to the late Ron Jaynes, longtime Palisade resident, writer, and historian. To quote from Ron’s obituary: “The pride, interest and knowledge [Ron] had of the Grand Valley was vast and his nostalgia was charming and sincere.” Which you’ll soon hear for yourself! 

We also owe a big thanks to Priscilla Walker, current Vice Chair and founding chair of the Palisade Historical Society, for her wealth of knowledge about Palisade.

We might sometimes feel isolated from international and national events here in Palisade, but the seasonal labor sources for this town have always been driven by these outside circumstances.

Keep listing to learn about the fascinating range of people who have helped bring Palisade’s agricultural products to market on today’s Postcard from Palisade.

Lisa: If you could just say something as a test.

JoAnn: Testing, testing. This is JoAnn Rasmussen.

Lisa: Perfect.

JoAnn: Coming to you live from the offices of Lisa McNamara and the Postcards from Palisade.

Lisa: Love it. Yeah, so like we were saying already, both of us have voices that are a little under the weather from. For me, thanks to seasonal allergies and the lovely smoke in the air.

JoAnn: Yep.

Lisa: So we might sound a little different than last time, but really appreciate you coming back and being here again.

JoAnn: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me back. This is fun. I like to do this. Anything that’s history involved and I can do some research and impart knowledge and share things. It’s really pretty cool.

Lisa: Well, I love that. so yeah, today we’re talking about something more, a little more focused than last time. But, a couple months ago I was at a presentation that Priscilla had given to the chamber of commerce members. It was like a lunch and learn. It was all about peaches and orchards and peach farming in Palisade. And she had made this comment that was like, Palisade has always been dependent on labor from outside the Grand Valley. And that really made me want to just dig into this a little bit more and understand, you know, what that meant, why and, just to learn a little bit more about it. So I thought JoAnn would be a great person to start with.

JoAnn: Yay. Well, no, it’s a great question. So Palisade is known for its peaches and its fruit trees. And fruit trees produce one crop each year and the work is seasonal. So for most of the year you wouldn’t need all of those workers. But especially back in the late 1800s, early 1900s, they would need 4,000 to 6,000 people for two to three weeks in August. And with a population of less than a thousand, you’re not going to find the workforce here. Now to be fair, everyone who lived in Palisade and knew, knew someone that worked on the orchards, worked in the orchards, even little kids. So this is before child labor laws and all of that.

And Priscilla Walker is the founding chair of the Palisade Historical Society. She talks about her first job was being a box girl when she was, I think it was five or six. And the incredible thing to think about in an economy like that and with the workforce like that is, every single job was incredibly important. You needed to have the box girl, you needed to have the packers, you needed to have the pickers, you needed to have all of those things fall into place. And for two to three weeks in August, thousands of people were needed to do that.

Lisa: So it’s just physically impossible.

JoAnn: Physically impossible.

Lisa: Even if every single. Every single person came out and worked, you still would be short.

JoAnn: Exactly. You would still be short. When you asked me to research this, and I love researching this, and I love talking about topics that I know all the information off the top of my head, but I also love researching things. And I found a manuscript that we actually have for donation at the Palisade Historical Society that was written by a man named Ron Jaynes, and his last name is J A Y N E S. And he has since passed away. He passed away in 2016. He wrote this first manuscript in March of 2008, and then we did a special edition in October of 2010. And he talks about how there was a unique set of workers that Palisade had during a certain timeframe in the United States that most people don’t even know existed here. And I’m sorry if I’m jumping ahead in the questions that you’re going to ask me, but would you like to know more information about that?

Lisa: Yeah. What I think would be interesting is to talk about who were these people? Because I know that, like you said, there was a specific group that we’re going to talk about, but there were different groups that kind of came in and helped out over the years. And is. I think it’s really interesting how it shifted from maybe like, where did it start?

JoAnn: Right. So that’s a great question. A lot of the workers that came here were white. They were Caucasian, they were migrant workers in that they followed the different migrant streams in the United States. So, back in the late 1900s, I had a job in Des Moines, Iowa, and I worked with migrant farm workers. And there’s, a migrant stream, and you can look it up online. The migrant stream of the United States and where they travel based on what’s being planted and cultivated and then harvested. And back in the early days for Palisade, most of those workers came from other parts of the United States, and they would migrate here during peach season because they knew the work would be here, the money would be here to do that, and then they would move on and do other types of things. Now, current, modern day. Well, and even back in the from the 40s to the 60s we had migrant camps here in Palisade. And at a certain point it switched to workers from Mexico or Central America, South America. But it’s interesting because a lot of times when people hear migrant workers, they don’t think about they just don’t think about them being citizens of the United States that have just moved from place to place to pick fruit.

Lisa: Yeah. Interesting. And that’s really how it started. Right. Dustbowl. Like people started their own farms, couldn’t necessarily support themselves.

JoAnn: Right.

Lisa: And you just start moving to where the work was.

JoAnn: Right. Or you would get people that were in trades, like teachers that would have the summers off and that type of thing.

Lisa: Interesting. Okay. So then moving to this unique group.

JoAnn: Ron Jaynes grew up in Palisade, in the Palisade area. And like I said, this is his manuscript. And it’s absolutely fascinating. It’s available for donation, a $5 donation at the Palisade History Museum. And if I can plug the history museum?

Lisa: Please.

JoAnn: We are at 3740 G Road. We’re down, near the corner of Elberta and the north Frontage road for Highway 6. It’s at 3740 G Road and we’re open Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 10 to 2 or by appointment.

And we actually have a couple displays in the museum about the migrant camps that were there. The CCC camp that was there and then the CCC camp actually was converted to house German prisoners of war. And this manuscript by Ron Jaynes, it’s written really, really well. And he talks about how, in fact, if I could read this, this little section, if that’s okay. So these are the words of Ron Jaynes. It’s called pre-war years in western Colorado.

“In the 1930s and early 1940s, Western Colorado agriculture production was flourishing and the recruitment of labor to grow and harvest those crops was a significant task. There were fruit crops, tomato crops, sugar beat crops and grain crops in the Grand Valley all in need of laborers to produce bountiful crops and harvest. From Palisade to Clifton to Grand Junction and west onto the Redlands and Fruita area, there were fruit crops.

“To illustrate the intensity of just harvesting the peach crop in the Grand Valley, consider that in a full crop season, over 1 million bushels of peaches had to be harvested, packed and shipped in about a two week period. During this hectic time, one could hardly walk on the sidewalks in the town of Palisade due to the people congestion. Throughout the day and night in Palisade, Clifton and Grand Junction there were farm trucks and over the road trucks competing for the roadways, the parking spaces and loading and unloading commitments. There was a constant day and night activity of railroad steam engines assembling loaded ice cooled refrigerator cars into trains and replacing them with fresh empties. The large packing sheds often worked nearly all night long to clear their docks and unloading areas for repeating the same procedures the next day.”

Let’s see. “In the lower valley Fruita area there were sugar beets, row crops and processing tomatoes grown also on critical harvesting schedules. In the area around Delta and Montrose, sugar beets, grain crops, potatoes and processing tomatoes were grown. Cedaredge, Hotchkiss and Paonia grew cherries, peaches, pears and apples. All growers shared the common plight of needing labor to complete successful years. Adequate labor was a large problem and the need was pressing to just meet demand without any additional complications.

“A large complication was looming in the not too distant future.” And then he goes on to say, “I was born in 1940, living in Clifton on the same property where my father was born and a fourth generation member of Western Colorado Families. Just over one year later, the United States entered into World War II as a result of being attacked at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. Many of the earliest memories of my life involve World War II because the southern boundary of our family farm was also the northern boundary of the Denver and Rio Grande railroad right of way. I well remember coal fired steam engines pulling flat cars, box cars and passenger cars loaded with the essentials of war. Tanks, half tracks, artillery pieces, trucks, jeeps, munitions and troops. It now seems probable that all these trains also transported German prisoners of war while all of this seemed pretty exciting to me, and my older brother John, I best remember the tears coming into the eyes of our mother with each troop train that passed.”

Lisa: That’s gonna choke me up too.

JoAnn: And now JoAnn is teary, so.

Lisa: Oh, no. that’s really interesting. Like, yeah, different experiences. A kid versus the parent. Picturing her kids there.

JoAnn: The adult. Yeah so there were.

Lisa: We can take a minute.

JoAnn: Take a break? No, it’s fine.

Lisa: It’s really sad.

JoAnn: yeah, so. And he writes really well and it talks about how, “history relates that 1943 was a significant year in the events of World War II, with the German war machine encountering great resistance to their once dominating advances. Stalingrad was surrendered to the Russians and Rommel’s troops in North Africa were defeated by the Allies. For the most part, Russia held all of their German captives.” And so it goes on to talk about. He talks about how the German prisoners of war, let’s see here. He talks about, “Over 450,000 prisoners of war were transported and placed into about 500 separately located camps across the United States. 15,000 POWs were brought into Colorado and located at three principal base camps located near Greeley, Colorado Springs and Trinidad, with 47 satellite camp locations across the state.

“About 1,250 POWs drawn from those were quartered at the Trinidad camp were brought into three Mesa county satellite camps, one in Delta, one in Montrose, and one in Palisade,” which is where modern day Riverbend Park is, which was on the eastern end of the park. And there’s really no remnants that you can see. And I brought some pictures, to show you. They were buildings that were put up and then dismantled and taken away. And the sides of them were canvas, so they weren’t quite tents and they weren’t yurts, but they looked like buildings. And I can show you. I can show you that if you were to look at them from the aerial photos, they just look like really long barracks and buildings, but they were kind of made of canvas with a wood floor and a regular roof.

Lisa: So it wasn’t. They weren’t necessarily moving into the CCC camp that was already existing. Sounds like.

JoAnn: Right

Lisa: okay, so it was a separate thing.

JoAnn: Because already that had already closed by the time, you know, by the time the war started. And he also talks about, so this is an interesting thing to visualize if you’re familiar with Palisade and what Palisade looks like. So, “in 1944, on a warm August Sunday between 11 and 11:30am, a passenger train rolled into a stop at the railroad depot in Palisade, an estimated 80 US Army personnel were the first to exit the train. Then an approximate count of 250 German prisoners of war disembarked and lined up four abreast. Flanked by the army personnel, the march began on Second Street to Main Street, then south toward Eighth Street. The sidewalks were lined with anticipating townsfolk of all ages, and the army guards were closing each intersection as the marching column proceeded.

“Sitting at the curb on the corner of Main Street and Third Street, watching the passing POWs, was teenager George Distefano, along with his pals Jim Vancil, Johnny Spangler and Pete Trujillo. George recalls that as the POWs marched, many were singing reportedly at the top of their lungs, while quite a few were quiet and appearing to be very uncertain as to their fate. George cannot explain why this would be so memorable to him as he tells of his simple and distinct memory of a POW looking to the side and studying a local man taking a drink of water from the outside fountain across from the Palisade Bank.

“As the POW newcomers to town marched along, a unique event, unlikely ever to be repeated was now cast into our western Colorado and local history. Replication of this same experience was being etched into the historical account of many locations across the width and length of the entire United States. Sunday services were being held at the Palisade Baptist Church with windows opened wide to chase a breeze through the church, and the marching column passed directly alongside and beneath those windows. Both Sharon Keeney (Wertz) and Leroy Wertz were in attendance. Both reported that the Germans were singing loudly. Both reported that services were delayed, and both told of how long the delays seemed to be after the powerful singing of the POWs had dimmed and the services were continued.

“Harry C. Talbott, about 10 years of age, was also in attendance at the Baptist church. Recalling the interruption of services, Harry described his bewilderment at watching the POWs marching in goosestep, the classic German military march step that he had witnessed for the very first time. The column of POWs and Army personnel proceeded to 8th Street, then toward the river bottom land where the once CCC camp, now suddenly a German prisoner of war camp, was located.”

And then, it says, “as reported by Harold Zimmerman in his article, ‘Harvesting Peaches with German Prisoners of War,’ printed in Mesa State College’s Journal of the Western Slope, sometime around 1980, the structures and grounds had not been maintained and had not been prepared for the POW occupancy. The POWs immediately began the task and by nightfall the facility was habitable.”

Lisa: Wow, that’s amazing.

JoAnn: they built it.

Lisa: Yeah. So 250 people came in.

JoAnn: They specifically came to help with harvest because our men were over there fighting and or had been captured. These men were prisoners of war and we needed labor. So they, they were sent here.

Lisa: And these are just regular people, right? These are just like, a regular everyday person.

JoAnn: They are so. Yeah. In fact, he talks some more in the manuscript about how a lot of them were teenagers. Teenagers, early 20s. Because by the time. By the point of time in the war when this was, the older men had been killed.

Lisa: Wow.

JoAnn: And so these were the men who were forced to fight for their country to do what they were doing. They weren’t the masterminds of the war. They weren’t. They weren’t the violent offenders. They weren’t. Not that…

Lisa: anybody in a war is somewhat violent.

JoAnn: but you know what I mean, they were. They were the equivalent of our guys that were captured and being held over there. And there’s another really funny. A really funny story. Oh. But before I get to that, they were actually paid. The POWs were paid.

Lisa: Oh really?

JoAnn: So, “one of the articles of the Geneva convention allowed that POWs could be utilized as labor source for the hosting country with an exception noting that officers could not be forced to do labor but at their discretion could work if they chose. The standard pay for a POW day of labor was 80 cents. payable by the United States government in either ‘canteen script’ or into individual savings accounts. The United States government was then to be compensated by the growers or employers at a rate commensurate to the prevailing pay rate for the job function.” And so they would be paying. They would be paying the people who came anyway. So in essence they’re paying the POWs to work. But it’s going through the United States government for them paying the POWs to work.

Lisa: Okay. So they weren’t paying in addition.

JoAnn: They weren’t paying in addition.

Lisa: Okay.

JoAnn: They were paying what they would have normally paid.

Lisa: what’s 80 cents then. What do you think that would be now?

JoAnn: I don’t know. I would have to look that up.

Lisa: I feel like I want to Google that What year was that? I want to Google it real quick.

JoAnn: So this would be 1944, I think.

Lisa: 1944 today. Live Google.

JoAnn: Yeah, 1944. We’ll ask the oracle.

Lisa: $14.50.

JoAnn: A day.

Lisa: Yeah, a day. Not a lot of money.

JoAnn: Not a lot of money. But better than nothing. And when you think of prisoners of war, you think of, you know, people in a chain breaking rocks with, you know, at that time. And they were treated really well. They really were treated. They were treated well. So this section talks a little bit more about the payment. So, “Larry Clark, then a teenager, was involved with his family fruit harvest and reports that they did provide some additional lessons in the way of our US economy by the use of incentives.

“Larry stated that their POW workers were mandated to pick a minimum of 70 bushels of peaches daily, for which they were paid the standard rate of 80 cents per day. If a POW exceeded the 70 bushels per day required, he could earn, paid directly to him, an additional 5 cents per bushel picked. Another twist of the system involved the hiring of the army guard to work in the shed and dump peaches onto the grader…” Because all of these were things that you would have to do in the harvest, right? You’ve got, you’ve got the pickers, and then you have to. You put them on a grader, which then decides, you know, the sizes.

Lisa: yeah, sorts out based on sizing.

JoAnn: “…starting them along their way to the sorting and packing process. This, of course, required that the guard would virtually abandon his army duties. But the POWs, with the incentive of earning bonuses themselves, had little reason to even miss the guards.” So they’re working as fast as they can, trying to pick the peaches so that they can earn the extra 5 cents a bushel.

And then, let’s see, there’s this. So this, I think, is a funny little anecdote that he talks about. so these army guards weren’t necessarily from here either. The army guards are coming, you know, coming from wherever they had been stationed. And so they talk about. He talks about an army guard who happened to be a farm boy from Kansas. And let’s see, he talks about how, “at the East Orchard Mesa Peach Ranch…” we’ve talked about peach ranches. What I think peach ranches remind me of…little peaches on legs!

Lisa: Little peaches with legs!

JoAnn: Look at the little critters. Yes. let’s see. “At the East Orchard Mesa Peach Ranch of Elmer Rice, about 25 POW pickers were guarded by a single army guard who happened to be a farm boy from Kansas. Two of Elmer’s sons, Jerry and Mickey, relate that things went well in part because of the POW’s presence and in part because the crop was looking good and prospects were positive. Jerry was working around the packing shed and Mickey drove the tractor between the operations area and the orchard. Jerry reports that Mickey was ‘always an inquisitive and curious boy and he had a real interest in the rifle carried by the army guard.’

It seems that the Kansas farm boy army guard was homesick for some farm work. So he proposed that Mickey could play with the rifle if Mickey would let him drive the tractor. A deal was made. The army guard immediately took off on the tractor and Mickey immediately began to disassemble the rifle, numerous times. Jerry related that he was very gratified that nothing out of the ordinary happened during the duration of that trade because, quote, the guard who would have had to use the rifle was driving all around the property and orchard while the 10 year old boy with the rifle always had it broken down into parts.”

Lisa: That’s so funny. That’s amazing.

JoAnn: And then another thing they talk about that I didn’t think about because I didn’t grow up around picking peaches and that type of thing. I grew up around tasseling corn and all of that which has its own, its own set of challenges. But they talked about how the prisoners of war like to work without their shirts on. And the prominent variety of peach was the standard Elberta. And if you’re familiar with the Palisade area, Elberta, the name, the name of one of the major streets here is named after that peach. “It was well known as an especially fuzzy variety,”

Lisa: I’m itching already, I’m sorry.

JoAnn: “causing a notable and uncomfortable amount of scratching and itching.”

Lisa: I can feel it.

JoAnn: “There are many experienced peach pickers who shudder at this mention. And I among them, as I understand, there were many quick dips in the canals which could only temporarily assist with the fuzz discomfort factor. When asked if there were any problems with the POW labor or attitude, they replied, none. And it’s a good thing because the guards spent a great deal of their time in the packing shed trying to get acquainted with the girls who did the packing.”

Lisa: I mean, can you imagine you’re going from like warfare, that you were forced to do, to like come to Palisade. And it must have felt like quite the. I mean it must have felt like a good trade

JoAnn: right?

Lisa: If you had to do something.

JoAnn: I can only, I can only imagine the uncertainty that they felt on, you know, so many trains to get here. And then you get here and you’re like, what what is this? How are we even going to be treated? And then to be treated well. And there are people who don’t even know that this happened in Palisade, that they were here. And then you’ve got, a faction of people that hear this happened and assumed that they weren’t treated well. And it’s like. But that’s not true. They really were treated well, if anything, for that karmic sense of our guys are over there.

Lisa: Exactly.

JoAnn: And we would hope that they’re being treated with respect, even though they were fighting for different sides. So it’s just amazing. In fact, one of those about just, the uncertainty of where they were coming. And there are various versions of this story, but it all boils down to there were guys that tried to escape and they made it as far as Loma or Mack and thought they’d made it to California because they didn’t understand the geography of the United States, how vast it is compared to where they’re coming from. You know, over there, where if you’re on a train for however long, you’re going to get a little farther. Right. Or at least not farther, but into a different country.

Lisa: Sure.

JoAnn: then one other little story I want to share that doesn’t have really anything to do with this, but it is fascinating to me. Again, these are the words of Ron Jaynes. “This was the first time in my life that I had my first memory of peanut butter. Dad brought home a glass 1 quart jar, unlabeled, as I recall, of peanut butter. The contents were separated with the top third being oil and the bottom two thirds being solid. To prepare it for eating, one had to stir the contents until it was the same consistency throughout. I do remember that it was good in a sandwich alone, but superb with some of Mom’s peach marmalade or jellies was added. Looking back, I now realize that jar was government issued, intended for the POWs. In my father’s defense, I contend that the statute of limitations has expired.”

And then it says, “with the surrender of Germany and United States and allies moving rapidly to locate and free all Allied forces who were captured and held in enemy prison camps, not only was it a glorious event for all who regained their freedom, their families and their nations, it also allowed the United States government opportunity to revisit the standards by which we provided for those captured enemy troops we still held. The featured standards to encourage our enemies to treat our soldiers being held prisoner in equivalent manner as we treated theirs began an evolution and the availability of certain foods decreased with some and increased with others. In the words of one unknown US-held German prisoner of war, ‘we were suddenly hit by an avalanche of peanut butter.’”

And then he talks about how his grandfather, John Walker, “took his vacation during the peach harvest so that he could come from eastern Colorado and drive the team of horses to haul in the pack fruit. And that he was raised in the Gunnison area and as a young man worked as a cow hand and a ranch hand and drove 4 team hitch ore wagons from the mines above the Aspen area into town and delivered the silver ore to the mill. And he was reveling in his past as he drove the team hauling our peaches.”

And that brings up another point. A lot of the other workers that they would have in town were miners. So they would be in the mines in the winter when the need for coal was greatest here in Palisade, because Palisade had about 15 mines in the BookCliffs. The north you know the northern palisades around. Around here. So miners would work with the peaches as well. But again, like we talked about, there weren’t 4,000 people in the valley to do that.

Lisa: Even with the 250. 250 German POWs, that still doesn’t really even scratch the need. Right. So they must have still had others that they needed to try to pull in during that time, or did they just make it work with what they had?

JoAnn: I still think they pulled in people from elsewhere. I mean, that was just, you know, the 250 people, the POWs. But then you would have, if they hadn’t been called to war, you know, those families would be. Would be migrating here and doing that.

Lisa: so you’d still have internal migrants. Going back to the German POWs, did you, have you heard of anybody who stayed here or who came back? Like did anybody marry any local girl or anything like that?

JoAnn: I think there was, there was one that got married. I don’t have that information. And then we did get. We have some copies of some letters at the, at the history museum of German POWs that wrote later and were asking to be sponsored because they love. They loved it here so much. And then there was Ron Jaynes does mention one that escaped and finally came forward decades later.

Lisa: Oh wow. Was just hiding out locally?

JoAnn: According to the manuscript. Yes. So but again if you could blend in, you know, blend into society.

Lisa: What do we know about the local residents’ reaction to hosting a POW camp here?

JoAnn: As far as I know they were welcomed and he does talk about there were some women with the church groups that made sure that they were fed well and all of that. And again some of that is with the Geneva Convention like it was required. And honestly having people come and pick your peaches has been such an integral part who Palisade is that they were just as welcoming to the POWs being an extra set of hands to pick as they are to all the migrants that come now. And as you know, I mean you live here. We’re very welcoming and open to those workers because it’s such an important part of the process.

Lisa: Can’t happen without them.

JoAnn: No, it really can’t. And I know you had asked about some of the, the migrant cabins that are on the western side.

Lisa: Yeah. So that, so that’s different. I’m learning right now. It’s different.

JoAnn: It’s different. Yeah.

Lisa: Interesting. Okay, so that was more of the old CCC camp or like. Or what? No, you tell me.

JoAnn: So where the POWs were, that was on the eastern side. That’s where the CCC workers came. And those workers also helped pick peaches when they were, you know, when that was the season for that. They helped line the canals with the cement. They also helped build the facilities up at Land’s End. So you’ve got the bathroom, the restrooms up there and you’ve got that structure that’s up there. They helped build that. They helped build the roads at the monument. So you know they helped all around the area. And so when they were trying to figure out what to do, you know we’ve got these able bodied men who can help and Palisade has a need where would we put them? And so it was like oh we’ll put them where the CCC camp was. That’s what we’ll do. So that was on the eastern end. And then like I said, those were more mobile, mobile facilities. So those were just dismantled and or destroyed at the end of that.

Lisa: So just temporary housing.

JoAnn: Just temporary housing

Lisa: like basic shelter over the summer.

JoAnn: Right. Then on the western side, I think there were about 200 of them. 200 cabins and I’m using that term loosely. It looks like a little shed and I think Carboy actually has one on property that you can see and there are some others that are located, you know, around.

Lisa: I think that Restoration has a couple but yeah Carboy’s you can actually walk into because they use it as a band stage.

JoAnn: Yeah you can see. And it again there were 200 of them down there. And then they also had they had a clinic that worked down there. They had a community area, they had a bathhouse. They had all of, all of that type of thing because they’re very basic shelter.

Lisa: like running water or no?

JoAnn: No, no running water. They were just the cabins on those slabs. So if you’re hiking out there, if you are on the western side of Riverbend, there is a sign out there that is in desperate need of being redone.

Lisa: Yeah. If anybody wants to sponsor something.

JoAnn: Gee. Yes. I wonder what. Yeah, I wonder who we could talk to about that. So it is on our radar. I don’t even know that it’s the historical society’s responsibility necessarily for that

Lisa: Yeah but somebody could donate to fund it!

JoAnn: But somebody could get that going. But Yeah. So the sign definitely needs to be fixed up and then you can see the cement platforms that are. That are still in there. For people who were truly migratory in that they didn’t have a permanent home, it’s better than living in your car. And the community around that. I can only imagine how wonderful that community was. I mean they’re working incredibly hard, incredibly long hours. They’re there to get a job done and. But you’ve got that sense of community where you’re living in all of those and you’ve got little kids so you’ve got your whole family is there sometimes too. And that’s a little different with how some of the migrant workers are now. Some of the migrant workers, they come up here without their families and they send their money back. This. The whole family would travel. So there were people who would watch the little kids during the day if you weren’t, if you weren’t quote old enough to help.

Lisa: Yeah so if you were like 4? 3?

JoAnn: And then child labor laws kind of came in, you know, ruined everything. No, just kidding. This is recorded. I should be careful when I say I’m kidding. Child labor laws are very important. She says while laughing. But yeah, and so those are, those are no longer there.

Lisa: So that. So the west end of the park was truly a camp for migratory workers.

JoAnn: Yes.

Lisa: It wasn’t. They didn’t. It wasn’t mixed. It wasn’t like, you know, they didn’t use the same camp or whatever. That’s so interesting. I did not realize that. I thought it was all in the same place.

JoAnn: Yeah. And like you said, there’s no running water, but with that there. These sheds are very basic. So it wouldn’t be hospitable in the winter. Like you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t do that. And now every season is a little different. So. And we have a chart at the Palisade History Museum that shows how many carloads, you know, train carloads of peaches were sent out. And you can tell based on the weather and kind of what happened during which season.

So some seasons they wouldn’t need 6,000 workers for two weeks because let’s say it was a smaller. It was a smaller season. So you could stretch. You could use the same amount of workers to prune and this and that. And it could be stretched over the season, but in the bumper crop years. I mean imagine, imagine 3,000 people in Palisade and it not. I mean we have the farmers market and we have things like that that bring a lot of people to town. But imagine that every day all day.

In fact, that’s one of the reasons why the public restroom is where it is. So that public restroom was built in the 40s specifically because we had so many migrant workers coming through that you needed a place for them to do that. So that, so the restrooms, those have been there since the 40s.

Lisa: Interesting.

JoAnn: They’ve been revamped.

Lisa: so yeah. Could people just get off the train right there?

JoAnn: Well, we had a stop. Yes.

Lisa: Right. So there was a station, right?

JoAnn: Yep. Yeah. So the, the depot is where those long white buildings are now for the for the train. All the train stuff. We’ve got some pictures of all of that at the historical society too. Yeah, Palisade was a stop. So, yeah, that’s where they. When he was talking about the German prisoners of war, they would have gotten off there. Right there kind of by, you know, Second and Main-ish.

Lisa: Then so going back to the migrant park. So we know the CCC camp which turned into the German POW Camp. We know why that ended and when. but for the migrant portion of the housing, when did that stop being needed and why? Because obviously it’s not still there today.

JoAnn: Right. So I will give a shout out to Priscilla Walker. She’s the founding chair of the Palisade Historical Society. I reached out to her when I was researching this because she knows a lot of this information. And like I said, I’m just learning all of this. I’m researching all of this too. So let’s see. we were talking about. We talked a little bit about the child labor laws, right? So, and that kind of all feeds into when all of this stuff kind of started to shift.

So, “before the child labor laws were changed, most teenagers worked in the harvest to earn spending money for the things their parents did not want to buy for them. And the schools even delayed starting when the harvests were late, as teenagers from all over the valley would come to Palisade to earn the spending money. In the 60s, that stopped as they passed a law that fruit could not be shipped interstate if kids were not in school during harvest.”

So now you’ve taken some of your labor, you’ve taken away some of your workforce. So, “kids who didn’t work for their parents orchard would go to school and then work in the packing sheds until 10 or 11 at night.” So they would still work. “Fruit must be shipped at just the right time to arrive at stores as they ripen. And the harvest dates change with every variety and weather conditions.”

And like I had mentioned, “in the first half of the 20th century, most of the harvest workers were white. We have information in the museum about a book written, about the Depression where the family was in Gunnison in 1933 and heard that Palisade needed workers and came here for the harvest. And then they lived in the area until World War II began. And we’ve got photos and information from a woman whose parents were teachers.” Like we mentioned, that type of migrant work.

“The marketing order passed in 1923, established the Peach Board of Control, which also advertised for harvest workers and helped ensure a supply. The migrant labor camp at the west end of Riverbend was built in 1941 with 200 cabins to house seasonal labor and their families. In 1943, it housed a population of more than 800. In addition to the cabins, there was the basketball court, horseshoe pits, clinic, bathhouse, community center. And then local physicians offered free health care.” So, “for truly migrant workers who otherwise would be living in their cars or tents, this was a better place.” And again, I mentioned it included daycare for the young children. “And churches readily offered help, to the residents and their families. Fruit grower wives, including Dorothy Power, Margaret Talbot, Ruby Toothaker, started the child and migrant services, which continue to operate today as La Plaza.”

“In 1961, the labor camp was closed by the federal government, forcing growers to find alternative housing for increasingly hard to find workers. A number of cabins were bought by growers and moved onto their property to house the workers they still needed, because they would no longer have access to the migrant camp housing and its benefits.”

Lisa: Do we know why the federal government mandated it to be closed?

JoAnn: I don’t know for sure, but if I had to guess, I mean, you’ve got 200 cabins there. You don’t have running water. You don’t, I mean, I don’t know what standards shifted.

Lisa: Interesting.

JoAnn: And, and then it kind of fell back onto the growers to provide that housing.

Lisa: So you went from kind of like a shared pool of resources to every individual farmer has to provide their own housing for their own workers in the 60s.

JoAnn: Right. Along that same time is when. So we had like the United Fruit Growers association, we had those farmers co-ops that would deal with the marketing of the fruit and the shipping of the fruit and all of that. And the farmers would, or the orchard. The orchardists would buy into that program, like how a normal farmers co-op works. Because when you’re a grower, you want to focus on what your talent is.

Lisa: Sure, yeah.

JoAnn: Right? A fantastic grower may not be the best marketer. Right. And so Palisade was really kind of known for that, having that community, that co-op type way of doing things. So you’ve got the co-ops, you’ve got the place where the migrant workers can stay. You’ve got, you know, all of this kind of happening as a community. And then in the 60s, 70s, things just kind of started to split out and it’s like, well, no, now there’s no longer the United Fruit Growers association. There’s no longer the co-op. So now the grower is responsible for. And we no longer ship them by rail from Palisade.

Lisa: Right, and there’s no longer a station here.

JoAnn: So now, now the grower has to figure out how am I going to get my workers, how am I going to house my workers, how am I going to market my fruit, how am I going to transport my fruit, how, how am I going to do of that? And there’s pro, there’s pros and cons to all of that. If you, if you were a grower that wants to be responsible for all of that, and can really be successful at that, that’s fantastic. And if you’re a grower who can’t, then that, that’s a different type of challenge.

Lisa: I was curious about that whole thing too. Like why did the co-ops end? Almost like with a shift in societal structure that I don’t know enough to even talk about, but seems like that was part of the reasoning for why everything started to change here.

JoAnn: Right. And with anything. And I haven’t really researched that. I’ve heard people talk about it and I’ve heard people, having differing views talk about it. And so you always get, “well, this is why they did it.” And then you’re talking to someone else, “No, this is why they did it.” It’s like, well, they did it, you know, I mean it came to an end.

Lisa: What haven’t I asked you about? You hit on a lot of my questions already just in the normal course of our conversation.

JoAnn: Because I babble on and on.

Lisa: No, because you’re prepared.

JoAnn: Well, I mean the CCC camp was built in 1935. It’s amazing to think about how Palisade has always dealt with thousands of people for short amounts of time. And because sometimes I think people think that’s a new thing

Lisa: with festivals

JoAnn: the festivals and all of that. And it isn’t a new thing. It’s been a thing forever. And that’s good and bad. We obviously need to address, to address some issues, but having an influx of people has always been a challenge. Now, granted, the workers are here and they’re doing a specific task, and then it’s done. But, that’s interesting to me, and I was absolutely fascinated to find out that there was a German prisoner of war camp here. And when you hear that, like, the things you think in your head when you first hear that are different than what the reality was.

Lisa: It’s not like a prison.

JoAnn: Right. Right. And then when you pick it apart, you’re like, well, why did I think that? Like, it would be just the same as if I found out that a whole group of Palisade guys were kept on a farm in Germany or wherever, you know, working on a farm. And you would hope that they would be treated well and not all. Not all prisoners were treated well and not all, you know, all of that.

Lisa: Where did they go when they weren’t here? Were they just moved around to different parts of the country where needed?

JoAnn: They were just moved around. Yeah. Where needed. Because again, with that migrant stream. So you’ve got, you know, apples are picked on a different schedule, cabbages are picked on a different schedule. These are like, everything is kind of picked on a different growing season. And then where were they when they weren’t doing that? I don’t know. That. I have no idea.

Lisa: What is this, historic Palisade coloring book?

JoAnn: Oh, yes. Okay. So this is a book that all second graders at Taylor Elementary get. And then, usually in the spring, we go and we do a presentation for them. So we show them, like, these are what the stilts look like. And this is really what coal is and that type of thing. This is interesting because Ron Jaynes did most of the drawings for this book. So he never considered himself to be an artist,

Lisa: I disagree!

JoAnn: despite the fact that these are really, really good. He considered himself to be a doodler. He liked to doodle. So his doodles are all through this book. And. And he talks about. So it’s a book to help elementary school kids understand kind of the history of Palisade and kind of what goes into that. And so it shows, you know, a man on stilts pruning, and he drew that. That’s by Ron Jaynes. And then you’ve got the picking sack. Oh, that’s another funny story that he has in his manuscript trying to teach the German prisoners of war how to use. So the peach packing sack was actually invented in Palisade by George W. Bowman, who happens to be Priscilla Walker’s grandfather.

Lisa: Oh cool.

JoAnn: We have a copy of the patent at the history museum. He designed this peach packing sack to gently hold the peaches while you’re picking. And he designed it when he got the idea when he was watching his wife pick peaches with her apron. She’d pull up her apron and she would put peaches in. And so you put straps around your neck and then these unclip and then it kind of opens up like a tube, so to speak, and you can gently release the peaches into your basket or your barrel. Obviously I did not want to read the whole thing because that would be boring.

Lisa: Well, we have to give people an incentive to come in and buy that.

JoAnn: I know, I can’t find it right now. But he, said, he said basically “they handed out the peach packing sacks just assuming they would know how to put it on. Some of them put them on like a skirt because they’re open when the bottom clips up.” People listening, are like, what are you talking about? It’s like it looks like a big bag that you’ve clipped up the ends, but it’s all open when you, unclip it, then the peaches can fall through into whatever you’re doing. So, “some of them put them on like a skirt. Some of them were trying, like they were just trying to figure it out. When they finally figured it out was it was absolutely hilarious.”

Lisa: I can see trying to wear that as a belt too around your neck, maybe that happens.

JoAnn: But it leaves your hands free so that you can pick. And a lot of times people see the stilts and they think people picked on stilts and they really didn’t. They, they did more pruning on stilts because you need to prune the whole tree. You don’t have to, you don’t have to get down every few minutes and empty your peach, your peach sack. So you had to be kind of more, more mobile. And he has a picture of people making boxes by hand. He’s got a fruit picker. And these are available too, for a donation at the museum. And then we give them to. So a, generous donation has allowed us to give them to Taylor Elementary students so that they can use this in their. Their local Palisade history section.

Lisa: It’s really just fascinating to think about. I mean as you know, think about all the people we’ve been here in the past and all the ways that people have had to be creative to just get the job done and get the harvest done.

JoAnn: And it’s intense. And I grew up on a farm, so I understand that part of it. It’s different. It’s different than you know, peach packing, but it’s the same idea that you are up sometimes before the sun, you’re working all day and you have this timeline that has been given to you by Mother Nature. Like you just. You have to get it done and you have to get it done in the time that you have and. Yeah. And I can’t imagine 6,000 people here every day, all day, all night, for even, you know, two or three weeks in August.

Lisa: Oh, I did think of something else though, that reminds me. So when I was reading some of the stories in the Palisade Tribune, which is available on the website.

JoAnn: Yes.

Lisa: Which you can plug. Real quick.

JoAnn: Oh yes, our Palisade. Real quick. Oh dear. Can I do real quick. Our Palisade Tribune was our newspaper of record from June 1903 until they ceased publishing March of 2014. So the Palisade Historical Society has been digitizing the physical copies, with Colorado Historic newspapers collection through the Colorado State Library. And those are being put in a free searchable database, which is a gigantic time suck. I mean wonderful resource for researching. But, Yes. So what about your?

Lisa: Well, so when I got into a total rabbit hole looking at articles about the CCC camps and it seemed like there, so to your point of having 6,000 people in town. There were a lot of things that the heads of the camp or different people in town would organize different events for people. So like dances, something like there is an event set up for the ladies to go visit the CCC camp and like the women of town.

JoAnn: Oh, dear.

Lisa: And just like you know tour it and.

JoAnn: Right. Well, it, in his manuscript, he talks about how, you know, an officer finds a wife or that type of thing. Because they weren’t just there. I mean, they were there to see the soldiers too. You know, everybody working.

Lisa: Everybody was curious. Right. It seemed like so I wonder if there were. Do we know anything about from the CCC time, if anybody from that era kind of stayed here and settled and became part of the community.

JoAnn: Became part of the community that I don’t know. That I don’t know specifically.

Lisa: it was long enough ago.

JoAnn: And I don’t know. I don’t even know exactly where all those workers came from either. They could have been. Some of them could have even been local already.

Lisa: Just from reading yeah, from. From reading the stories. It just sounds like they came from. It just seemed like such an effort to staff these camps or, you know, populate them and then move them around the country too, because they also moved around the country. So, they would say, oh, the boys from. You know, in the old language of the article. The boys from Nebraska are going to be coming this week and let’s welcome them.

JoAnn: Right.

Lisa: And then there’s. Then everybody was sad when they were leaving. They’d be like, oh, we miss their smiling faces. They wrote us, you know, they wrote Mrs. Blah Blah Blah a letter and said they really miss her or just like it was really adorable.

JoAnn: Right. Well, it goes back to that sense of community too.

Lisa: Right.

JoAnn: You know, you’ve got your locals, but then you’re also welcoming people that are here to do a job. They’re here and now you’re part of Palisade.

Lisa: Right.

JoAnn: And then you’ll move on. But you always take that little part of Palisade with you.

Lisa: That’s. That’s a really beautiful note to wrap it up on, I think. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. I appreciate Priscilla and Mr. Jaynes, a definitely invaluable contributor to this conversation. So thank you so much.

JoAnn: No, thank you so much for having me.

Lisa: If you’re interested in learning more about the history of seasonal agricultural workers in Palisade and the Grand Valley, visit the Palisade History Museum, where you can also find copies of ‘Colorado Peaches and German Prisoners of War’ by Ron Jaynes, which was written in 2008 based on interviews Ron conducted of residents who worked with German Prisoners of War in the summers of 1944 and 1945. There you can also find copies of the ‘Historic Palisade Coloring Book.’ Both are available for suggested donations of $5 each. 

In the next episode, I’ll be talking with Iriana Medina, Executive Director of La Plaza Palisade, about how the H-2A visa program helps provide the seasonal agricultural labor to meet the needs of today’s farmers, orchardists, and grape growers. That episode will be out in two weeks.

Before we go, here’s a bonus story from JoAnn, courtesy of Ron Jaynes’ publication:

JoAnn: And then he talks about the very first time he rode in a Jeep and that was August of 45. He “was nearing five years of age and there were eight German prisoners of war out in the Clifton orchard picking the peaches. While our mom was occupied with the efforts of harvest and packing our crop, my brother John and I had a few tasks assigned and I am positive that John tended to his with far more enthusiasm than I dedicated to mine. As would have been quite typical for me, staying out of the way, not being underfoot and staying low profile was my ultimate goal, not doing those meaningless little tasks. This also allowed me more time to take notes on other events, like the army jeep with a white star on the hood which drove into the yard daily. Driven by an officer, it went past the packing shed and out into the orchard. Soon it would return, zip past the packing shed and be gone. I decided that I wanted a ride in that Jeep.

“Not exactly in keeping with my low profile philosophy, but the variety of this idea seemed to be acceptable to me. Since the only place the jeep stopped was out in our orchard, that would be where my dream ride had to start. The following day, as I anticipated and expected, the Jeep came into the yard and drove out into the orchard. I ran through the middle of the orchard and into the midst of the POW pickers. Some picking from six foot ladders, some picking from the ground. I was first noticed by the POWs and recall their grins and some jabber amongst themselves. Then I was noticed by the guard. The guard shouldered his rifle on its sling and walked along the peach rows to reach me, picked me up and carried me out of the orchard into the Jeep, sitting me into the passenger seat.

“I sat alone in the Jeep for a short period of time, but soon we were on our way over the orchard trail that I followed daily on foot alongside the head ditch and passed about 30 rows of peach trees approaching the plum tree, turning the corner at the big tree with the tire swing, past the horse corral, the old cellar where Grandma Jaynes kept the smelly apple vinegar, past the smokehouse where the aroma of smoke cured meat lingered year round and the garage, a corn crib to the barn and packing shed, where for the first time I can recall that army Jeep stopped in the yard.

“A vivid memory of this ride was the amount of dust that swirled around us as we traversed the orchard trail, a ride of about 300 yards, and in not much more than three minutes, my mission accomplished. I do not remember what was particularly thrilling, and possibly I was interested in the motorized vehicle running in the orchard because we still carried our crop out of the orchard with a wagon and a team of horses driven mostly by our Grandfather Walker. Looking back indicates that I was probably more excited with the planning of my ride than I was in experiencing it. I didn’t get to honk the horn or touch the steering wheel or the gear shift or examine the carbine mounted on the dash, or even slap the spare tire and gas can hung on the back. At the end of the ride, the driver and my mom had a short conversation, But I do not recall that I was even remotely in trouble for my actions. At any rate, I guess my thirst for a Jeep ride was quenched and I did not try it again.”

Lisa: The podcast’s theme music is Riverbend by Geoff Roper.

Thanks for listening. With love, from Palisade.

For Julia Coffey, Farm Director at Early Morning Orchard in Palisade, her dream job on a farm isn’t really about farming. Learn what it’s really about – and then go visit the farm! They’re located at 3694 G 4/10 Road in Palisade and at earlymorningorchard.com.    

Theme Music: Riverbend by Geoff Roper    

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Transcript:

Welcome to the Postcards From Palisade podcast. I’m your host, Lisa McNamara. Palisade is most famous for its peaches, but there’s so much more happening in our little town. Join me as I chat with our community members to learn how they are making Palisade a great place to live and visit.

Today, I’m talking with Julia Coffey, Farm Director at Early Morning Orchard in Palisade, about seeds, farm life, her dream job, and finding happiness here. For Julia, her job on a farm isn’t really about farming. Learn what it’s all about on today’s Postcards From Palisade.

Lisa: Thank you so much for being here today and spending some time with me talking about Early Morning Orchard.

Julia: Yeah, I’m super thrilled to be here. Thanks for inviting me. my name is Julia Coffey and I am the director at Early Morning Orchard, which is a four season vegetable farm and stone fruit orchard. So we do a little bit of everything.

Lisa: And where is Early Morning Orchard located?

Julia: Ah, okay, so it’s on G and 4/10, just like half a mile down to the west. The farm is owned by Skip Doty and he is probably a known name in Palisade. He’s been around for a long time. And let’s see, I think that he started his operation in the early 2000s. and then it’s been a farm and an orchard ever since then. And we’ve done all kinds of different attempts at that business model.

Lisa: That’s cool. It’s crazy to think that early 2000s is over 20 years ago.

Julia: It seems just like yesterday.

Lisa: It does.

Julia: a peak for me.

Lisa: but yeah so that’s a long record of farming in this area.

Julia: Yeah. And so recently I think there’s been, a real interest in regenerative farming practices. Like, it’s popular, it’s trendy, but it’s also very important. And our former farm manager and farm director were very focused on those types of practices which take time. So you can’t just be regenerative overnight. It really takes a lot of methodical planning and patience. For instance, moving away from something like tilling, which is turning the earth over really aggressively, does have a significant impact on the microbiome of the soil and all kinds of living organisms. And it can deteriorate the quality of soil. So when we say that we grow responsibly at Early Morning Orchard, a lot of the things that we think about orient around soil health. That also goes with pest management. It goes with crop rotation to protect the soil from diseases, from blight, from, overuse. It does help to protect the soil in the off season. So you have a cover crop and then it puts nutrients back in the soil. Not, disturbing too much of the upper layer. And so when you’re working with the soil and being cognizant that everything below you really matters and then rotating crops so that you can mitigate disease and you can have something like a really heavy feeder be replaced by something that fixes nitrogen back into the ground. We do a lot of composting, and that’s kind of shifted over the years. We do not have it dialed in 100%, but that’s part of our process to add nutrients back into the soil. yeah, there’s a lot of different things. You know, we used to have a livestock component, so we had chickens. and right now we’re not currently able to care for them. So we adopted them out and had to kind of scale back our operation. But we do have that on the horizon as the farm develops. but yeah, that’s kind of the idea of responsibly grown. It is really seeing our work as stewardship, as growing soil and then creating a space for plants to kind of grow themselves because that’s what they do.

Lisa: Oh that’s a really interesting distinction that I honestly haven’t really thought about. and a good description of what regenerative principles are. How is that different from. Or does that include like, organic or biodynamic principles too?

Julia: Okay, that’s a really good question, and I’m going to answer this in my layman’s terms

Lisa: good!

Julia: because I don’t actually know, like, the. All the laws being written about it, but it’s definitely in process because organic standards are currently, okay, to the best of my knowledge, in conflict with regenerative practices. And one of the biggest reasons is because of livestock and animal integration. Those are really important for regenerative farming practices, especially with manure, with hooves turning under food, like the digestive processes are so important with livestock, grazing, all that kind of stuff. It’s just, it’s a really natural combination. However, with national organic standards, you cannot have livestock or any animals on the land, like 90 days before harvest, which is a considerable amount. So you actually find that they do not overlap. So I think, again, best of my knowledge, that many, many people are aware of this. And I think that there’s some types of efforts to address that kind of miss. That’s one of the ways that, like, organic is super out of touch with stewardship.

Lisa: Right. Maybe when it was started, like anything, there has to be some kind of compromise in the principles. So you talk about the distinction I think probably on the website where it’s called Certified Naturally Grown. Is that like a program or something like that that accounts for that difference?

Julia: not with livestock. I don’t think. But I think Certified Naturally Grown is just a different but similar distinction to organic. I believe it’s a little less stringent and maybe quicker. when I owned Seeds Trust, which was my previous company, we were really interested in biodiversity and saving seeds that had a story in history. Now when we narrowed it down to just organic, it actually was super limiting and was the opposite of creating a biodiverse ethos. So we actually opted to not do organic because it was too limiting. We did take on Certified Naturally Grown because we still do all the organic practices, but it allowed us to purchase from other people who were very small operations with very responsible growing habits in line with our values, but weren’t part of like, a really, really large, somewhat expensive and burdensome thing. There’s pros and cons to all kinds of these certifications and whatnot. And they’re not appropriate for all size levels they’re not. It’s just not one size fits all. So that’s kind of an example of certified naturally grown versus organic. I’m curious to see what happens with regenerative. I know there’s a lot of policy work going on with that, so we’ll stay tuned.

Lisa: Yeah, that’s fascinating, but there’s more behind the labels, so.

Julia: Yeah, yeah.

Lisa: So you mentioned earlier, Early Morning Orchard is a four season farm. what does that mean? Why is that unique?

Julia: Well, it’s unique because oftentimes here in Colorado, our climate, we don’t have a full 360 growing season. 365, I should say. and normally it’s a summer or a shoulder season. And we’re fortunate enough to have pretty robust greenhouses right now and tunnels. So we’ve decided to really lean into the winter season and offer greens when there’s not a ton of options out there. A lot of it is like very quick cold season stuff. And when I say quick, I mean days to maturity is low. and then cold tolerant items are going to be your kale, your chard, lettuces. let’s see what else. We’ve got like 15 beds of spinach outside with their little hoop covers. Herbs, we can do romaine lettuce. We have this really cool mustard mix of Asian greens. so it’s just like basically green therapy because you walk into a greenhouse in the middle of winter and it’s alive and warm. Yeah, we’re just really fortunate to be able to offer food in the wintertime.

Lisa: Yeah, that’s really unique. I don’t think there’s many places around here that do that. How can people buy your products?

Julia: So historically we have not had a huge direct to customer presence and right now we’re really, really trying to develop that. So I’m proud to have been involved in food access and wholesale types of sales. As we move forward as a business, we really need to be like, we are your neighbors. We have produce for you. So here’s how you can find us. You can wander onto the farm anytime you want. There’s a big cartoon peach right outside the driveway. And we’re just wanting it to be like you come on the farm, you can buy whatever you would like. So we’re going to have a farm stand every Friday from 2 to 6pm. we’re going to be at the farmers market this coming season. And we have a website on which you can kind of like go grocery shopping. So you can put things in your cart like you would anywhere and then come pick up your order once we have it ready. So that’s earlymorningorchard.com. early morning orchard. A lot of people want to say early morning orchards, but it’s just one.

Lisa: not plural.

Julia: so those are all the ways, you know, we’re on Instagram, we’re trying to build, build our following and you know, we’re joining the chamber of commerce and we’re trying to be, you know, including ourselves in some of the agritourism events, trying to see what’s going on in town, going to town meetings, all that kind of stuff. So we’re trying to just be there, which we have not been historically so it’s kinda fun.

Lisa: So what was behind the shift in that and being more wholesale to being more community focused.

Julia: I think that economically and our size there’s a better fit for our business. So the growing space that we have for vegetables is not very big. So it doesn’t make as much sense to do wholesale when the size of our farm is so small. another thing is it’s so close to the center of town and it’s right along all of these bike loops. It just makes so much sense for it to be like a really welcoming space for people and neighbors and tourists and folks who are here in town. We are still gonna do food access. We’re still gonna do wholesale. but we’re gonna just add the direct to consumer aspect of it. You know, like, we have amazing food to share, not just with food access, which is an honor, but for our community, our direct community. Like, we are a resource for food right there. We have to share that with people. Like, it’s just so cool. It’s so satisfying. Like I live on the farmhouse on the farm and I’ll be cooking something and I’m like, oh, I need rosemary. And I run off into the farm and I get some herbs or I’m like I want a carrot. I literally go out with a pitchfork and dig up some carrots for carrots and hummus. It’s so satisfying. And it’s very cool to share that with our friends and neighbors.

Lisa: Yeah. And very delicious.

Julia: Yeah. And here’s the other thing that I think is very cool. When you pull something out of the ground, from that moment on, it loses its nutrient profile significantly. So the sooner that you can eat produce from the time it was harvested, the bigger boost of nutrients you’re going to get. The amount of vitamins and minerals that are packed into fresh greens, particularly, but vegetables across the board, is incredible. So being able to be like, yeah, I’m gonna eat that within 24 hours or even a week is significant.

Lisa: Yeah.

Julia: Yeah.

Lisa: That’s why when you buy something from the farmer’s market or from a farmer, it tastes so much better. It’s like, versus from the grocery store. Like, who knows how long that’s been around.

Julia: That’s stuff does. Yeah, you can taste. It’s true. You can taste a lot of that. A lot of what’s in there. This goes back to, four season farming. And I was talking about what you grow during the wintertime and cold season items. So we have chard and kale in our tunnels, which means it’s just covered with plastic.

Lisa: Okay.

Julia: It doesn’t mean that it’s

Lisa: I was picturing a tunnel in the ground.

Julia: Oh yeah, no, we call it a tunnel, a high tunnel. Right. So it’s covered with metal framing and then plastic over the top. And there’s no supplemental heating other than what the sun can produce in there and then what that plastic can trap.

Lisa: Wow.

Julia: So it gets, I mean we had what like a day of six degrees or night. So the cool thing is when those cold hardy crops are exposed to that level of cold, they create sucrose within their cells and that’s a protection mechanism against the cold. So you get unbelievably sweet taste, from kale and chard and all that stuff. And you can really like it tastes so different than summer kale. Just like such a cool little special thing that really only happens in the winter.

Lisa: And I don’t think I’ve ever had any winter grown produce, now I feel like I’m

Julia: Okay well

Lisa: I’m embarrassed to admit that, but I gotta stop by and get some.

Julia: You’re embarrassed? I should have come in here with an offering of greens. What was I thinking? Like what the heck.

Lisa: But yeah, I don’t know if I’ve ever tasted that difference. So I’m very intrigued.

Julia: I am going to get you some of that as soon as possible. So it’s coming towards you. You’ll be able to taste it.

Lisa: Sounds good. I’ll stop by. So you mentioned food access earlier. And so can you talk a little bit more about what that means?

Julia: Yes. Okay. This is super cool. So food banks will have programs in which they not only have, donors, but they have potential access to funding from many different sources. Whether it’s federal, whether it’s state, whether it’s personal, grants, whatever, all that kind of stuff. And with that money, a lot of people don’t realize that they do actually purchase a lot of food. It’s not just donating food to a food bank. They do a lot of that. But they have the capacity to actually buy really high quality food. Well, at least some of them do. So we have been really fortunate to be included in sourcing for food pantries. So Community Food Bank based in Grand Junction does excellent work with this and they really prioritize local food, they prioritize local food systems and they prioritize like fresh greens that are also culturally responsive. So they have their clients really, really well in mind. pretty amazing work. So they will buy a lot of stuff from us. and then similarly, Garfield County has a program called Lift Up and they buy greens and veggies and all kinds of stuff from us all year long, and they commit to that upfront as part of their programming. So, so they’re doing a really wonderful service for their clients.

Lisa: That’s very cool yeah. That is like a win, win, win, win for everybody.

Julia: Totally. Yeah.

Lisa: Continuing on with the different things that you do, tell me more about the seed adaptation.

Julia: Yeah, so we did a seed adaptation project, and this is kind of like in the interspace between when I was just seasonally working at Early Morning Orchard, but I also was running my own business. So I owned a company called Seeds Trust for 14 years, and my business partner and I moved it out here in 2020. Once I was involved with Early Morning Orchard, I saw a lot of opportunities for us to do seed growouts and then also seed trials and then seed adaptation projects. and one of the reasons is because the farm itself was interested in responsible growing. And part of responsible growing is saving your seed, planning to save your seed, being aware of how certain varieties are responding to our stressors. Our region and a lot of western regions and just, okay, the world in general, we’re seeing more and more extreme weather. We are going to be challenged and are challenged with heat, water scarcity, all kinds of stuff like extreme weather. So when you can start with adapted seed that already has within its DNA and genetic expression, hardiness to drought, to heat, maybe even some pest resistance, and then early production, we are ahead. And that’s regional responsibility. Not to bash any other seed companies, but you should be buying, if you’re growing, from your regional seed companies that are growing regionally. that’s true sustainability and resilience. So anyway, long story short, there was an opportunity on a little parcel of land across Front Street, to do some pepper and tomato adaptation projects. And all that really means is growing these varieties under stress and then saving seeds from the best plants, the most ideal fruits, or whatever criteria really you’re looking for. It can be early setting, it can be, general resistance. It’s kind of up to the person who’s, who has a relationship with that plant to choose what they’re looking for. So our parameters were heat tolerant, early producing, and drought tolerant. So you keep selecting for those things, and then each season you will see that resilience build. And then that’s what we are planting in our farm and we should be building, you know, resilience moving forward.

Lisa: And so, like you mentioned too, like, that’s not a fast process because you have to go a whole year before you see what the plant does. And do you like, tag the ones that you like and then.

Julia: Yes. I do.

Lisa: Wait until they go to seed and then you have to start over with those the next year and just.

Julia: That’s exactly it. Yeah, you mark them. Sometimes you rogue out the ones that you know you don’t want because they’re just complicating things. We have to make sure that they’re not cross pollinating because you don’t want that the genetic material from that one to contaminate the one that you’re trying to go for. and then also it’s easy for peppers and tomatoes because they’re self pollinating. You don’t have to worry as much about the cross. So they’re actually a really great beginner plant for seed savers.

Lisa: So then you mentioned that you’re developing the seeds. So it’s not even like this isn’t like some kind of lab thing where something’s being created. It’s like a natural process of selection, and then using them and then also distributing them?

Julia: Yeah. So there’s a lot of very natural collaborative folks involved in this. So, the farm benefits from its own seed stock, but you get so many seeds out of a tomato, like, you’re just overloaded. So Seeds Trust will actually. We will sell seeds to Seeds Trust so that we can actually make money off of both the seed, the produce itself, and we can save costs on purchasing seed in the future. So it’s kind of a win, win, win, win.

Lisa: Again! Yeah. And then if people wanted to buy them, they would buy them from Seeds Trust?

Julia: That’s correct. Yes, we have those varieties available at Seeds Trust.

Lisa: I think, and this is a little bit different for you because it’s a four season farm. I think for a lot of people, they assume there isn’t anything to do on a farm in the winter, and that’s totally untrue. So setting aside even the lettuce and, and the greens and the things we talked about earlier, what else is really important that you have to do in the winter?

Julia: Okay. Several things come to mind. One of them is vegetable oriented and the other is orchard oriented. So when we’re talking about vegetable production, like when you’re in the middle of your winter season, you have to also simultaneously be planning for spring and summer. So all of these items that you have in your greenhouses you have to give a date for, all right, we’re going to pull you up and we have to have everything growing for what’s going to be transplanted in there. You start first from your greenhouses because they’re most protected, so they’ll be able to house your more kind of like tender things. Right. Then you move out and you plan into the tunnels because they don’t have heat. Then you move on to planning in the field. It’s basically like constantly playing with the puzzle. So you’re constantly doing that. Then you also have to think about, okay, how are we taking care of our orchards in the wintertime? Like, just because they have no leaves doesn’t mean nothing’s happening. So there are some pretty significant, milestones that you have to hit in the quote, unquote, off season. It depends, I think, on sort of how you decide to manage your orchard. But there are certain pest management and maybe even dormancy sprays or frost protection sprays. Blight management types of sprays, like these are on a schedule at certain times. So I’ll give you an example. In the fall when you have your leaves drop, there’s a certain type of spray that you would put on the trees to protect from a certain type of blight or some type of bacteria. Okay. I actually, this is my first season in the orchard, so I’m actually learning and I can’t remember the scientific names of these things, but the idea is that as the leaves fall, it exposes more of the woody material and that’s what the spray sticks to and that helps prevent spores from spreading. there are organic ways you can do that and there are conventional ways you can do that. And then there will be the pruning season, which is happening now. You see that all over, right? We used to see all the kind of like the red, really young growth, adding a little bit of color. As one of our CSA members Lisa mentioned, she’s like, oh, I love seeing all the red, and now it’s all getting pruned off. So like January through Marchish is the time when you really prune. And then that allows the buds to set and the fruit to set in a way that is, that’s using the best resources for the tree and easier fruit picking and bigger fruits because. Okay, so another thing you’ll do with pruning is, okay, now we’ve pruned. Then once the fruits start to set, you’ll go back and you’ll do thinning so that the fruits have enough space to mature without crowding each other out. So those are all kind of things that need to happen. Then, okay, so after you prune, then the branches are all on the ground. Now what? Well, okay, now you bring a big flail through. So now you got to mulch it all in. And it’s actually a significant operation that’s happening all over right now. So it’s kind of cool.

Lisa: So that’s interesting, you mulch the branches in instead of. I know a lot of people will pull them and just burn them. I see that too.

Julia: They do. Especially if there’s gummosis, or Cytospora, which is the same thing. You want to cut those branches out and burn them because you do not want that going back into your soil. So there’s a lot of remediation that has to happen to protect against disease spread. That’s certainly a burn pile situation. A lot of times those types of diseases are not necessarily in that new growth. And so when you get the lighter stuff coming off, you can mulch it right in, which is a great practice. But yeah, you got to get that disease stuff out.

Lisa: No, that’s an interesting distinction and just makes a lot of common sense that you wouldn’t want to take something with a disease and put it into the ground. Interesting. I’ve always wondered. Yeah. Why some people will burn and then other people you’ll see. But it just would be about the timing then in terms of what you’re pulling down and when.

Julia: Exactly. And they may do both.

Lisa: Yeah. It’s always fascinating to watch the pruning happen because it looks like it’s like, aren’t you gonna kill that tree? But it’s really interesting to know that that’s what you have to do to make it be like. Make the peaches and the fruit and the apricots be so delicious.

Julia: Yeah. Like there is a lot of maintenance that goes into tree health. For sure.

Lisa: Yeah. So another thing that I’ve heard people talking about, specifically in relation to fruit trees is, something about needing a certain number of dormant days. and so. And that this year I think there was maybe a little concern early on that we weren’t having enough or it wasn’t cold enough. How does like, what does that mean? How does that work?

Julia: I have heard that too. And this is something I don’t really know, but there’s definitely a number that you have to hit. And then from my understanding, if you don’t, then they’re susceptible. I don’t know. I haven’t gotten to that particular part yet. There was a very well known hard freeze in 2020 that had like impacts years and years after. And that hard freeze was so damaging that the lasting wounds from that and the effort that it has taken the trees to recover, because they’re basically constantly trying to recover and then produce and then recover and then produce. It’s been an issue. So I was learning recently about. And again, any orchard person will be like duh. But that there are certain sprays that you can use. and again I think there’s both organic and normal, what do you call that? Conventional, thank you, options. But as you know a freeze is coming, you can, I think it’s like a 10 hour window that you can spray the blossoms in order to protect them. Conversely in the fall if, okay, because this is what happened in 2020. There was like a 75 degree stretch of days in October and then in a matter of 63 hours it went down like I can’t even remember what it went down to. It just pulverized. But if you do know something like that is coming, you can also, I think there’s like a dormancy spray that encourages dormancy earlier because they’re not getting the cue to start to go into dormancy. And so they’re still really susceptible to they haven’t had time to harden off to incremental weather changes. So this spray encourages dormancy. The kind of balance to that is if you do use that, you shouldn’t use it all the time, only in kind of an emergency but because what ends up happening is then they do wake up a little bit sooner which is also a potential liability.

Lisa: So that’s so fascinating because like here, like you said, it has been single digits since at some times overnight this year. They can handle that now, but they couldn’t handle that if it was just like overnight.

Julia: No, they have no time. So like even with you know, something as simple as putting a tomato outside. So if you started in the greenhouse, it’s used to a certain expectation in its environment which is not direct sun, regular temperature, it’s babied. Then it’s gonna go out into the field. Right? Well, you cannot take it from a greenhouse and just plop it into the ground. It’s gonna get what they call this transplant shock. So you spend a significant amount of time slowly exposing plants to the elements to direct sun, to temperature changes, so that they’re better equipped, because they will they’ll actually adjust themselves, then you can put them in the ground. And it’s the exact same thing with with trees. They need gradual shift into temperature changes. In order to handle it.

Lisa: That totally makes sense. It’s just like normal, like a normal seasonal type thing.

Julia: Yeah, exactly.

Lisa: Since it’s warming up now, it seems like spring is always a little bit of a season when people are holding their breaths because it can be 70 or 80 or it could be like 20, you know, on a daily basis. So during this season, I mean, how do you kind of manage that? Like it sounds like there’s some things that can be done, but then also we’re also sort of just like at the mercy of nature. How do you just like manage dealing with that?

Julia: Well, the inherent risk is total loss anytime you’re farming anything. And many, many orchardists and farmers have been through that exact thing not too long ago. so what you can do besides the spray stuff is, okay, so you’re going to hear probably like, oh, the weather’s getting great. And then other people are gonna be like, no, it’s getting too warm, too soon. It’s encouraging these buds to grow too soon and then we’re going to get that April frost and they’ll all die. So I think just what you can do is be very attuned to the weather. You can put weather sensors out in your field, you can Bluetooth connect them to your phone so that you get an alert about temperature drops. But essentially physically what you can do is you’ll see a lot of orchards out there that have fans and that moves cold air just away. It’s really that really, really low cold air that does the most damage. So getting it, just moving it through and not letting it stagnate is important. You can also attach what you call a wind drain to the back of a tractor, which is kind of a smaller version of a large fan.

Lisa: Yeah, I see those driving around town. Like tractors towing them around town.

Julia: Exactly. So you set that strategically at a point in your orchard or you drive up and down. I don’t know what you do yet. I still have to learn that because I’ll need to be doing this in April because we have the wind drains on the back of a tractor. So you get out there at 2am or whenever and you protect your crop.

Lisa: Wow. The fan for the average person who doesn’t know anything about farming. You’re like, wait, if you blow a fan on something, it gets colder. it’s just so interestingly counter-intuitive.

Julia: There’s like, there’s also growing practices. So when you plant your tree and it grows, you are then going to do a strategic cut to establish what you call the crotch. And that should be at about knee height, well, depending on how tall you are. But that crotch is then where your scaffolds or your branches start to come out. And if your crotch is too low, then your whole tree is more susceptible to frost damage. Whereas if you have a taller crotch sometimes, that additional height can bring bring your buds out of a danger zone. So there’s also just like different techniques like that. And if you have two scaffolds, usually those two scaffolds tend to go up higher, which can protect your fruit. Then again, if you have any problems and you have to cut off one branch, then you got only one branch left. Like there’s all kinds of give and take as far as what method is best.

Lisa: Interesting. I’m thinking about all the variation now that I’ve seen and never thought about that it was intentional, you know, around, if you just bike around the fruit loop, the different variation in tree shapes and sizes and forms. I didn’t realize that there’s like a purpose behind that.

Julia: Absolutely. So you will see some that, are more closely planted together and two scaffold. So that’s what we call high density. And you can pack them a little bit closer together, which increases your fruit production. But it’s also, it can be a higher risk because if you lose some, that’s a significant loss. Then, you have a four scaffold. And then that also, like, you kind of have to be picking, all around the tree. But you usually are able to use just ladders because those scaffolds don’t grow up as tall. Whereas typically, from my understanding, when you have just two scaffold, sometimes you need a picking platform to get that much higher up. And again, the idea is to save it from the frost, but it can also be like more labor to be able to get that going. So.

Lisa: So when you say scaffold, you mean basically like one of the arms of the tree?

Julia: Exactly. Yes. Those. The branches that come out from the crotch of the tree, which is just that, that diversion part.

Lisa: All right, now I got to go around and see, like, how many different options I see.

Julia: Yeah!

Lisa: Let’s talk about how did you. How you got into farming? Because you’ve mentioned, the seed program, the seed business that you had in the past and just starting this and being fairly new. So how did you get to it? What made you decide to make that switch?

Julia: Okay, well, Buckle up. Kidding.

Lisa: If it is a switch.

Julia: It’s a little bit of a winding story, but I will try to be concise. So, okay, when I graduated from college, I earned my degree in linguistics in French. And then I moved to France to teach English. And I, of course, was just in love with France. But something I noticed that I did not see here at that point in time was a genuine value by the community of local producers. From vegetables to cheeses to wine. A very robust local culture. So you would still have like an industrial like, but you’d have like a Monoprix, which would be, you know, large scale canned goods or whatever, processed foods, popular. But in that same town square, every single week, you would have people coming to bring their really fresh stuff. And everybody in town went and bought there. And you would have a shepherd come in, like, certain points of the year with his sheep, and then he would sell his, sheep’s milk and the (french word) cheese and all kinds of stuff. Like it was seasonal and so valued. And I was like, wow, I’ve never seen anything like this. Even a farmer’s market, you know, it’s meat coming from Kansas being sold here in Colorado. Like, this doesn’t even.

Lisa: And if you don’t know it’s a local orchard, they could be getting their produce from anywhere. Right?

Julia: Yeah. Like, the. The genuine nature of this was really impressive to me. So when I came back, I wanted to know, who’s doing alternative agriculture? Is there a possibility for this? Is this happening even? So I found a little farmette in Lyons called the Lyons Farmette. And they did really cool. Like they were. They did permaculture stuff. I don’t know what’s happening with them now. That’s why I’m saying they did. This was a while ago. And they would do workshops and lectures. And, there was a seedsman giving a lecture one evening called I don’t know what it was called, but it was about seeds, and his name is Bill McDorman. And so I was like, oh, yeah, I’m gonna go to that. I’m gonna bug him about whatever. So I heard his talk, and it changed my life. After I heard how important seeds are and how our civilization basically is resting upon something that no one even thinks about, I was like, wow, I basically need to dedicate my life to increasing biodiversity and reversing the loss of seeds.

Lisa: Wow, that’s so cool.

Julia: So that was kind of where those two things met. So I basically glommed onto Bill, and he and his wife let me move down to Cornville, Arizona, where they had their seed company, Seeds Trust, and I became a seed apprentice. And they grew out all their vegetables and saved the seeds. Like that was their thing. So I lived with them and I learned about seeds. And then I eventually purchased that company from Bill and I brought it back to Colorado. And I mean, that set me on this whole farming trajectory. It was never about farming. It was about food security and it was about environmental responsibility. So having a purpose of responsible growing and not just plundering the earth, but care-taking is so important. Like the amount of loss that we face from something as simple as topsoil is like. We’re talking about survival.

Lisa: Yeah.

Julia: So the stakes are really high. And it’s something that’s so easy to ignore.

Lisa: Yeah. It’s easy to forget that because it’s here. You know, it took thousands or more, you know, of years to form topsoil. You can’t just form it tomorrow.

Julia: Similarly, you think about how we got to corn today. It started from something called teosinte, which is also, it sort of looks like a bloated wheat grass. And that over thousands of years was responding to the relationship between humanity. So we were selecting, we had a hand in selecting what we needed from that crop. And over time it became what we know as modern day corn over thousands of years. The sad thing is, is somebody’s effort can easily be lost forever because nobody took care of it anymore. Almost like the bystander effect. And without protecting heritage varieties and landraces and genetic diversity and open pollinated seed, this is not a reversible situation. When it’s gone, it’s gone, period. And our genetic pool diminishes. Genetics 101. You’re only ever as strong as your genetic pool. Think of the Habsburgs.

Lisa: Right. Then things are susceptible to disease. Or like bananas I think is a really good example where you’re just like there’s, there’s one commercially produced kind of banana. like that’s crazy.

Julia: Yeah.

Lisa: So it was like that passion for seeds more so. But then. So what made you then say all right. I’m gonna stop doing just the seed thing and I’m gonna do all this other stuff because there’s so much more that you do now.

Julia: Yeah. I honestly think I was a little under-stimulated. So I operated Seeds Trust as one person for so many years. It kind of like it sized itself around my capabilities. Like I’m actually not a business person. I didn’t go to business school. There are certain things that I just taught myself over time with varying degrees of success. So what I’m trying to say is I never ended up, I mean we have had employees at Seeds Trust, but it has always been. I got most of my satisfaction out of collaborative efforts with that seed company and working with other people and doing interesting combinations of skill sets. I wasn’t as in love with engaging with a customer about seeds. I wanted to tell them why it was important. And oftentimes being sort of isolated, I would lose a little bit of that line of sight about why the hell I’m doing this in the first place. So I needed more of a team and a larger reach to stay connected to the mission. And then I actually realized that I am happier as a person when I’m toiling in labor. So I struggle behind a screen, as many of us do, and I’m much more effective in my body, working in the soil and working hard. That’s like the best therapy I ever got in my life. And I just couldn’t go back from it. And I was just. I was done with the business aspect of the seed company and ready to launch into something that I knew nothing about. I just started my farm director role basically with this winter CSA season. So it was supposed to be like, January 1^st, but we launched this in November. And so I keep saying that I’ve been with Early Morning Orchard for, like, four seasons, but now I’m kind of, like, asking myself, what even is a season, since it’s four seasons.

Lisa: Yes.

Julia: but, yeah, I basically officially started, late last year and early this year, and then before that, you know, was doing collaborative projects or was, a farmhand, at Early Morning. So now I get to decide what we do.

Lisa: You’re the boss lady.

Julia: It’s pretty awesome. I feel so lucky. Like, I gotta pinch myself. It’s crazy!

Lisa: That’s great. That’s wonderful. So what brought you to Palisade originally and when?

Julia: So, my business partner, Alisha Wenger, she’s actually from the Grand Valley, from Grand Junction, and she was my inspiration to come out here. She lives in Palisade with her family, and she’s the executive director of Community Food Bank.

Lisa: I was like that name sounds familiar.

Julia: Yeah, she’s definitely. Yeah, one of those names. Let’s see, around 2020, she and her husband were getting, you know, thinking about, hey, where do we want to set down roots? Where do we want to raise a family? So they decided to come back to where Alisha grew up and start their family here. And Palisade is where they chose. And that was going to take my business partner away from me and from the business. And Alisha’s like, hey, why don’t you move? Why don’t we move Seeds Trust out to the Western Slope? And I was like, yeah, absolutely. I’m totally sold. I am grateful for my life in Denver, which is where I was before. That’s where I’m from. Quality of life was actually like, deteriorating relatively significantly. The traffic was crazy. I mean, you’re gonna hear the story. Time, time, time, time, time again.

Lisa: Yeah. We came out here from Fort Collins.

Julia: Oh, my God. I was spending my life in traffic.

Lisa: that’s not why we live out here.

Julia: It’s so expensive. And it’s like, how do you have a seed company and, like, survive? Like, I had four, I’ve always had so many extra jobs. So we have growers out here. It’s way more our pace. It made so much sense on so many different levels. So we actually move Seeds Trust into the business incubator center in Grand Junction, which is one of the best things we’ve done. And we had a lot of support for some of the ways in which we needed to grow our business. Covid was the biggest year we ever had for sales. Like, unmanageable. I get it. Right. Like, okay, we’re on our own. We got to grow our own food.

Lisa: Yeah. There was the whole interest in backyard chickens and sourdough and all those things coming together.

Julia: Totally, yep. So that helped us make this move and helped us grow as a business. Then things sort of evolved from there. But that’s how I found myself here in the Grand Valley.

Lisa: What do you like about Palisade? Like, are you glad you moved here? Like, what keeps you here?

Julia: Yeah, this is, well, like, the job opportunity brought me here, and I just feel so fortunate and so, like, I just feel so grateful. What I love about Palisade?, well I love my job. This is a very peaceful place to be. It’s stunningly beautiful. It truly honors the word epic. You, like, you look up and you see the Grand Mesa. Then you see the Bookcliffs like you’re on Mars. And then you look out and see the monument. It’s like a 360 degrees of magnificence. I think personally, I really thrive in a size similar to Palisade or Grand Junction. I like seeing people I know. I like feeling like I can have an impact in my community and a purpose in my community. I like serving my community. That’s so satisfying. Service is so satisfying. So I’ve been really impressed by the feeling of community and feeling like I can bring something to the community. yeah, I just. I love. I love all of that. I love that it’s an agricultural community. It’s very special. I also love, like, all of the luxury, kind of like indulgent experiences around here. Like, I love wine. I love peaches. I like riding my bike. I like music. I like hiking. I mean, it’s freaking paradise. It’s the coolest, the coolest place. Yeah. You could not pay me to move.

Lisa: Love it. I mean, obviously, I feel exactly the same way. Okay, so especially on your farm, four seasons farm, you mentioned, you know, having to be up at 2am sometimes driving a tractor around. It’s like a job that could never end. So, like, how, what’s your. What’s your day like? And how do you. Or do you need to, like, make yourself stop working ever?

Julia: yeah, I think a that’s a really good question. I think it will be different, during each season. So. Yeah, one of the things I’m compensated for is definitely taking care of that property when things go awry, they need to be taken care of. So something like protecting from a frost in the middle of the night is absolutely my job. It is a little odd living onsite because, you know, all the employees drive right past your window. Or, like, you weave. It’s. Yeah. Like, the boundary situation is something that I’m just trying to learn to navigate. And it is easy to go out and be like, well, just let me just finish this thing and let me just finish this. But I also feel really exhausted at the end of the day. And it’s very easy to be like, okay, I’m done, and I’m not gonna do one more freaking thing because I can’t.

Lisa: Your body tells you when it’s time to quit? That’s fair.

Julia: Yes. And so, I think that having things that bring me away from the farm and kind of contribute to, like, a more vibrant social life within the town is going to help a lot with that feeling of just always being at work. And it does have a very different vibe when nobody’s on the farm, like, it’s my time to connect with the farm. But honestly, that’s going to be a work in progress as time moves forward. So a day in the life. I wake up and pet my cat and then feed her her third breakfast of the day, make my coffee, and then try and get out the door to be on the farm by 8 and it’s always 8:03, because I cannot, like, I live there and I’m like three minutes late every morning. But we have our little farm team meeting in one of the sheds that we’ve turned into an office. The property is very cool because it was designed by Skip, who’s an architect. So there’s really cool structures on the farm, which I encourage everybody to come see. And it’s sort of a unique thing about this farm. They’re sort of funny shaped, so using them practically can be a challenge. But we meet up, we talk about our tasks, and then we disperse and we do our tasks. And those are going to be, you know, watering the propagation house. Because we have always having seeds starting in trays, from herbs to tomatoes to lettuce. These are things that need typically about four weeks in a tray before they’re ready to transplant. Which means you always have to be thinking at least four weeks ahead so that when there’s a space that opens up in a bed, you’ve got something to put in there. So we do like our watering. And then we actually have a lot of orders to fill, and certain organizations order on certain days. So we have our food access orders that go out one on Tuesday, one on Wednesday, and then we have, our retail orders that go out on Friday. So Monday’s a big harvest day. In our winter season, we harvest according to orders, right? We harvest our heirloom greens, Asian greens, romaine, spinach, and then we bring them into the washing shed. We wash it all, then we lay it out to dry. Then we bag it. We get the labels on it. That’s kind of like the labor aspect. And then there’s always the admin of invoicing and connecting with customers and developing business and then planning the farm, meeting with people, establishing relationships, following up on those relationships, doing really fun things like a podcast. Like, that’s the fun thing that I get to do. We do some deliveries. That’s a typical, typical day. A little bit of hands in the dirt, a little bit of fingers on the computer.

Lisa: Yeah, that’s a lot. I think the variety of any job is, is helpful to me. Like, I love just something where it never gets boring and old.

Julia: Right! It stays stimulating and not just it, doesn’t become the slog. It’s like it will change if it is slogging.

Lisa: Is there anything else you wanted to make sure you talk about or share with people that we haven’t covered already?

Julia: I would like people to know that we want the farm to be a welcoming space. I would like to see people drift on in. we’re going to be doing events, we’re going to be doing classes. We’re going to do some business attempts, like maybe some picnics in the orchard. so I just, I guess I want to get that out there to just come over and check us out! We actually have a plant sale on May 10th and so we’re gonna kind of kick off like, okay, so right before Mother’s Day, right. So you can pick, you can get some plants and give them as gifts. we’re gonna have some music. We’re going to sell our plants. We’re go going to sell some seeds. Seeds Trust will be there. We’re gonna have some sourdough bread from Little Button Bakery, who is one of our partners for our CSA add ons. and we’re just gonna kind of create a little party where you can enjoy what we have to offer. Stay tuned and be willing to let me pester you about coming to the farm and coming to an event and buying produce, like, and letting me pitch how awesome our produce is. Yeah, like, just. I’m excited to get more entwined into the community.

Lisa: I think the community is very excited to have you.

Julia: Thank you.

Lisa: Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

Julia: My absolute pleasure.

Lisa: An awesome conversation and I definitely can’t wait to check out some of the things I learned.

Julia: Me too. Actually, I feel like I learned something from this conversation as far as, like, what I need to research.

Lisa: Cool. Win, win, win, win again.

Lisa: Listeners who closely follow the news will have picked up on Julia’s mention of food access, and that a couple of Early Morning Orchard’s bigger customers were local food pantries.

Julia and I chatted right before the USDA announced that it was cutting the federal programs that provided about $1 billion in funding to schools and food banks to buy food directly from local farmers, ranchers, and producers. This will impact farmers across the country, including here in Palisade. This funding had already been announced and farmers had planned their 2025 seasons around it.

I reached out to Julia to ask if she wanted to add a comment about this change. Julia wanted to “emphasize how precarious our food situation is when billions of dollars of funding disappear. It affects everyone in the chain from the folks who are in serious need of fresh food and nutrients, to the non-profits who provide access, all the way to the local farms who produce. It is devastating and wrong. [She would like to] encourage people to support local food producers and local food access programming.”

Farmers are incredibly resilient; they have to be, they deal with change and challenges and uncontrollable outcomes every day. But if you care about having local food to eat from local farmers, if you care about the agricultural community of Palisade, it’s more important than ever to support our local farmers by buying food directly from them.

But I’ll close on a lighter note, because I want to leave this conversation full of the passion, energy, and excitement that Julia has for her job, the Palisade community, and the earth. So I’ll end with her teasing me about the podcast.

Julia: So when are you going to let yourself be an interviewee for your podcast?

Lisa: Oh, people have asked me that, and I’m just like, I don’t know. Here’s the funny thing. I don’t really like talking about myself.

Julia: That’s why you’re in the question seat.

Lisa: I like asking questions. I’m very curious and I always want to know, like, why and how and whatever, but I feel like I don’t really have anything interesting to say. So, never!

Julia: Which is why you need a good question asker, because they’ll draw out all the obviously very interesting things about you.

Lisa: Very true.

Julia: Yeah, it would be cool. It would be cool to get a little inside scoop on your creation. It’s so cool.

Lisa: We’ll see who can do that. Maybe it’ll be you.

Julia: Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Well, it’ll be like a very laborious process. You’re like, okay now push this button.

Lisa: Oh, it’s really not that hard, trust me. If you can operate farm equipment, you’ll just be like, oh, it’s one click.

Julia: Oh, God, don’t get me started on farm equipment. Talk about a learning curve and, like, brute force.

The podcast’s theme music is Riverbend by Geoff Roper.

Thanks for listening. With love, from Palisade.

March 13th is the podcast’s second birthday! Hear (and see) what we’re giving ourselves as a birthday present and about all the fun things planned for this year. And THANK YOU for listening!

Theme Music: Riverbend by Geoff Roper    

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Transcript:

Welcome to the Postcards From Palisade podcast. I’m your host, Lisa McNamara. Guess what? Today, March 13^th, is the podcast’s second birthday! To celebrate the occasion, I felt like it was time for a new outfit – in the form of a fresh logo for the podcast! Last year we got new music and this year we’re getting a makeover.

You’ll notice a new logo in your podcast feed and on the website and social media. It’s a bolder look that I feel better represents what the podcast is at a glance. After all, I created the last logo when I wasn’t sure if even a single person would listen to this. I didn’t even remember to capitalize the F in “from.” I felt like it was time for something more intentional.

You’ll also notice the logo in at least one other place around town. I’m thrilled to announce that the Postcards From Palisade podcast is a Patron of the Arts Sponsor of the Carboy Concert Series, presented by Clint Richards. This concert series is made up of four shows hosted at the beautiful Carboy Winery at Mt. Garfield Estates venue.

The shows include: Bubbles and Blues on May 24 Midsummer Music Fest on June 21 Harvest Harmonies on October 4 and Rave to the Grave on October 31 Check out carboywinery.com/happenings for more information about each show, along with links to purchase tickets. I’m really looking forward to this series, it’s going to be a lot of fun!

But back to this show – I’m sure you’ve noticed that my publishing frequency slowed way down over the past year. Thanks to my day job, I was traveling to the east coast way too often and it was hard to balance work, life, and the podcast. But the good news is that I’ve quit that pesky day job and now have much more time to focus on the things I care about – like helping others build connections within the community via the podcast and the Palisade weekly event calendar, like serving the community organizations that support the causes I care about, and another exciting thing that is soon to be announced.

I have three awesome episodes on deck that will be coming out over the next few weeks – we’ll be deep-diving into the workings of a local farm, learning about migrant workers of the past, and understanding the H-2A visa program that provides the valley with much of its agricultural manpower today.

And I have so many ideas for stories to come. If you’d like to be a guest on the podcast or if there’s a story you’d like told or someone you’d like to hear from, let me know at lisa(at)postcardsfrompalisade.com. I always appreciate hearing from you all and I love your stories!

Remember, Palisade is most famous for its peaches, but there’s so much more happening in our little town. I’m looking forward to continuing to share it all with you.

The podcast’s theme music is Riverbend by Geoff Roper (and happy first birthday to it!).

Thanks for listening. With love, from Palisade.

Michael Palma, manager of the El Rey Mexican Restaurant and Food Truck, shares the latest on what El Rey is cooking up at their new location at 528 Iowa Avenue. Listen and get inspired by this family operation’s warm approach to hospitality, food, and community. And…is that your stomach I hear growling?

Theme Music: Riverbend by Geoff Roper  

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Transcript:

Welcome to the Postcards From Palisade podcast. I’m your host, Lisa McNamara. Palisade is most famous for its peaches, but there’s so much more happening in our little town. Join me as I chat with our community members to hear about how they are making Palisade a great place to live and visit.

Today, I’m talking with Michael Palma, manager of the El Rey Mexican Restaurant and Food Truck. El Rey, which previously operated solely out of a food truck by the car wash, recently opened a brick and mortar restaurant located at 528 Iowa Avenue in Palisade. Hear how this family operation is inspired by a love of great food, excellent customer service, their community, and most importantly, each other.

Michael shares the latest on what El Rey is cooking up at their new location – get ready for some margs, music, and authentic specialties from the kings of Mexican food in Palisade.

Join us for Taco Tuesday here on today’s Postcards From Palisade!

Michael: My name is Michael Palma, but everyone knows me as Mikey. I am the manager the restaurant and I’m also the manager of the food truck. We are located in 528 Iowa Ave, Palisade. And if any to-go orders or anything, you guys can give us a call at 970-261-8370. And the food truck, we take it wherever they need us for events or wineries or anything, we’re always there. Or if they need us, say, in, wherever they need us in the Western Slope or in Colorado, we’ll be there. But yes, I’m the manager of the restaurant.

Lisa: What do you do as manager?

Michael: So I just make sure everything’s running good. Making sure whoever is the waitress this day, is doing the right job. And then I go check, making sure the cook, because we have a new cook we’re training, and I’m just making sure everything is going good. Right portions, right amount of time to cook all the foods. And I just go around and check if, how the customers are doing, if they’re enjoying the food. And yeah, that’s, that’s what I do. And then when it comes to the food truck, that’s when I turn into more like, like wherever they need me, if they need a cashier, I’m there. If they need me to prep all the food or cook all the food or just put all the garnish on the side or anything, I’m always there. And yeah, I’m the one that stays late if Oscar can’t. I close up the place or I’ll open up the place as well.

Lisa: Wow. Okay. So you’re just making sure everything is happening basically. That’s great. When did Oscar open the El Rey food truck? How long ago was that?

Michael: It was about April 10, 2022, so about like three years. So, yeah, he started off, I believe it was a Saturday that he opened. At first he was, like, scared. He was all like, I don’t know if I want to do it in Palisade. I don’t know if I should do it in Junction. But I’m like, you know, you guys should give it a try. Because at first it was my mom and him the first day. And I was like, you guys should get it a try in Palisade. Let’s see how it goes. So everyone started showing support because we were down at the Ace Hardware store here in Palisade and people just started showing us support and we’re like, you know what? Maybe this is gonna go far.

And then I started coming in, right after school because I was still in school at that time. And I would just come in and, just let my mom not work because that’s the only thing I don’t want my mom to keep on working. I want her to retire one day and hopefully it’s soon but yeah, I just. I’m like, mom, let me just take it on from here and, I’ll just start working. And my plan was to work for the summer and then go to college. But since I saw a real big future in the food truck, I was like, you know what? I’ll stay. We don’t have to hire anyone. And yeah, I would just help out Oscar and the food truck, running it. And yeah, three years passed and now we have a restaurant.

Lisa: Well, I’m really glad that you guys decided to open in Palisade because that was one of the first things that we, Well, obviously when we moved here, we lived downstairs from your dad and you know, met him really early and just we love the food. So, like, really? I didn’t know that there’s a possibility that you wouldn’t have been here. So. Glad you decided to stay here.

Michael: No. Yeah. And, that’s what also made us stay here because people were like, oh, finally we could have a place that you come and eat and not drive 20 to 25 minutes to 30 minutes. we’re like, you know what? Yeah, this is going to be a good place. And especially because when it comes the summer, there’s a lot of tourists and Palisade is just really busy and well, they have a lot of options in downtown, Main street. But once it comes down to them being full and then the roads being closed off, we’re the next option for them, you know?

Lisa: Yeah.

Michael: If they need anything fast or. Yeah, if they want to have some good, authentic Mexican food, then they can come over here as well. And we try to do it fairly quick and all the to-gos. We try to do them as fast as we can. So no wait there.

Lisa: So why did you decide to open a food truck?

Michael: So the food truck was supposed to be like. Like a just in case something happened, like college was working for my siblings or it was just a bounce back for anything, if work didn’t go right. Yeah, it was just a bounce back. But since we saw a big future, we started being more involved into it, like doing promotions, then, opening more days and wherever they want to call us, we would go. But yeah, we just started seeing a lot of future. And we’re like, you know, this could go far, so let’s just start working on it more and more. Be more dedicated to it.

Lisa: So it was like something he knew he could do. He was like, I know how to do this. This is like I’m set here.

Michael: Yeah. My mom and Oscar, they both started at restaurants. The one that they met was El Tapatio. That’s where they met. Oscar, he was the manager at El Tap.

Lisa: In Fruita. Okay.

Michael: And yeah, Oscar was a manager. My mom was a waitress. And together they had a lot where my mom would always come and tell me, oh, yeah. Everyone that comes in loves me and this and that. And I’m like, wow, like, that’s really motivational. And once I started going in the food truck, I’m like, I’m just gonna be like my mom was. Let’s see how it goes for me. And yeah. Just thought I would learn from her. I’m like, mom, what would you do in these situations? Or how do you handle when some people come back to you? And then she just started telling me everything and customer service is first and just always keep a good smile, you know, towards the people. And that’s what I did.

And when Oscar, he would just always guide me, like, how to be the manager. You know, like, oh, never tell them that we don’t have this. Always check if you have it in the fridge. And then just tell them. Just give me a couple minutes and it should be ready. You know, he always tries to tell me not to tell them that no, we don’t have it. Yeah. And he just. And then like, wherever if we would need napkins or anything, try to try to see what’s the next solution. We had Bountys. All right, there you go. We got you guys some Bountys. Or just always trying to think if we don’t have anything, just try to think of a solution. So it works, you know.

Lisa: Yeah. So you’re not saying no. It comes across from, just from all the times we’ve gotten food from you. And, you know, a lot of the things, obviously the food is great. That’s really important. But also important is just having somebody who’s like happy to see you and is like, hey, and remembers your name. And you know that’s. That’s critical. You guys have that.

Michael: we would always go to different restaurants where like, dang like, do these people really like their job? They’d just be like, OK, have a good day. Like they don’t really want to talk or anything. I’m like, you know, I got changes to that I want people to actually be like, well, that kid, that kid is nice and the cook. He’s really good, Oscar. And yeah, I just wanted to do that. Just want. Want people to come and think that we’re actually really good people. Because we are.

Lisa: Because you are. Right, right. And so that’s really cool. So from 2022 to today, just a few years later, going from a food truck to actually opening a restaurant, that’s really great. So it’s very exciting. And so we’re sitting here in the space right now and it looks just. It’s really cute. It’s really vibrant and looks like a street taco stand. and so right now there’s like two booths and a couple tables and bench seating. And I think there’s a plan to open and go through to the next door, right?

Michael: Yes, that is our plan. Hopefully the owner said by next month it should be ready the place to move in. We’re trying to get on that, trying to open up over here. And our plans for over here for the next building is to have a little section for live music. Try to get the high schools out here. Like they can play solos, duos, trios, whatever it is. And yeah, we want them to come over here and play an hour and we’ll pay them. That’s the plan. We’re thinking maybe like if everything goes good, maybe I don’t know, towards like midsummer. We’ll trying to see if we get some famous Mexican groups or anything out here.

Lisa: that would be amazing.

Michael: And yeah, more seating over there as well. And liquor license. Hopefully get it soon. So some peach margaritas and all that, Palisade themed.

Lisa: Sweet. Well, that’s gonna be really fun. I’m excited about that. Menu is the same?

Michael: Menu should be different sometime next month. We’re almost done with our menu that has all the pictures and prices and we’re gonna add more stuff to it. Oh yeah, getting more like a, a restaurant going in here for the building. But this menu would be just for I believe just for the food truck.

Lisa: Okay.

Michael: So when we go to events or anywhere in Junction or Palisade or anywhere, any place in the Western Slope, then yeah, these are our menus. But yeah, our menus for the restaurant should be coming in next month.

Lisa: Ooh can you. Is it a surprise or are there any new things that you want to talk about?

Michael: So we are gonna have like pollo con mole, a lot of the restaurant stuff like pollo con mole or what do you call it? Like seafood, like shrimp cocktail we call it coctel con camaron. So it comes with like the shrimp, then ketchup. It’s just a whole bunch of stuff but it’s really good. And then yeah, we’re gonna add more seafood stuff. And one of our plans that we’re trying to do, we saw it in Denver. It’s like a mini trompo. Like where you keep all the pastor and people cut it themselves and make their own tacos. They cut their own tacos. They have the sauces in there and yeah, it’s just like a mini ones. But right now we’re trying to. We’re trying to see if it’s the right time to put it out. But first we have to get the mini trompos as well.

Lisa: Oh, I think people would love that.

Michael: That’s a fun dish. We were over there in Denver and oh man. We ordered one of that for us four. We were full with that one. Like you know, we’re bringing it over here to Palisade.

Lisa: I can see people getting really excited about that.

Michael: Yeah. And just. It’s just a big portion of meat and spread out evenly. But yeah, those are what’s coming up in the future.

Lisa: Very exciting.

Michael: Thank you. Every month there’s going to be more improvements to the building. We’re trying to put up a what do you call a painting over there for like the dia del muertos, like the ones at Los Colonias. We want to put them up over there. And then the other building. We just want to do so much stuff to the building and just so can have a good vibe in here and just enjoy some food and hopefully sometime in the future, liquor as well. We want to do the peach margaritas for Palisade and yeah, we just want to get all that going for the people and yeah, that’s. That’s all I want to say that there’s gonna be a lot of improvements to the building. So if you walk in one day and then you’re like whoa, this wasn’t here last time. Or woah this was. You guys added this or a lot of. A lot of stuff because that’s what’s been going on. A lot of people come and they’re like, whoa, when did you guys put this?

Lisa: Yeah.

Michael: Or oh, man. When did you guys paint this? Oh man, like, when did you guys install a bar? Yeah.

Lisa: Yeah. So keep coming back to see what’s new every time.

Michael: And not to be scared of, if you’re in the right building because it’s still the same building. Same spot, same people, same restaurant. Just. It’s just different. Like, everything. Everything’s gonna be different.

Lisa: What’s it like working with your dad every day?

Michael: well, sometimes there’s a. There’s a pros and then there’s a cons. Sometimes, like, we will argue. if we didn’t think the thing was right. Oh, if I thought it was right, he thought it was wrong, we would just argue the whole time. Since I don’t really see him like a boss. I can argue with him all day.

Lisa: He’s not gonna fire you.

Michael: Yeah, he’s not going to fire me. That’s the whole thing. That’s the pros. Well, the cons is that sometimes we’ll take it towards the house, but then we’ll make up later. But yeah. But yeah, it’s. I like it especially because I’m like, I know he can’t fire me. So we’re good. I like especially because he teaches me how to cook and all that. And overall how to just keep a food truck going and. Well, now a restaurant. That’s. That’s what I like because they would always tell me, like, if you ever were to go work in a restaurant, it’s gonna be hard, you know, you’re gonna have to try to do whatever you can to be where you’re at right now. If you want to have good tips as a waiter, you’re gonna have to like, be on that. And I’m like, you know what? They’re right. Because I don’t know if I would. I would be able to compete with all them. Waiters from El Tap or Aztecas or the managers. Like, they’re on it. They’re always on it. Professional. So, yeah, he’s just helping me out.

Lisa: I was gonna ask if you also like to cook, because I think your dad is such a great cook. I’m curious if you liked it too.

Michael: Yes, I cook whatever. Whenever our cook needs help. I’m right. I’m like, all right, here, let me show you how to do it. And then I go and do it. Back then Oscar would leave me alone. He’d be gone for like three hours. I’m like, oh, man, he’d leave me alone by myself. And I’m like, you know what? I’m have to take them all out. And yeah, I would take the orders, then wash my hands, start making up the food. Right, here’s the next one. All right, who’s next? Start making up all the food. Yeah, little by little. My first ever, I remember, was a burrito. And, so it just came out all flaky. My tortilla. And then after that I’m like, you know what? I don’t want that to ever happen again. So I just started improving each time and. Yeah, trial and error for when I started off.

Lisa: Is there anything that I was curious about, like if there’s anything your dad cooks or you cook that you just. You like to cook more than others or you don’t like to cook?

Michael: One thing that I like to eat, when he’s cooking is I like to say the pastor. The pastor is my favorite one. Like, especially when it’s already. He has the pineapple mixed, all ingredients mixed into it. I always ask him, can you make me some tacos el pastor? And that’s, the number one thing that I love that he makes.

Lisa: That’s one of my top three also.

Michael: Or the birria too as well. Like whenever it’s done. I’m like, can I get a little bowl of it? Rice, beans, and then yeah, he will give me that. Oh, man, it’s really good. But the thing that we, like, we struggle a little bit on is I have to say breakfast burritos. Breakfast burritos are. It’s because on our food truck, we don’t have a lot of space. So the tortillas take up all the space. And then we gotta have a what do you call it, like it’s called a pan.

Lisa: Like a griddle type thing?

Michael: yeah, we gotta put all the meat, like potatoes go in, eggs and then the meat. So yeah it’s just a lot of work. And then once we know the tortilla are ready and the eggs, potatoes, and the meat, then we have to throw it on. And then it just takes a lot of time. And especially because it takes a lot of time to cook. So that’s the only thing. But we do it every. Every day and then throughout the whole day. We learned how to do it. Well, for me, I’m still struggling, but Oscar, yeah, he’s an expert at it.

Lisa: OK so when you were. When you were a little kid, when you were younger, was there anything that he would make for dinner that you would just be like, ugh, gross, I don’t want to eat that.

Michael: Let’s. Let’s think. I think here and there he’d make tacos of liver. Oh, yeah. Like, they weren’t really my favorite. I just don’t like liver. But yeah. He’d always be like, oh man, they’re so good. And I’d try them and I’d be like, not on me.

Lisa: Yeah.

Michael: That’s the only thing. Well, a lot of people in Mexico City they eat that.

Lisa: Yeah.

Michael: It’s really good for them. But for me, it’s not really my go to. Yeah. That’s the only food.

Lisa: I hear that. That sounds. That’s fair. That’s totally fair. Honestly, as much as I like his cooking, I wouldn’t eat that either, so. No, no. What’s the most popular thing on the menu that people order the most?

Michael: So top two has to be. Well, I’ll say top three. It’s the burrito supreme that ones like, you know, it comes with all the beans, rice, lettuce, pico de gallo, sour cream, guacamole. And then all that inside the burrito and the sauce on the side. So that one, everyone loves that because it’s great burrito. People can split it and then eat it for two. Or they could eat the first half and then save it for later or the next day.

Lisa: Yeah, that’s what I do. I save this. I save half for breakfast. It’s so good.

Michael: Yeah. I’m like oh, a lot of people do that. Because sometimes I get hungry then I’ll just eat it throughout the whole day, but I’ve never done it for breakfast.

Lisa: Yeah.

Michael: And the other one has to be the tacos quesabirrias. Those ones. Oh, yeah. Soft tacos, cheese, shredded beef, onion, cilantro, and then the carrots, radishes, the consomme (the dipping sauce for the quesabirrias), lettuce and yeah. Choice of sauce if you want it any spicier or mild. Yeah, yeah, we always have that, That one’s really good. Like those are like the supreme and the tacos quesabirria. Those are like the ones competing for number one.

Lisa: Okay. Those are my two favorites.

Michael: Yes. And the third one has to be the street tacos, yeah. 4.5 inch tortillas with whatever meat, onion, cilantro, and then the carrots, radishes, and limes on that one. And yeah, those are go-to on Taco Tuesday, especially because they’re two dollar tacos. And yeah, people. People get as many as they like and they love it.

Lisa: Do you all make your own salsa?

Michael: Yes, we make our own salsa. Our own horchata. We make them. Then our lettuce, we freshly cut it. Everything except the tortilla is and the meat is not made by. Made by us. But everything else it’s made by us.

Lisa: Yeah, but with the meat you’re still like seasoning the meat, preparing it.

Michael: Yeah, we make it, marinate it. And then the carrots, the vinegar carrots we also make them. Because a lot of restaurants, they just get the canned ones. Yeah, but yeah, it takes, it takes us. We do it. Usually if we run out, we’ll do it like once we get inside the building, like at 8am we’re ready to go on that one. We start making it and then it’s ready for the rest of the day.

Lisa: Wow.

Michael: Yeah. So everything’s freshly made.

Lisa: That’s awesome. And you can tell the difference, especially with like the pickled carrots and things like between the canned version and the fresh homemade.

Michael: Yeah, it has a different flavor, right?

Lisa: Yeah, huge difference. I love those carrots so much. let’s see. Yeah, you’ve been operating out of that food truck for a few years now you’re in this restaurant. Huge by comparison. Like how, how different is it to be working out of here versus working out of the food truck?

Michael: The difference is that I never get bored. In the food truck, like if people weren’t coming in and I did do all my stuff and I would get bored, I would just wait for the people to come. That’s the only thing. But over here, there’s endless amount of things to do. Like fill up the drinks, then fill up more, fill up more ice for the machine or put more water for the machine so you make ice and just do a whole bunch of stuff like cleaning up all the tables before people start coming. The windows, just the whole. Clean the bathroom. Making sure we have enough food over there for the. For them to cook. Yeah. So there’s a lot to it. But yeah, I prefer restaurant because I’m also protected by this building from all the, all the elements outside. Like the sun, the wind, rain, whatever it is. And then also protects people because people, they would. They would be outside in the wind getting blown away while trying to order some food. I’m like, you know, people need to come over here and not be so, what do you call it? Bothered by the elements outside.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah.

Michael: We’re like, you know what, we need to start a restaurant asap. That’s what we did.

Lisa: I bet that it’s just so much nicer for work working too. Especially in the summer when it gets so hot. It’d be so hot in there.

Michael: Yeah. We would step outside and even in the sun. It was still cooler outside inside the food truck. Yeah, that was the only thing I don’t not miss. But I’m gonna this summer we’re gonna have the food truck still. So I’m gonna go back to it.

Lisa: Okay. Okay. Yeah. Are you gonna be going into different events and things like that or.

Michael: Yes, so far we’re just trying to get the information on when air show is and then for sure we’re trying to be in peach festival this year and then bluegrass and then we’re trying to see who else in the western slope needs up for summer or whenever.

Lisa: Okay. So it’s more like you will just go to events or go to things for hire instead of being at the car wash. Or stationed anywhere.

Michael: Yes. And our plan is to as well if because we try to use the food truck more we want to take it to like Grand Junction or Fruita. Yeah. And just to get our name out there and let them know, hey, we have a restaurant as well over here in Palisade. So people could come in and have some wine in the wineries and also come and dine in here.

Lisa: And for this location here, what days times are you going to be open in the future.

Michael: So in the future, for right now, for this month of February, just from 10 to 7, from Tuesday through Saturday. And then starting next month, I believe we’re going to be from 10 to 9 all day of the weeks from Monday through Sunday. And then we’re just trying to see how it goes. And if we get that liquor license, we’ll try to be open maybe even later, you know. And yeah, that’s the plan for coming up. So next month from 10 to 9. And then sometime in the summer, we’re trying to see 10, 11 or wherever and especially wherever the city let us. Whenever, whatever time the city lets us. Because everything has to go through the city. That’s why a lot of restaurants, they close up early because the city tells them that there’s a certain amount of town that you could be open.

Lisa: Right. I know each liquor license and things has different hours of operation tied to it and yeah, so it’s gonna depend how that plays out. Hopefully that works out smoothly for you guys and doesn’t take too long.

Michael: Hopefully they told us hopefully by two months, we should get that liquor license. But you never know. Right. With the whole process because we got to go, we got to talk to the city, then we got to talk with the state and there’s just a whole process around it. So that’s why we’re not really sure when are we going to get it.

Lisa: Yep, that makes sense. Yep. Just gotta go through it and you’ll get there.

Michael: Yes, hopefully. In the food truck, well in all the events, because we’ve been in the Ace Hardware next to Ace Hardware and the car was right and we just get people but like one by one coming in. And then once we start hitting up events then we started getting a whole bunch of lines we’re like oh my God, this is never ending. So the first time I was not prepared and we had a lot of voids, a lot of refunds and I was just all over the place. But then after that I started getting the hang of it. Oscar was at first he wasn’t cooking the food as fast as now and we just, we weren’t prepared for any of the big events. Sorry about that. But yeah, once we started a rolling going, peach festival was a piece of cake. Then we started getting the air show that was the only tough one. But we started getting kicked some butt on that. We took out the orders then. Yeah, we were all the events that we went, we started doing good. So when it starts coming to the restaurant, we’re already used to it. And then that’s how people like minimum they’re gonna wait is if it takes a long time like the fish or the shrimp, then minimum they’re gonna be waiting is like 15 to 16 minutes. But anything else it’s like from 10 to like 5 minutes it should be ready.

Lisa: Well that’s a really hard thing to deal with because you don’t know how many people you’re gonna get, when, what they’re gonna order. And yeah, you just get slammed all at once. And what a really good thing to learn how to deal with.

Michael: Yeah. Because there’s a lot of fighting with Oscar and my mom at that moment. And then after that I’m like, know what? You guys are right. You guys know more than me. And I’m just gonna do this better next time. And once next time hit. We’re rolling and going. And now we’ve had a lot of times where on Saturdays a whole bunch of people come, but right away we take it out because we’re used to it. We already know how it goes and yeah, we take out everything as fast as we can.

Lisa: Yeah. The more you deal with it, the more efficient you get. You find out. Right. How do you need to be prepared and. Do you foresee yourself being in this role for a long time?

Michael: Yes. My, my plan is to once it’s, once it’s going good, I want Oscar and my mom, to just, just come in and see whenever they have a chance just to see how it’s doing and so they don’t have to work as much because, well, they’ve been working for a long time. And I just feel like it’s right if my siblings start, taking control and just making sure everything’s running good because we’re young and they’re already going to an age where they just want to relax a little bit because they’ve been work. They would work all from Monday to Sunday. They’d work all the time. And then I would only see my mom on Wednesdays. So Wednesdays was our only day to, see each other. But. But yeah, I would just want to work for them. So one day they don’t. One day so they could stop working and just come and just look at how everything’s doing. Talk to some customers, make some drinks for them, just ask them how everything’s going. And yeah, I just want to take control and just making sure everything is running good. And yeah, we want to try to. Hopefully one day we’ll expand to maybe like Fruita or Parachute or wherever we feel like people need more Mexican authentic food then we’ll be there. But yeah, that’s the plan for myself and my siblings.

Lisa: It’s really hard to picture your dad not working.

Michael: Yeah.

Lisa: But I mean, I know from experience, just from living next to you guys, it’s like basically, I think he sleeps maybe like three hours a night?

Michael: Yes.

Lisa: I mean, really almost never stops working. And it’s amazing to be that dedicated and that hardworking. It’s hard to picture him relaxing.

Michael: It is. Yeah. He said, even he told me one time once, once everything goes good in the restaurant, I think my plan is to retire Mexico and just open up my own stand over there and just make food on like the weekend. I’m like, oh, alright. So I guess it never wants to stop working.

Lisa: Yeah, right. It’s fun for him. And when you make food that people really love and enjoy, like, it’s got to be really nice to just make people happy too.

Michael: Yeah. I feel like especially him he like, he loves people when they come back, they’re like oh, man, that those taco quesabirrias were really good. And then you just, you know, makes them more eager to work. He’s like, you know, I gotta do this more dedicated. Once he hears all that.

Lisa: Yeah.

Michael: And all the smiles he gets. Yeah. He just loves it so much.

Lisa: How did you guys end up in Palisade?

Michael: Honestly I don’t. I don’t really know. He just got an apartment over here. He’s like, you know waht, I don’t really like all, that because over here Palisade it’s a little bit more calm and not too much going. And then over there in Grand Junction, it’s like, it’s like there’s a lot of stuff going on. There’s a lot of people. Sometimes you get some rude people, then there’s just a lot of going on in the city, or town. And yeah, he just loves Palisade, it’s just more calm and he just loves it a lot. He. You go to the park because we live near Riverbend park, well close to Riverbend park, and yeah we just go to the park and they’re like, you know what, let’s just start a business here instead because it’s nice and people are really nice over here and. Yeah. He just decided to be over here because it’s nice and calm in Palisade.

Lisa: Yeah. Fair. I think that’s.

Michael: and there’s wine.

Lisa: I think that’s why a lot of people like it too. Small town, kind of calm, and everybody’s friendly.

Michael: Yes, everyone’s friendly. We really love it over here.

Lisa: So in the rare time you have off, what do you guys do for fun as a family?

Michael: So it depends. Sometimes so on Sundays we’ll go to church and then after that we’ll go eat at a restaurant and whenever we’re in town and they’re not working, like if we’re not over there because Junction is where we have our church and then we go eat. But whenever we’re in town, we go to riverbend park and do some fishing. They like to do a lot of rafting but we always like to go and support the locals as well. Just go eat, try some food from the locals and yeah, that’s what we like to do. We just like to just do whatever we can take advantage of our day off.

Lisa: Yeah.

Michael: Yeah.

Lisa: Nice.

Michael: Yeah. We also like to do some snowboarding and if we’re ever on vacation we also like to do some deep sea fishing. So we’re just like a fishing type of family. Oh, and also day offs we like to, what do you call it? We like to cater for our family. We like to just, we have really small little cousins, we like to make them a huge selection of tacos and just to give out to his friends so they can try and yeah, a lot of people even ask. They’re like, whoa, you guys cater for everyone. We’re like, yeah, here’s our phone number. And then they call us and then they cater for their kids and we cater for their kids. But yeah, or their. Or it’s. What do you call it, weddings or birth, or anything, we’ll cater.

Lisa: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. I really appreciate it.

Michael: Thank you, Lisa, for having me today. And I’m sorry Oscar couldn’t be here today, because he just got back from Texas. And he was out of it. I think he only got one hour of sleep, ran out again. But I’m glad I could be here today.

Lisa: Me too.

Michael: And just, just like, be the face of the restaurant and food truck for today.

Lisa: And you’re on the face that a lot of people see anyway, so it’s good for people to get to know your voice.

Michael: Yeah. A lot of people to call me, well, the kid with the braces. Like where’s the kid with the braces? When my mom would be over here at helping us out. Like, wait, the kid with the braces? And then my mom tell me, everyone was saying, where is the kid with the braces? I’m like, oh, okay. I’ll be back next week.

Lisa: And you’re not with kid with the braces anymore, though.

Michael: oh yeah, no braces.

Lisa: Michael or Mikey, yeah.

Michael: Michael or Mikey now, or like, the kid with the good smile now.

Lisa: Nice. The kid who had braces.

Michael: The kid who had braces.

Lisa: Love it. Well, thank you so much.

Michael: Yeah thanks for having me.

Lisa: As I mentioned earlier when chatting with Michael, when Paul and I first moved to Palisade, we lived in an apartment downstairs from Oscar and his family. I quickly gained a deep respect for them all as I saw how hard they worked and the pride they took in their work. And for their generosity. The first day that Oscar added red posole (aka pozole), a delicious stew made with pork and hominy and topped with fresh veggies, to his Saturday menu, Paul and I were so excited. It’s one of our favorite dishes, but we weren’t able to make it to the truck before it closed for the day. But later that night, there was a knock on our front door. Oscar and Erika were standing there with two huge containers of posole and toppings that they had set aside for us. That generosity brought tears to my eyes then and it still does now. They truly embody the community spirit that we all love so much in Palisade.

Go experience the El Rey family’s hospitality for yourself at 528 Iowa Avenue.

The podcast’s theme music is Riverbend by Geoff Roper.

Thanks for listening. With love, from Palisade.

I’m going to go ahead and bet that you didn’t know that there is a mushroom farm in Palisade, CO. And no, we’re not talking about magic mushrooms, though as you’ll find out, there’s something magical about every single mushroom, including the kind you serve on your dinner plate. Tune in to learn all about the fascinating world of mushrooms and what they can do for you and the agricultural community of the Grand Valley.

For more about Monumental Mushrooms, visit: ⁠monumentalmushrooms.com⁠

Theme Music: Riverbend by Geoff Roper  

Photo courtesy of Rhysa Ferris

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Transcript:

Welcome to the Postcards From Palisade podcast. I’m your host, Lisa McNamara. Palisade is most famous for its peaches, but there’s so much more happening in our little town. Join me as I interview business owners, scientists, winemakers, historians, artists, and community members to hear about how they are making Palisade a great place to live and visit.

Today, we’re continuing our science streak with Rhysa Ferris, Mad Scientist at Monumental Mushrooms here in Palisade. I’m going to go ahead and bet that you didn’t know that there is a mushroom farm in Palisade. And no, we’re not talking about magic mushrooms, though as you’ll soon find out, there’s something magical about every single mushroom, including the kind you serve on your dinner plate.

Tune in to learn all about the fascinating world of mushrooms and what they can do for you and the agricultural community of the Grand Valley on today’s Postcard From Palisade.

Rhysa: My name is Rhysa Ferris, and I’m the mad scientist at Monumental Mushrooms down the street. I’m working for Marc Hebert, and we have intentions of doing really big business in the mycological field here in the Grand Valley.

Lisa: That’s amazing. So how did Monumental Mushrooms come to be?

Rhysa: Mark and his lovely bride Marie moved here from New Hampshire roughly a year ago and wanted to start up a new business. They thought maybe mushrooms would suit them. Not knowing where to start, they came and took some classes from me at CMU and then asked if I wouldn’t help them a little further. And I ended up working for them full time.

Lisa: So do you still teach at CMU?

Rhysa: I do. I have classes coming up here in March and April. I teach just culinary mushroom cultivation, some indoor and some outdoor classes.

Lisa: And anybody can take those classes? You don’t have to be a student and enrolled?

Rhysa: You can. You don’t have to be enrolled. It’s a community class at the WCCC. And I’m also going to kind of, like, guest teach with Chef Wayne in his sustainable cuisine classes there at CMU, which I’m really excited about. That’s coming up pretty soon.

Lisa: Very cool. How long have you been teaching?

Rhysa: Few years since I want to say Covid.

Lisa: So what’s your professional background? Like? How did you get into mushrooms? And why mushrooms or fungi? Oh, do you like to call it mushrooms or fungi?

Rhysa: Either.

Lisa: Okay. Either.

Rhysa: No preference.

Lisa: Okay.

Rhysa: I, took an interest in them very young. I got my first apartment when I was about 16, and I didn’t enjoy having roommates. I’d had a couple places before that with lots of kids my age, and I detested roommates. Sorry, guys. I know you’re out there, but you were awful. And so I decided to turn my second bedroom into a lab. And I got a lot of petri dishes and some pressure cookers, and I built a ramshackle lab in that second bedroom. I bought a couple of textbooks, and off I went. And I used to pit relatively dangerous microorganisms against one another in petri dishes. And watch the battle that would ensue.

Lisa: That’s amazing.

Rhysa: And I never really stopped being fascinated by that world, that very quiet world of minutia and they play such an important role in what happens on our planet. And until recently, were so often overlooked. So I, would say within the last 15 years, my dabbling in mycology has been gaining speed. After my children got old enough to kind of see to themselves, I began plans to build an underground lab in my backyard. And I designed it, commissioned friends to help build it, help pour the concrete, the whole thing. And I’ve just never slowed down since then.

Lisa: Going back to your petri dishes and your microorganism battles, what was something that turned out maybe differently than you thought it was going to, or what kind of things would you see, happen that you’re just like, wow, I can’t. Like, I’m, hooked.

Rhysa: I was often surprised by the immune reactions that different organisms would have with one another. It’s like a kaleidoscope of color and texture. But the most unexpected thing, I think, that happened in that lab was the time a chipmunk got loose in my apartment. Little baby chipmunk got into the lab and managed somehow to open a couple of my good petri dishes. And I could clearly see its little hand prints in the mycelium. I closed them up, taped them off just to see what would happen. And some very unusual tie dye, like bacteria and fungi, presented afterward

Lisa: wild.

Rhysa: Never could identify it. I always had a slew of textbooks at my disposal with troubleshooting guides. And if it’s blue, it could be such and such. If it’s blue and hairy, it could be such and such. And I remember poring through those texts and trying to understand what I had. And I’d like to take this opportunity to mention that that is a terrible idea for health purposes. I do not recommend that anyone does that in their apartment. And I knew it wasn’t safe at the time, but I’m a bit of a risk taker. When in doubt, throw it out.

Lisa: That’s good. That’s good advice. When I told people I was going to be talking to you today and what you do and what monumental mushrooms here in Palisade, the first question everybody asked me was, oh, are they growing, magic mushrooms? based on your website, One of your FAQs, one of your three is the same thing. So I’m guessing people also ask you that all the time.

Rhysa: It’s a common question because it’s such a topic of interest right now. there have been some relaxed laws, and a lot of folks are going that direction, it isn’t where we’re going to end up as a business because I believe that the market will flood with psychoactive mushrooms if it hasn’t already. And believe me folks, it won’t be the growers who make the money.

Lisa: that totally makes sense. similarly, I think as a food, people have a really strong reaction to them. Like they have a gut reaction. It’s they love them or they’re like eww. So a few people are really neutral, on mushrooms. Like I don’t feel like it’s very rare to have somebody just be like, eh, I’ll take it or leave it.

Rhysa: I am actually one of those people

Lisa: really?

Rhysa: I am one of those take it or leave it type people. My interest in them was more from the perspective of a scientific mind than as a foodie.

Lisa: Oh, interesting. That I was not expecting.

Rhysa: I like them just fine.

Rhysa: Though I would be comfortable stating that after picking several thousand pounds of culinary mushrooms, one does tire of mushrooms.

Lisa: Yeah, I can see that.

Rhysa: But I never tire of growing them. I am never exhausted in my curiosity of what may happen next. So today I’ve brought you a box of mushrooms and there are two species in here that are new to me that I have not become proficient with. And each one has a very different pattern of growth, preferences, colors, fragrance signature, signs of health and illness. And it’s that quiet communication and understanding that is where my fascination lies. I would be just as happy growing mycorrhizals say, mushrooms that pair with and seem to communicate with plants. They use chelating acids and enzymes at the tips of of the mycelial tubes to pierce root systems. And through that connection there’s an exchange of nutrition, sugars, moisture. And I’m deeply fascinated by this process. And I think it is tremendously valuable for potential organic farmers to incorporate local mycorrhizals in the rehabilitation of the soil in which they intend to grow here.

Lisa: Interesting

Rhysa: because mycorrhizal mushrooms, along with other organisms, are largely responsible for the breakdown of all the leaves and twigs and last year s crop, the compost that you throw out. And if there is a deficit of these organisms, you are reliant on fertilizers. I can’t help but wonder if total rehabilitation of the soil here after many, many decades of heavy fertilizing wouldn’t be more plausible with the addition native mycorrhizals.

Lisa: That’s really interesting. So the last episode I talked to a gentleman named Fred Judson who worked his entire career at the CSU extension in Fruita on like a bean, breeding program with the whole purpose of breeding beans, for one of the reasons around here, to help with refreshing the nutrients in the soil and creating a type of bean variety that was disease resistant. And so you hear a lot about things like that being used to rotate through fields. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody say anything about using mushrooms, or fungi or rhizomes. And that’s a really fascinating idea.

Rhysa: The soil here is fungal deficient for many reasons. The climate’s not especially conducive to its growth, but also because it’s incredibly sensitive to fertilizers and pesticides. Mycelium in its way is relatively delicate and these types of additives burn it to death. And it takes some time, can take some time to come back. The desert is the slowest ecosystem to recover when it’s been disrupted. Sadly, we might not have any grasp over what was here before we started laying down the chemicals we needed to boost crop production, to make profit feasible in farming. So the gentleman Fred that you spoke with, I assume he was experimenting with bean crops because they can refresh the nitrogen content in soil. And that’s classic crop rotation. Something like corn, say, has a very high nitrogen requirement. And if you repeatedly grow corn year after year, it will remove all traces of it from the ground and become sickly, I think pretty fast. So folks used to rotate crops and then they would allow a year where the ground was fallow, meaning that nothing was grown the soil was permitted to rest. Now I wonder if that time that the soil was traditionally allowed to lay fallow wasn’t to allow the microorganisms that I’m talking about to recover. They also don’t suffer tilling well. when you drag and implement through and pull them all up to the surface, you break all those delicate tubes, the thousands and thousands of miles of interconnected digestive tract that they are, and they dry out. They are harmed by that process.

Lisa: Right. And to your point of never knowing what was here. I mean, they started in, they, the first farmers who came here in like the late 1800s. I mean, they just started growing peaches and absolutely blasting them with arsenic and, you know, the worst possible things that you could think of to put on the ground and did that for years and years and years before they realized that was really bad. it’s kind of fascinating to think that, yeah, you might not ever know it was actually here before.

Rhysa: we often don’t know the harm that we do.

Lisa: That’s it. Yes.

Rhysa: It’s something you can count on from people. We won’t figure it out right away.

Lisa: Yeah. Getting back to growing mushrooms though, inside indoors, is it difficult to do?

Rhysa: On what scale? On a small scale?

Lisa: On the scale you’re trying to do.

Rhysa: Yes, on the scale that I’m reaching for, it is very difficult. And I suppose that you need quite a lot of drive to want to bother to figure it out. I suppose the most difficult part so far is trying to navigate the number of tasks that must be accomplished in a day in order for the quality to meet my standards. It’s quite a lot of space to clean, for instance. I’m not partial to chemical fogging of any kind and I prefer to be very proactive in my approach rather than applying chemicals to combat a contaminant, I would prefer to clean very well to begin with, but that takes a lot of time. It’s so many, hand done tasks in a day. 500 pounds a week is really reaching for the stars in my case.

Lisa: that’s a lot.

Rhysa: It is.

Lisa: So, why is the cleaning part so important? Like what could go wrong if you didn’t make sure that everything was clean to the standards that you need it to be clean to?

Rhysa: Everything can go wrong. So the mushrooms that I grow do not enjoy she sharing their food source with other organisms. They’re primary saprophytes. They want to be the only microorganism in that sawdust in this case. And if you have another aggressive fungi that enters the scene, they fight with it. Rather than producing beautiful fruit bodies. They will exhaust their immune system trying to eradicate something that is in the substrate. There are many molds that you have to contend with. The grow environment is roughly 85% humidity and it just lends itself to pernicious little microorganisms that will crop up. If you’re not diligent about cleaning every surface, removing every block with a weakened immune system or that shows signs of ailing, they have to go out right away.

Lisa: Interesting.

Rhysa: I suppose that there are easier ways to grow. I of course, have selected a difficult way with very high standards. No regrets.

Lisa: Yeah, I’m sure people can taste it. I can’t wait to try them.

Rhysa: if you keep it clean, the flavor is so much better. And mushrooms have this incredible superpower. They disassemble cells. They use those same chelating enzymes and acids that I mentioned a few minutes ago in discussing mycorrhizals to rip cells asunder. Now they can do that to chemicals as well, thereby I suppose, making those chemicals or heavy metals soluble to you. So they will take these things apart, absorb them, and they will be all throughout the fruit body which you then intend to eat. So if you can keep it very clean in the first place, and I just use simple things like castile soap, quite a lot of water, a lot of vacuuming and sweeping and just generally keeping all of the debris cleaned up all the time. And that’s enough. I don’t want any potential hyper-accumulation of heavy metals or toxic substances in those mushrooms. So I’m really persnickety about what they eat and how clean their environment is from beginning to end.

Lisa: Interesting. What do they eat?

Rhysa: They eat cellulose and lignin. so trees. Straw.

Lisa: So they’re eating the sawdust?

Rhysa: the sawdust.

Lisa: Interesting.

Rhysa: We’re lucky enough to have a warehouse sharing a parking lot with Lincoln Woodworks and all of the sawdust that they would have thrown away, that meets my criteria. It has to be certain species of trees, cannot contain OSB, treated lumber, things like that. They collect all of that for me, hundreds of bags of sawdust and they bring it over very kindly. I then wet it, weigh it, sterilize it, and more or less infect it with the organism of my choice. But that organism must be the only thing growing in that sawdust. And once I detect a second organism, out it goes. Out for compost.

Lisa: So that’s fascinating that you use the byproduct of Lincoln Woodworks. was it always your intention to do that or was it just a happy accident that they were next door?

Rhysa: I have always sought to use waste products from other businesses in what I do. I also use sawdust from Fruita Wood and Barbecue Supply. I don’t know if you know Bert and Chris, but they’re pretty awesome. So I’ve actually worked with them for maybe eight years. They make all the smoking chips for the barbecue joints around town. So they have the good stuff, oak, alder, maple. And they are also kind enough to bag that up, and I bring it back to the warehouse. So it’s not just Lincoln Woodworks. It’s also Bourget. Mike Bourget down the street, the millworker. When he has, when he’s been making blanks or whatever he’s up to in there that meet my specifications, I’ll jump into the back of that trailer he has and scoop everything up and take it back to the warehouse. I prefer this to ordering hardwood pellets, which, you know, a lot of resources go into making hardwood pellets. This is all stuff that would just be going to the landfill.

Lisa: Yeah. That’s so cool. I think that’s one of the coolest things. And I know that one thing that people were, you know, maybe, a concern about a mushroom farm is like, oh, it has to be, you know, it’s manure and everything. And there’s none. There’s none of that whatsoever here. Right?

Rhysa: Not required.

Lisa: Just sawdust.

Rhysa: Not required. From primary saprophytes. And then I will use soybean hulls for some of my species to boost the nitrogen a little bit, but it’s a very small amount.

Lisa: So you’re growing, I think, five different species right now. Is that, about where you want to stay?

Rhysa: It might actually be more at the moment. Yeah. I’m a little over the top.

Lisa: So what kind of things are you growing? Maybe I should say, what’s your favorite and least favorite that you’re growing right now?

Rhysa: My favorite is always blue oyster mushroom. It is mild and meaty. It’s very cooperative from a growth standpoint. It’s reliable. It’s cold tolerant. So we don’t have to spend a lot of money maintaining 85 degrees inside the building. It’s perfectly happy to fruit at 45 degrees, I find. That’s the mushroom I probably have the most history with, I would say. My least favorite is actually probably pink oyster mushroom. I grow them for shock value. People love them. I personally do not enjoy their fragrance signature, but they are beautiful. And if you want to compete with peaches in the summer, you better have some wow factor. So the combination of that pink oyster mushroom and the cheerful yellow of the Russian golden trumpets, the lavenders and soft blues of the oyster mushrooms, and this rich, rusty chestnut. When you put all of those together in a package, it is absolutely beautiful.

Lisa: I’m gonna grab that package really quick because I just want to reference it when we were talking, but this is absolutely gorgeous. And, like, this is so heavy. So do you have any of the Pink oysters in here now. Or I would guess no.

Rhysa: I don’t. They’re very finicky in the wintertime. They love it to be 90 degrees sweltering and unlivable in the grow room. And they’re just monstrous. They get huge and they’re very, very bright and beautiful. Right now, you have some lion’s mane

Lisa: that’s so beautiful

Rhysa: which according to my texts, packs a punch from a medicinal standpoint, it contains airinations which help regenerate the human myelin sheath. That one’s pretty cool. And then these are huge, like portabellos, but they’re actually chestnut mushrooms. This recipe is really excellent. I’ve just developed this. I’ve never seen chestnut mushrooms this big. I’m going to see if I can keep doing that. These little darlings are new. This is called Snow White and I love it. And underneath them you can see some blue oyster mushroom. You can see this really mammoth specimen.

Lisa: those are huge!

Rhysa: I’m showing off for you a little but there at the bottom of the box.

Lisa: I’ve never seen oyster mushrooms that large before.

Rhysa: I can grow them much bigger.

Lisa: Wow.

Rhysa: I have some that will not fit in that box right now.

Lisa: Wow, that’s amazing. And then these are the Russian.

Rhysa: Those are the Russian golden trumpets.

Lisa: Beautiful.

Rhysa: Yes. They’re so cheerful. I love putting them in a box like this.

Lisa: especially in the winter.

Rhysa: so you can see how when the pinks are cooperative again, if you put a couple of pink petals in the middle of that box, now you have a real family. You, you have a great family photo there.

Lisa: Beautiful. So one of the things I read on your website was that each mushroom has a preference for growing environment or it can be influenced by things like sounds. And I thought that was really cool. So like what kinds I guess what kinds of sounds or songs do you find they like? And how do you know when they like something?

Rhysa: They demonstrate signs of health to a keen eye. They’re very sensitive to vibrational disruption, to being manhandled. And something really unusual that I can’t back with any textbook research, but has been my experience for years, is that my mood seems to influence the quality of the product. If I am hurried, if I am over-tasked, upset, the quality of the product starts to go down. Despite using the exact same tried and true recipes and techniques. But this isn’t so far flung from people who are very good with horticulture. You can sell someone a tomato seedling with a set of instructions that should work. And for some people that tomato plant will thrive. It will do incredibly well. And. And for some people it will quickly blacken and die. I suppose this might not be so different.

Lisa: Interesting. Yeah.

Rhysa: But I have learned everything that I know from a few good textbooks and intuition. I watch them very closely. I tend to be a fairly quiet person. And every day I go through the warehouse and I examine hundreds of blocks. I check to see what their mood is, how quickly they’re running through their substrate. And I gauge what they’re enjoying based off of what I see. It’s not that scientific, I suppose, but it does work.

Lisa: Yeah, that’s fascinating, there’s so many things that you can’t explain, but you can see that they are or they’re working. but yeah, I was wondering if. If there’s like, ah. If they like classical music or if they like, you know, just ambient or if there’s any kind of specific music they like.

Rhysa: I listen to a little bit of everything. I love Latin music, for instance. I would say my taste in music ranges all across the board. So it’s just whatever I feel like listening to. And I keep it low. It’s just background. But it does help me to focus. And I feel happier when I’m working to music. I prefer a quiet work environment with minimal human interaction. And I really enjoy spending time with all those blocks.

Lisa: It’s like perfect fit. And most of it, I mean, so you’re probably doing like what percentage of the work has to be done by hand?

Rhysa: All of it. It’s all by hand at this time. I do have plans to build machinery and I know where to get the pieces that I need. My educational background is actually in automotive and diesel mechanics. So it’s not difficult for me to take machines apart, weld them back together and come up with something that will meet my needs. That is on the horizon. I’ll have to check with the town of Palisade before I make anything too monstrous or noisy. But I have access to a lot of antiquated farm equipment that’s made from really good stuff. That served purposes not so far flung from what I need now. And I have discussed with some family members buying, these whole chunks of steel for me to fabricate something new. Save all of our backs at the warehouse down the street.

Lisa: So where can people find your mushrooms now?

Rhysa: The little retail packages are available at Blaine’s, Fisher’s Meats, Meadowlark Gardens, Skip’s. That might be everyone at the moment. But this is the slow season

Lisa: Right.

Rhysa: When the produce stands reopen, there’ll be more.

Lisa: And any restaurants that you supply?

Rhysa: Yeah, Caroline’s down the street is doing some great things. Or if you want to go out for date night on Valentine’s Day and go to Spoons and hang out with Chef Martin. Pablo’s just ran a really great pizza special. It was so delicious with the garlic cream sauce and fresh tarragon and the blue oyster mushrooms. I brought that home and it was gone immediately. And my kids also, I would imagine are tired of mushrooms. But that pizza did not last. And Paul is such a nice guy at Pablo’s. Café Sol. And I think once our sort of busy season hits, it may be difficult for me to keep up.

Lisa: When is the busy season?

Rhysa: Really April I would say is when it starts to ramp up significantly. We’re going to start to see an increase in demand for local produce before that. But probably June, July is when it begins to become difficult to keep up. Through the end of October, I would say.

Lisa: like farmer market season.

Rhysa: Farmers market season. And I’ve spoken with a lot of people in agriculture that’s available to the general public and they all report largely the same. People just kind of stop eating during the wintertime. Maybe they’re all buying from just regular grocery stores, I’m not sure.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah. Eating comfort food and unhealthy comfort food I should say. yeah. So what are you planning for the future? Is there any kind of like. I think I saw something on the website about maybe doing classes someday. maybe some other types of retail things.

Rhysa: I would love that. The building that we’re in currently is not conducive to those goals. It is a short term lease. This is just to demonstrate what is possible. Bringing visitors in for classes poses a tremendous risk to my crop.

Lisa: Right. Makes sense.

Rhysa: People who have been out gardening or composting will have many, many microorganisms clinging to their clothes and shoes.

Lisa: I’m picturing the little chipmunk right now in your mushrooms.

Rhysa: The fewer chipmunks in the lab, the better.

Lisa: that makes sense.

Rhysa: And the retail space, we would have to build something additional for that. We’re finding that the level of production that we’re aiming for takes up most of the space that we have. So cordoning off an area for retail isn’t really feasible at the moment. We’ll see what the Heberts decide to do. It would definitely be well received by this town. I get a lot of questions about that. Having an option to do some agritourism, some direct retail sales, classes. I think that would all be a wonderful direction to go, but not in this building and not without more help. We would have to hire more people to make that work.

Lisa: But that would be such a cool agritourism type thing. Or even just for locals. I mean, it would be a lot of fun to have something. It’s just such a different thing, you know, you know a lot about peaches, there’s a lot about wine. But just a new thing that’s really cool.

Rhysa: I think having a class at a different venue would be possible. I can continue to teach for CMU, but I suspect that there’s some smaller little outfit here in town where we could do something like that and that’d be really fun. I love hands on projects. In all my classes, people usually leave with a pet, something for them to track the health of. And then of course they all have my email so we can communicate about what happened later and I really enjoy that. I enjoy taking a box of mushrooms like I’ve brought for you today and say you know you eat 90% of this and then with the remaining 10%, start your own garden in the box that it came in.

Lisa: What could you start your own garden with? Like what parts?

Rhysa: Okay, so this snow white right here, you could sever the stem, chop it into small pieces, soak the cardboard in water, wring it out until it’s at field capacity and it’s nice and pliant and smooshy but not waterlogged. And roll up those minced stems in the cardboard. And then you just have to provide an environment that will maintain the humidity. An old Ziploc bag that hasn’t been closed off all the way. An old spring mix container with holes in it. One of our compostable containers that had mushrooms in it previously is perfect because it’s already got the breather holes and you just let it sit in there. And for the blue oyster, the Russian golden trumpet, or the snow white, any of those will overtake the cardboard within a week to 10 days and begin to form primordia or baby mushrooms. And mushrooms will sprout and grow right in the container.

Lisa: I’m going to do this. That’s so cool. Oh, I love it. That’s such a cool thing. So if somebody wanted to, like, if there was a business in town that wanted to reach out to you to have a class like that or something like that, would you. Could they email you?

Rhysa: Sure, sure. They could go to our website. Monumentalmushrooms.com. I respond to all those emails. We could set something up. It would have to be an evening class likely, because I do work very hard all days.

Lisa: Yeah, that makes sense.

Rhysa: But I love teaching. I love it and I suspect that I always will do it.

Lisa: Is there anything that I didn’t ask you about that you think is really important about, anything you do or just anything related to mushrooms?

Rhysa: Well I’m just flipping through the microfiche in my mind of what else might be of interest. We might discuss some of the culinary potential of some of these mushrooms. I feel that when you have a very fresh product and you can’t do any better than this, I cut these for you. Not only are they going to last a long time, but the flavor is so good in something that is so fresh and so well tended. You don’t have to employ a lot of fancy culinary techniques to make something delicious. Just rough chop, cook in butter or fat equivalent, and have it with rice and green onion. Have it in an omelet. It doesn’t have to be something really complicated. Ramen noodles. Throw it in some ramen. and if you feel that this is too much to eat right away, dry them out, dry them completely, which is easy in our climate. If you have a dehydrator, then it’s real fast, but you can dry them all the way and then keep them in a jar, a flip top jar for a very long time. And you can get into that jar and break pieces off and add them to your cuisine for months. Months. And that’s part of the reason I love these boxes. It allows the mushrooms to breathe. So they’re gonna brown a little bit on the gills and on the edges of the caps immediately. But that’s good. That browning eliminates, all the availability of moisture for other little microorganisms to hang out. So it kind of makes like a skin and then they defend the interior with their immune systems. They’ll stay alive like that for a while.

Lisa: interesting. Definitely not too much for me to eat. I love mushrooms.

Rhysa: They do cook down quite a lot.

Lisa: Exactly right. I know it’s always like, aw.

Rhysa: So the other day I roasted a bunch of these chestnut mushrooms. I was running many simultaneous experiments and recipes with them to try and get these results. The result of many of those experiments was highly productive. So I had to take home a gunnysack worth of chestnut mushrooms to cook. I roasted the majority of them with just a little salt and some high quality olive oil from Bella Balsamic. I don’t know if you like their stuff, but I do. Portioned it out, put it in the freezer. And I’ve been drawing from that stash of chestnut mushrooms for quick weeknight dinners. I love it. It’s working out very well. I’ve gone several different directions with it from classic Grand Valley grandmother cooking. Bacon, onions, garlic, green beans, to Italian, Italian sausage, caramelized onion. I did some with chorizo. Sky’s the limit. And then you can keep them for a long time. They’re ready to go.

I might also mention that there are many appropriate food sources for mushrooms. You needn’t necessarily utilize sterilized sawdust. Pasteurization is a great low tech, low cost way to go. And they respond well to wheat straw, a few other, corn cobs. There are many types of agricultural waste that you could employ without purchasing a big expensive autoclave like what I use now. I think it’s a very generally available type of agriculture for most people and could, just like I have woven it seamlessly into this community using waste products, you could weave it into an existing business model. And that’s something that we’re going to discuss at length in Chef Wayne’s sustainable cuisine classes. Someone who wants to grow green beans or someone who wants to grow tomatoes, they want to have a business where they sell eggs. How can you weave all of these things together and maybe incorporate mushrooms? As a primary decomposer they almost certainly have a role to play. Even if it’s just really excellent quality soil.

Lisa: Yeah. Which is really important.

Rhysa: Yeah, yeah. Like I mentioned before in Palisade, in the Grand Valley, our soil is very fungal deficient. If you have a skilled hand with making spent substrate, whether it’s from a pasteurized source or sterilized like I use, you’re now generating a very valuable additive to the soil. The water retention capabilities of that spent substrate are incredible. And in this valley where we have to be so careful with our water usage. Think that could help so many folks here. Highly encourage.

Lisa: when you say pasteurization for things like corn cobs. You mean just boiling them?

Rhysa: Well not quite boiling, about 175 degrees for an hour will do it. On things like I’ve mentioned that have a low density. So if you had a block of wood the center of the block of wood would not reach 175 degrees but something that’s been shredded like straw, grass clippings they’re so I mean just the sky’s the limit. Especially for oyster mushrooms. They’ll eat anything. You can just bring it up to 175 degrees thereabouts, either with steam or hot water, I mean, solar. There’s so many ways you could go. So here you know a greenhouse, a hoop house can approach those temperatures in the summer if you don’t use something to cool it. It wouldn’t take much to just kind of supplement that heat and you could potentially have a wetted substrate that you just use our climate to pasteurize. Then once it has cooled, you just infect it with that organism either with mycelial fragments like I discussed earlier, cutting up pieces of stems, or you could buy a culture. You could buy what’s called grain spawn which is basically a more potent form of mycelial fragments and you could make quite a lot. And the bio efficiency of oyster mushrooms grown on straw or on corn cobs it’s like 100, can even be 200 percent. So a 30 pound bale of wheat straw which costs roughly $12 could yield 30 to 60 pounds of fresh mushrooms.

Lisa: That’s amazing.

Rhysa: If you know what you’re doing and you’re welcome to email me or take classes and I’ll show you.

Lisa: all the class information is on CMU website I’m assuming?

Rhysa: it is. It is just under culinary mushroom cultivation. And they also send out that mailer. It’s like a little newspaper mailer.

Lisa: Well, this has been really great. I think I learned some things that I didn’t know before and I’m really excited about and I think people are gonna be really interested to hear about what you’re doing.

Rhysa: There’s so much to talk about, but I feel that we’ve covered a lot of the best points.

Lisa: Yeah. Well, I’m excited for what you’re doing and definitely excited to see just what the future holds for the company and for a possible future like agritourism type event or thing here in Palisade and also just eating the mushrooms. So thank you so much. I really appreciate you bringing these and I really appreciate your time.

Rhysa: You’re so welcome, anytime. Thanks for having me.

Lisa: Thanks for being here.

I happily took my gorgeous box of Monumental Mushrooms home to show off to Paul. I was most excited about the lion’s mane, which I’ve never eaten before but find so fascinatingly beautiful. It kind of looks like a head of coral, in a way. That night we diced the lion’s mane up, sautéed it in butter, and served it on top of gnocchi. Which was not the best way to serve it because it cooked up rich and heavy and gnocchi is also so rich and heavy. But hey, it was a cold day and really, there’s no way to go wrong when you’re experimenting with such a delicious product. 

The rest of the box’s contents got diced, sautéed in a little bacon fat, and tossed on top of a pizza, which as Rhysa suggested, was the perfect way to enjoy these mushrooms. Also, in terms of growing my own mushrooms, I decided I’m going to leave that to the experts. After tasting these mushrooms, I know there’s no way I can compete with the quality of mushrooms that Rhysa can grow.

Go grab a box and try your own culinary experiments, and let us know what you do. They’re so beautiful that you’ll almost not want to cut them up and eat them. Almost…

The podcast’s theme music is Riverbend by Geoff Roper.

Thanks for listening. With love, from Palisade.

Fred Judson and Andrea Judson have had very interesting careers: Andrea worked in biocontrol at the Palisade Insectary and Fred worked with disease resistant bean strains at Colorado State University’s Western Colorado Research Center at Fruita. Geek out with us about sustainable agronomy and entomology in western Colorado!

Theme Music: Riverbend by Geoff Roper  

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Transcript:

Welcome to Postcards From Palisade, where we hear from the people who are shaping our slice of western Colorado. I’m Lisa McNamara.

Fred Judson and Andrea Judson are long-time Palisade residents whom I got to know through the Monday night community bike rides. After the ride each week, people usually hang around to chat over food and drinks, where I learned about the incredibly interesting things Andrea and Fred had done in their respective careers: Andrea worked in biocontrol at the Palisade Insectary and Fred worked with disease resistant bean strains at Colorado State University’s Western Colorado Research Center at Fruita. I knew I had to get them on a podcast episode to share the cool things they have done that have had a positive impact on the Grand Valley and beyond with a wider audience.

So come geek out with us about bugs, beans, invasive species, and more, on today’s Postcard From Palisade.

Andrea: hi, my name’s Andrea.

Fred: And my name is Fred. And, we both worked in agricultural research and applied fields in this valley for over 30 years.

Andrea: 30 plus years. So is that going to be okay if we kind of overlap in our conversation?

Lisa: Yeah.

Andrea: Okay. back when I first started, we kind of did some stuff out where he works, but then that project.

Fred: That’s how we met, actually. First time. My first week, she came out to release some Scymnus beetles.

Andrea: Scymnus and quatrodecimpumtatus. P14s.

Fred: And I got detailed to help her build an exclusion cage out in the field, which keeps other insects from getting in and it keeps the ones you release inside.

Lisa: And you said she came out. Where did she come out to? Where were you?

Fred: 19 and 10 L Road for Colorado State University’s Western Colorado Research Center at Fruita.

Lisa: Okay, and what did you do there?

Fred: I started out as the Russian wheat aphid entomologist and from there, technician for the regional Russian wheat aphid entomologists and lasted about five years in that before we fixed the problem and the money ran out. And then they offered the dry bean seed program to me if I wanted to stay here. And I did not want to go back to the Front Range at that point in time.

Lisa: Partly because you’d met Andrea?

Fred: Know, it took her 10 years to ask me out after we met. So at that point in time, she wasn’t in the picture when I moved over to run the bean program.

Lisa: Okay. Okay. So Andrea, you were. You grew up here, right?

Andrea: I grew up in Palisade. My early years were spent on the Redlands of Grand Junction. And then my father decided that he wanted to do horses and mules, so we found property out here near Palisade. And I’ve lived here since 1976, so quite a while. But yeah, I’m a native of the Grand Valley.

Lisa: like, how did you get into your career? What made you want to get into that field?

Andrea: Well, when I was. Was the summer I was 16, a, girlfriend called me and said, hey, do you need a job? And I’m like, yeah, I could use the summer job. And she goes, well, it’s at the insectary in Palisade. And so I went and talked to him and the next day I had a job. So I worked there from the age of 16 to the age of 50.

Lisa: Wow, that’s awesome.

Andrea: I worked there six years as a seasonal employee and then, 30 years as a full time employee. And I have equivalent to a biology degree, which I learned on the job. I was fortunate enough I didn’t have to go to college. for me, myself, I learned more on the job than I think I ever would have learned from a book. So I was very grateful for that job and I enjoyed it immensely.

Lisa: awesome. what was your official title?

Andrea: I was a biological pest specialist.

Lisa: what kind of projects did you work on throughout your career?

Andrea: I worked on several different projects. When I first started I worked with ladybird beetles, different ladybugs. there were three different ladybugs. Scymnus, which was a small, real small ladybug that could get in the whorls of the wheat and eat the aphids that would be down in there. The Russian wheat aphid. And I worked on the MAC program which MAC was a Macrocentrus

Fred: ancylivorus

Andrea: There you go. Fred said it. Which was a beneficial insect to help control Oriental Fruit moth which is a pest of peaches. And rearing that insect saved the growers hundreds, maybe even a few thousand dollars a year in spray costs. So and those insects, all the insects that were raised at the insectary were given back to the public for free, because the insectary is a state owned facility. So the taxpayers were paying for our jobs basically.

One of my favorite ones was working with Purple loosestrife which is a noxious weed from Europe that came over on ship ballast probably or in different seeds. And it’s very prominent on the east coast and it crowds out native grasses and cattails and clogs up the natural flow of little creeks and streams. And there was extensive studies abroad to bring in this insect called Hylobius. And it was a root boring weevil and it would lay an egg at the base of the soil and the plant and then this little weevil would bore into the roots and it took about two years for its life cycle to be completed in the roots. a professor from UC Davis in California came up with an artificial diet, to feed to these Hylobius insects and we could their life cycle instead of two years went to about two months on this artificial diet. So I had the opportunity to go to California and learn how to make this diet and release lots and lots of Hylobius, mostly in the Nucla, Naturita area but also on the east slope of Denver. There’s purple loosestrife there as well.

I worked with musk thistle, which is not a native thistle of Colorado. And we had a beneficial insect called conachus that would lay its eggs on the flowers of the musk thistle. And then those larvae would feed on the seeds, the flower seeds. So then the flower, the plant wouldn’t produce seeds. So that would cut back on the spread of the weed itself. And that was a really fun project. You got to go around with a plastic bag and bend the head of the thistles over and shake them and all these little insects would fall off into a bag and then we’d take them back to the lab.

Lisa: Oh my gosh.

Andrea: And separate all the, the trash so to speak, and collect just the insects and then have a pure insect to re-release in other areas of Colorado.

Lisa: Oh wow. Now I didn’t realize that, so I know that a lot of what you worked on, what the insectary worked on was developing beneficial insects like you say that are going to a specifically do one thing to kill a plant. and then having to go pick them up and bring them somewhere else. It’s just like even one more step. That’s so amazing.

Andrea: a lot of the insects that we released we had made insectary sites in the field. So we would go to those sites and collect from there and redistribute them. And as the insect populations grew, we had more to collect which we could re-release in other problem areas. But biological control takes a lot of patience and time. to get a good field establishment could take anywhere from 10 to 20 years. So as much as it is a benefit for us to be using that, a lot of people aren’t patient enough to get to the results. And then they end up using herbicides and pesticides to control the weed, which puts all that product in our air and potentially can be a bad, bad thing. But if you’re patient, it’s just amazing to see when it works. It’s just absolutely mind boggling that it works. But like, you know, most of our weed pests came from Europe and Asia and so that’s where the native insects came from. and then the weeds came here. There was no natural predators for them and then they just took over our native plants and weeds and other stuff.

Fred: I think now would be a good time for me to break in and talk a little bit about a misconception. You said the insectary was developing insects. They aren’t. nobody is creating new insects. What they’re doing is taking insects that exist and, and increasing their numbers and then redistributing them.

Lisa: Yep, that’s a good point. They’re not actually putting, growing a bug from.

Fred: No.

Lisa: Like you grew beans. Or like bean varietals right.

Fred: No, we’re not that.

Lisa: No, yeah, yep, good point.

Andrea: We’re just rearing them in large enough numbers that they could be released out in the field.

Lisa: Sure. Is there some though, is there some work that has to go into finding the right bug for the job?

Andrea: Well, that work goes to the USDA where they have a insectary facility in France, where those insects are brought to that facility and they go through rigorous controls to see if they’ll eat on roses, if they’re going to eat your vegetable garden, if they’re going to do other different things even before they’re brought to the United States.

Lisa: Oh, interesting.

Andrea: And then they’re brought to the United States and they go through the rigor here in the United States and Beltsville, Maryland at a USDA facility in Maryland before they’re even considered to be released in the United States. So it’s a very rigorous thing that goes through to get insects okay to come into our country.

Lisa: and that makes sense because the last thing we want to do is bring in something that’s gonna be a problem. Right. You’re trying to solve a problem, not make more problems.

Andrea: Right. There were actually two insects that we raised on purple loosestrife. And not only did we use artificial diet, but in some cases we had to grow the weed in our greenhouse. Greenhouses at the facility. And growing weeds in a greenhouse situation is very, very difficult. a potted weed just doesn’t like to be in pots. Basically. It takes a lot of, TLC to grow weeds in a controlled environment.

Lisa: that’s funny.

Andrea: So there’s a lot of strategies involved with both things. You rear the insect on weeds that you’ve cultivated in a greenhouse. those weeds aren’t necessarily as healthy as they might find out in the regular environment and where it’s located and you have to be on top of it with fertilizers. And we had weed problems in our soils that we used and we made up our own soil mix at our facility which we thought well it did help grow healthier plants, but not as healthy as that you would find out its natural setting.

Fred: They also had some insect problems in there.

Andrea: Yeah. We had aphid problems and

Fred: insectivores on their plants, the weeds they were trying to grow.

Lisa: Of course. That’s funny.

Andrea: Yeah. Our greenhouses weren’t insect-proof. They would come in the cracks and crannies of the greenhouse. But we did our best.

Lisa: Yeah. I mean you’re trying to control a lot of different things there. Why is what you did important? And again, I think it’s important, but I’m curious how you describe it.

Andrea: I think without some sort of biological control for our plant and weed pests or insect pests, we would just become overwhelmed with weed species that ah, aren’t good for anything. They’re not good for grazing, they’re not good for anything. They crowd out our native vegetation and that would just be a detriment to everyone. as slow as biological control is to get established, I would sure hate to see the program disappear because it’s so beneficial. It just cuts out huge costs to growers. farmers that have these weed problems, they don’t know how to get rid of it. Here we might have a solution for you. and they’re excited about it too. They want to, you know, see that, that what they’re doing is a safe control, that it’s not going to hurt their livestock or their kids running through the field or even just the average, person.

Fred: A successful biocontrol program reduces the amount of pesticides that are used. And everybody knows that’s a good thing.

Lisa: Yep. Yeah. I need something in my yard. Biological control of weeds. I have every weed there is.

Andrea: Well there is a control for bindweed.

Lisa: Oh yeah, I have some of that.

Andrea: You can get bindweed mites from the insectary.

Lisa: Can just a regular person go get something from the insectary?

Andrea: Yes.

Lisa: No way.

Andrea: It’s open to the public. You know, there’s there’s a limited supply. You usually get put on a list. And each season as those weeds and insects are at their highest level of production, we have staff and summer employees that will go out and collect those. And we try to fulfill each request that is received.

Lisa: that’s so cool.

Andrea: But sometimes there’s so many requests that we don’t get to everybody every year. But yeah, they’re. There are insects over there that you can actually get for your garden.

Fred: And we can show you how to collect them on your own, too.

Lisa: Yeah?

Andrea: because they are established very well in certain places. But I think the most beneficial insect that is reared at the insectary is the MAC wasp for Oriental fruit moth that the insectary started in 1945 here in Palisade. And they specifically only reared that specific insect. And to lose that culture, with the insect or to have the budget cut so it’s not feasible to rear that insect. I think that would be a huge detriment to this area. Our area here in Palisade is unique in itself and me personally, I’d like to keep it agriculture. And if that means to help out the grower or the farmer, then I’m all for that.

Lisa: So you were talking about this a little bit before, but is there, is it being that the insectary state funded. Is it something where you’re always worried about losing funding?

Andrea: Well, it was in the 80s and early 90s and part of the early 2000s. But we have our supervisor in Denver fights hard. I mean he’s the one that has to come up with a budget for everything. So he works hard, working with the legislators and saying no, this is a very important part of the Department of Agriculture and we need X amount of monies to keep it going.

Fred: we do have some budget shortfalls coming up for the state. So yeah, it’s a worry. It’s always a worry.

Lisa: Yeah, it’s hugely important for this area.

Andrea: It’s a shame that there’s not more public knowledge or that the public doesn’t have the knowledge that these things exist. it’s such a small part of the budget for the Department of Agriculture that it’s easily overlooked. Say, well, this is so much small, this is a smaller piece of the pie. We can get rid of it. But it’s such a, helpful thing for the Department of Agriculture to have that facility here in Palisade. And it’s been fought to be kept here in Palisade. there was talk many times about moving it to Denver. and our local fruit growers got together with legislators and said, no, we need it here. This saves us so much money. It’s such a, it’s a unique specialized program that it would be just a shame to see it go away.

Lisa: Yeah.

Fred: And another thing that’s interesting to point out is once you have biological control established, it’s essentially free because it regenerates itself. And it’s also affordable, it’s very cheap.

Andrea: It’s cyclic as well. as the insects eat out their food, the population of the insects will go down as the weed problems go down and then the weed problem comes back up and so will the insects. So, you know, it’s. Unless there’s some extreme thing that kills off the insects, it’ll always be out there.

Lisa: That’s cool. That is definitely one of those things that I think people don’t realize it’s happening and you don’t really miss or understand the impact of until if it’s taken away. Until it’s gone. Is there anything that you were working on that it just didn’t work out?

Andrea: Well, they all kind of work out. They may not work out like you want it to work out. even with the artificial diet, you had to be very, very careful of using clean sterile equipment to mix up that diet. Because if you get mold or mildew in those little cups that those larvae are feeding on, there’s a dead bug. and the greenhouse situation was very difficult. It was very difficult. We used to rear a little parasitic wasp for alfalfa weevil and our alfalfa in the greenhouse was constantly covered with aphids. It was constantly covered with aphids. And you know, we do everything we could to knock the aphid situation down.

Lisa: it’s ironic!

Andrea: That was my most, I think that was my most problematic was the greenhouse situation. Although I loved working in the greenhouse, that was my favorite place to be. But, yeah, was, it was a challenge. It was more like a game for me. I’m gonna beat this thing. I’m gonna make it work. I’m gonna make it work. And I tried a lot of different things to make it work and sometimes it didn’t. And sometimes it didn’t. But, yeah, as an overall 30 year career I was very blessed to have that job. And yeah, I would push biological control to anybody and everybody. If you don’t, if you didn’t know there’s an insectary in Palisade, there is. And I think anybody that hears this should look up Palisade insectary in Palisade Colorado and give them a call for a tour. go for a tour. You’ll learn some stuff. You’ll come away there with some knowledge that you didn’t know it was out there. And I think you would respect what they do there a little bit more.

Lisa: Yeah, absolutely. What’s your least favorite weed or insect? What do you see that just makes you feel angry.

Andrea: We did work with leafy spurge, which is a noxious weed and it’s toxic to cattle. It’s not a fun weed to work with because it’s kind of like a poinsettia. It has a lactic acid that comes out. It’s real sticky and gooey. But there was an insect that we tried. It was called a Hyles, a hyles moth. It was kind of like a horn worm. Looked like a tomato worm with a little horn and had different colors on it. And I could deal with the larvae when they were little, but when they got as big as my thumb, I just, or my finger, I just couldn’t deal with those. I had to have someone else come and deal with that stage of the insect. But that’s the one I least liked working with.

Lisa: Just gross.

Andrea: Just. Yeah, just grossed me out.

Lisa: That’s fair, that’s fair.

Andrea: I think just on the college level, I know that in a lot of universities, agricultural universities, entomology isn’t a. Isn’t a thing they teach. I couldn’t certainly do what I did without the people I worked with that had a background in entomology or pest management or pathogens and weeds and stuff. we’ve got to keep things like that going. As soon as that disappears, that knowledge disappears. I mean, you lose. You lose a lot of knowledge when somebody retires from their job that they’ve worked there for many years. and it can’t be helped, but, it certainly, can be improved on if those educational classes are still available.

Lisa: Right. You need someone there to pick up the baton. Like, we can’t watch a YouTube about weed management or, you know, increasing bean yield. It’s like you can watch a YouTube to do a lot of things, but that’s not going to solve everything in the future.

Fred: Well, I think an important thing that’s happening in the United States, certainly on the university level and then research level is there aren’t very many young Americans who are getting into that field. And we were filling those positions with people that we’re training, that come from other countries. And that’s not a bad thing. But I really wish that more young Americans would become interested in and involved in all facets of agriculture. And I’d also like to tell an old entomology joke while I’m here.

Lisa: OK

Fred: when you ask somebody who’s going to college if they know what an entomologist is, a lot of them will reply that, yeah, it works with insects or bugs or something like that. And I say, no, it’s a biologist with a biology job. Because if you have a degree in entomology, you’re going to be able to get a job. And that’s not necessarily true if you go into forestry or some of the other biological fields, if you get an entomology degree, you’re guaranteed you’re going to be able to go get a good job.

Lisa: because it applies to so many different fields or?

Fred: Yeah. Well, you can’t have food without, you know, insect control of some kind, whether its biological or using, you know, some of the integrated pest management techniques that we use now. And you know, you need people who understand how to do that and are developing new techniques for managing insect pests as well as just the ecological, side of entomology too. And that’s probably even more underfunded than the agricultural side is. you know, we all know that we have problems with pollinators and the declining numbers and species of insects that we have worldwide is becoming a huge problem. Habitat loss and pesticide use has really decimated the numbers and types of insects that we have. you people all know about the non native European honeybee, which wasn’t in North America up until the 1700s, but we have lots and lots of other pollinators, bees and wasps and accidental pollinators like miller moths and.

Andrea: ants even.

Fred: Yeah, anything that essentially touches a plant can pollinate it.

Andrea: Birds.

Fred: Birds, there’s some mammals. There was a recent study released that show that wolves in, the Middle east are actually pollinating a rare type of plant because they like to rub their muzzles on it. And when they’re doing that, they’re picking up pollen. When they do it again, they’re transferring that pollen to another plant. So, yeah, the entomology world is big and boy, there’s some pretty serious issues that are happening in the world right now with entomology and, you know, lack of insects, insects that are dying out on us.

Andrea: Yeah. Would be great if, people weren’t so insectphobic. Insects are cool. The majority of them will not hurt you.

Lisa: Right. That’s a tough thing to kind of stay positive in the face of that thought. it’s just awesome that you both really worked towards trying to solve that big problem. And I don’t think it gets a lot of attention either. It’s like another one of those things that you don’t notice until it’s not there anymore.

Andrea: Well, the Insectary, like I said, has been here since 1945. The population of Grand Junction, maybe 5% knows that. That’s horrible. We need more public education people that go out there and promote not just with our legislators, but to the general public. And there are, you know, that does happen to a certain degree with the staff at the Insectary. But I think that, I mean that could be somebody’s full time job over there. There’s not the funding for that type of person. So again,

Fred: if the general public knew about all the good work that’s being done over there, they would knock down the doors of any legislature who tried to cut the funding out from under him. So a little more visibility would be great. We need to get the word out that this is here in Palisade and it’s doing really, really good, important work and it needs to continue.

Lisa: How much of your time do you spend, like, talking about bugs?

Andrea: A lot. I mean, we travel. We travel the world, and, we can’t get away from our jobs. We’re retired. But it’s just like, you know, you go someplace new and you see a weed or something, and it’s like, oh, my God, look, they have that here. I wonder if they’re doing anything about that. And a good example for me was we traveled to New Zealand, and lo and behold, we go in this botanical garden in Christchurch, and they’re propagating purple loosestrife.

Lisa: Oh wow.

Andrea: And I was just like, oh, my God, they’re growing it here. And I

Fred: intentionally.

Andrea: Intentionally, yeah. And I found the curator, and they said that was no problem.

Lisa: Really?

Andrea: I’m like, you got to be kidding. It is a huge problem. And later that day, we took a little paddle boat down the Avon river, which, went right by the backside of the botanical gardens, and there was loosestrife growing in that waterway, and it went clear to the ocean.

Lisa: No way. Wow. That’s

Andrea: Yeah.

Lisa: That must have made you see red.

Fred: We often will be driving somewhere, and we’re like, oh, my God. Dalmatian toadflax. And then we’ll stop and pull it all up.

Andrea: Yeah, if it’s a small patch we’ll pull it. Even, a lot of people think that, butter and eggs, it’s called. It looks like a snapdragon. It’s yellow.

Lisa: Oh, yeah. Yellow with the orange center.

Andrea: Yeah. And it’s called

Fred: yellow toadflax.

Andrea: Yellow toadflax or butter and eggs is the more common name for it.

Lisa: That’s bad? I didn’t know that was bad.

Andrea: yeah, it crowds out native vegetation.

Fred: This valley has a huge problem with Russian knapweed. It’s getting a lot worse. People don’t recognize it. And I can see from your face that you don’t.

Lisa: Yeah. What does it look like?

Fred: well like woody form with a very deep perennial taproot. Purple flowers that people think are pretty. And it grows in monocultures. It actually performs chemical warfare on its neighbors, which is called allelopathy, where the roots exude a chemical which prevents other seeds from germinating and other plants from encroaching on it. So it produces these dense monocultures.

Andrea: I worked on that towards the end of my career and that’s. That was a. Not a fun one to work with.

Lisa: Yeah, I don’t think I have any of that in my yard. So I have that going for me.

Fred: Typically you won’t find it in a yard but roadsides railroad right of ways. There never used to be any between Palisade and Clifton on Highway 6, and now there’s some pretty big patches of it. Next year they’re going to be bigger.

Andrea: Because nobody knows what it is. Which you would think that CDOT should have a noxious weed person in their office or several.

Lisa: Right.

Fred: Well, they used to, but budget cuts, they take people like that out of the equation fairly quickly. Well, I haven’t seen the numbers recently, but somewhere around 90% of all of our pesticide use in the United States is used against invasive species that don’t belong here.

Andrea: Whether that’s plant or insect.

Fred: Yeah, plants and insects.

Lisa: That’s amazing.

Fred: If we’d had a better quarantine system, we’d be far better off right now.

Lisa: What was your official title?

Fred: I was technically a research associate. And I went through 1, 2, and 3 as I, progressed up the ladder.

Lisa: what would you call yourself if you were introducing yourself to somebody at a party?

Fred: I would say I was a bean geek. basically, you know, running the bean seed program. We worked with the breeding program and the seeds came to me and I increased those seeds in the field until we had enough to go to trials with them. So, no, I was an agronomist essentially. You know, started out in entomology and then moved over into a specialized field of agronomy, plant breeding, if you will.

Andrea: Which is odd because I worked with insects and Fred was an entomologist and didn’t work with insects.

Lisa: Yeah. That’s interesting. So you both are entomologists at heart, but maybe not even at heart. You now you’re a bean geek at heart.

Fred: Yeah.

Lisa: I think a lot of people who aren’t from Colorado or haven’t been here are surprised that peaches and grapes and things grow here in western Colorado. I don’t know if anybody ever thinks about beans. So why are beans important here for this area?

Fred: Well. I think the single most important thing is that dry beans, pinto beans, a few black beans, yellow beans, that we’re growing here now, they’re all very susceptible to bacterial and fungal diseases. And the factors that increase the problems with those are humidity. And we have very low humidity here. So Mesa County, Delta county and Montrose county are the only three counties that can reliably certify disease free seed. If you start with disease free seed and you plant the seed in an area that has disease problems like eastern Colorado, then you’re going to get probably an additional 30 days of growing season before those diseases manifest themselves in the plants. And this is our earlier genetics, later genetics, we had bred a lot of disease resistance into these plants so that we weren’t, we didn’t really need fungicides as much. But you could delay it essentially by 30 days, the onset of having disease issues by starting with disease-free seed. And that’s why the seed program was here in western Colorado.

Lisa: are beans actually grown commercially around here?

Fred: it used to be a much bigger crop, particularly in Delta and Montrose counties. The price received for producing edible beans is very low compared to some other crops. And it’s seen more as a rotational crop so that you can break disease and insect cycles by rotating in. It’s not really a moneymaker. the guys who are making a little bit more money are the guys that are producing seed. But we’re competing with areas like a small area in Wyoming and Idaho. the state of Idaho is huge in seed production, disease-free seed production, and we haven’t been competing well with them. Part of it’s a scale of economy thing. We’re just too small.

Lisa: is the program still going on today?

Fred: It is sort of going on. When I retired, the bean breeder in Fort Collins who ran the dry bean seed breeding program, he also retired and CSU decided since it’s really a minor crop that they wouldn’t replace him. And also, you know, initially in bean breeding it was all done by USDA and universities. And in the last 20 years private industry has gotten more involved in it and perhaps that’s where plant breeding belongs, is in private industry. I mean we built a lot of really good things in the government sector that helped it along. But there are, mostly private breeders going on, private breeding companies going on right now carrying on the lines of dry bean seed.

Lisa: Andrea, we started to talk about earlier was the funding. So who funds it, who thinks. Who spends the money on it? Right.

Fred: The dry bean seed program was self-funded because we, the breeding program made the crosses and then sent the seed to me. Those seeds were increased in the field so that we had a large enough volume of seed that it could actually be sent out across the United States for head to head trials with other varieties so that we would get information. Obviously the most important one is yield. I mean you have to yield enough to be able to sell it and make some money at it. But also we needed disease resistance and plant architecture that’s upright and makes it easier to harvest and things like that.

Lisa: It must take a really long time because every year you’ve got to, you’re limited to like natural growing conditions. So every year you have a new crop.

Fred: We are. And you know, initially, When I started 35 years ago, it would take about 10 years to bring a cross into a publicly released variety. you start in the greenhouse, you make a cross and you get 26 seeds or 30, a very small number of seeds. And then those seeds would come to the field. In my case, it would come to western Colorado. And I would plant them as individual plant rows and keep track of them as they grow. Because a new cross is still segregating. It’s essentially a hybrid and it’s going to take in case of beans about four years for the outcrossing to disappear. But you have to recognize when those plants are segregating and then keep them separate so that the seed is pure seed.

Lisa: So you have to be very patient.

Fred: And we also, in the early days we didn’t have, the ability to see, essentially to look at the DNA of a plant. But in later years that ability was much greater. So you could actually see what the genomes are in the plant and breed accordingly for that. And also later in our career we had established ourselves in the United States as one of the premier programs. So we were selling our seed and making a little more money and we could afford winter nurseries then because you only get one generation a year in the Northern hemisphere. So initially we sent seeds to Brazil, but it came back full of diseases

Lisa: Counterproductive!

Fred: and that set us back farther than it advanced us. And about the last eight years of my career we were sending seed to the North Island. Excuse me, the north end of the south island of New Zealand where they had very similar growing conditions. And we found a guy who was really good at seed production who could do it for us. So we would get two generations. So that cut essentially 10 years into five so that we could increase the amount of seed that we had available.

Lisa: why is what you did important? I think it’s important, but like why would you say it’s important.

Fred: when people started trying to improve and that’s what we do with crop seeds when we breed them. We’re trying to improve things. primarily yield, disease resistance, seed quality, things like that. We did it because we were getting really low yields. In the 40s and 50s the yield per acre of dry beans was around 600 pounds per acre. Even in the 70s and 80s we were only up to 1,100 to 1,200 pounds per acre. And through selective breeding where we bred for yield, we bred for disease resistance and plant architecture, the plant shape that made the plant able to yield more, we increased those yields from initially 500 to 600 pounds in the 50s and 60s, all the way up to 4,000 pounds in the modern era. And I think it’s also important to say that the breeding techniques being used are pollen transfers. They’re the old fashioned. You cross plant A with plant B and you hope to get a good result. There are no GMO dry beans in the United States.

Lisa: That’s an important point.

Fred: The only one that I’m aware of was a plant that was bred in Brazil and they actually asked permission to use some MA Colorado State University’s genetics for this cross to defeat a virus problem that they have in the southern hemisphere. So the reason we’re doing it is number one, a farmer has to make a profit. it’s a business just like any other business. If they can’t make a profit,

they can’t stay in business. So in order to do that you need to have a plant that you know, has high yield and lower inputs. In this case fungicides, primarily disease resistance that we bred into the root system and to the leaves, typically in somewhere eastern Colorado, western Nebraska, where they have higher humidity, they would have to make two to three applications of a fungicide every year in order to get a full crop. And with that disease resistance that we and other institutions spread in, we took that down to zero in many cases. So we increase, increased the yields four fold, and we decrease the amount of inputs, especially pesticide or fungicide specifically. So I think that’s a pretty good thing.

Lisa: That’s pretty cool.

Fred: People don’t realize in the United States because we have a lot of food choices, but in third world countries, dry beans and rice are what feed the majority of people. So, not only did we benefit from it, but those other people get to use our genetics. University programs don’t really prevent other people from using the genetics like some of the private companies do. We did patent our seeds so that growers would have to pay us a very small royalty in order to use our seeds. But nothing compared to private industry.

Lisa: Interesting. Seems fair.

Fred: Well, we patented them because we had to fund our programs.

Lisa: Right.

Fred: You know, the taxpayers can’t foot the bill for everything. if you’re able to generate some income by selling the seed that you have bred and then later released to the public, then you can pay for the program.

Lisa: Yep. Makes sense. Fred, was there ever like any challenge or any project you had that you just weren’t able for some reason to solve? What made you just bang your head against the wall?

Fred: Well, dry beans are traditionally harvested by cutting the roots and piling them in a windrow and letting them dry and then combining them. And this is because the pod load is carried very low on the plant. So it’s not like a soybean plant where you can run a sickle bar or a combine head under them and pick up the whole plant. So it’s cut and then wind rowed into a, you know, like, hay. And then you come by and pick it up with the combine after that. But when it’s cut and laying in that windrow, it’s very, susceptible to wind. Can blow it away or rain can get on it and cause, you know, mildew, it discolors the seeds, all sorts of things.

And all the programs in the United States are still working, that are left, are still working to essentially breed a direct combinable dry bean. One that that carries its pod load high enough off the ground that a sickle can get under it and harvest the whole plants all at once. That will take away problems that you have with losing yield because of wind and also damage by water, thunderstorms, etc. And it’s not been real successful yet. I mean it’s a slow change. it’s very common for direct combining to occur in places like North Dakota which have more wind and rain problems than we have. And they are losing a lot of yield because they’re harvesting our old fashioned dry beans that have the pod load very close to the ground and they’re accepting a 25% loss in order to avoid having their beans blow away or get ruined by a thunderstorm. So eventually somebody’s going to get the right genetic combination, will have a very strong stem that carries the seed pods very high off the ground. It’ll happen someday. But that was one thing that we tried for a long time and just, it was frustrating.

Lisa: Yeah. That’s so interesting though. It’s like the relay race of, you did such a big piece of it and then you pass it on.

Andrea: anything that has to do with agriculture is a long, drawn out process and there’s a lot of patience and hard work that goes into that. I personally don’t grow a garden. We do grow a garden but

Fred: Fred grows a garden.

Andrea: Fred grows a garden. I would just as soon help our local growers. They work hard at it. I’ll pay them to grow my food.

Lisa: I completely agree with you by the way.

Andrea: It’s just a slow process and you just have to have patience. Patience is huge.

Lisa: Yeah, I’d rather pay the farmer to grow my food personally because I’d starve.

Fred: I spent 40 years in agriculture and I still really enjoy growing my garden, my small garden in the backyard.

Lisa: I mean the food does taste great when it comes out but.

Andrea: Fred has always wanted to plant fruit trees in our yard and I’m like no, we’re gonna support our local grower.

Fred: Agricultural research at a university level is suffering from really bad funding. And I think that’s definitely the biggest problem that we had. And we were using 40 and 50 year old equipment and we spent as much time mechanicking and fabricating equipment to keep it in the field to perform the research. And you know, the dry bean harvesting that was going on at the Western Colorado Research Center, to me it’s mind boggling that we will not fund agricultural research in the United States to the level that could really make it so much, so much more powerful. I mean we could do great things if we weren’t fighting poor equipment all the time.

Lisa: Yeah, that’s a good point. When you have to spend a lot of time repairing things. So you really had to be multifaceted there to keep things running.

Fred: Well, I came out of of college with an entomology degree and I didn’t really have very good mechanical abilities. But I learned. I became a fabricator, a welder, troubleshooter, problem solver and you know, it’s good to have that ability. But if we’d had better equipment to start with, we could have put much more effort into the actual nuts and bolts of what research is in the field.

Lisa: So looking to now or to the future, what do. It’s you probably just already answered that. But what do you think is the biggest challenge that our current kind of generation of researchers and scientists are dealing with in the Grand Valley, what do you see is being some of the big issues in the future that they’re gonna have to figure out how to handle?

Andrea: funding.

Lisa: that’s what I was like, I feel like you probably just answered that.

Fred: And also, you know, I’m going to come at it from a row crop agriculture position because that’s what I did. And that’s somewhat different than the fruit a little bit. But the two biggest problems I see are water availability in the future. I mean everybody, there’s a water shortage and everybody wants our water.

Andrea: That’s true for the fruit industry too. For anything.

Fred: Well, it is, and they’re going to either buy our water from us and it’s already happening in the back in the Grand Valley. You know, large wealthy corporations or whatever you want to call them are already buying water shares from this valley. and another problem that people probably don’t see is we have a big salinity problem. Our soils are becoming. If you irrigate soils, they will leave behind what’s in the water. We have a lot of salt in our water, it comes from the mancos shale formations in the valley. And, high saline soils will reduce our yields and they are becoming slightly more saline. So we need to work on methods that will, not only leave less, less salts in our soils, but also breed plants that are salt tolerant. And it’s not just a local Grand Valley problem. This is a worldwide problem.

Lisa: So you agree on water and funding?

Andrea: Oh yes. Most definitely.

Fred: In an area like ours, it gets 10 inches of precip a year. You’re not going to grow anything without supplemental water. And it’s got to come from somewhere. And, all those people downstream from us, they want it as badly as we do and they’re wealthier in a lot of cases. We didn’t even talk about the tamarisk.

Andrea: Yeah.

Lisa: Oh yeah.

Fred: Which has been a success story.

Andrea: Yeah, that’s a huge success story. I didn’t work on the project myself but I knew enough about the project. tamarisk was brought over from Eurasia as a like

Fred: soil stabilizer.

Andrea: soil stabilizer, wind block. and it got out of control. so there’s an insect here that we reared at the insectary. Two different species and it’s a leaf defoliator. so the larvae feed on the leaves. They get to full term as a larvae. They drop down into the ground and pupate. And then the adult emerges and the process starts over and over and cycles like that. it’s been a huge success story on the Colorado river. As you may have noticed driving from here to Fruita or even Moab. there’s been a lot of mechanical use on it in the Moab area where they go down and cut it off and then put it through a chipper whatever.

Fred: Dig up the roots.

Andrea: Dig up the roots. But the tamarisk beetle is a huge, huge.

Fred: You’ll be driving along the Colorado river and see what appears to be dead or dying brown plants. That’s from the tamarisk beetle.

Lisa: OK

Andrea: It’s not from herbicides or chemicals.

Lisa: Not from a drought or anything like that.

Andrea: Nope. Those insects, they pick out the. I don’t know how they sense which tree to go to because one tree will be covered with insects and the other trees not. Doesn’t have anything on. I don’t. There’s some sort of pheromone, natural pheromone that the tamarisk, tree puts out that attracts the insects. And but yeah, the insects will keep attacking it year after year until it finally kills it. and then if it does come back at the roots it, it will get that new growth from coming up and spreading it again. But yeah, the tamarisk is one of the biggest salt emitters in the Colorado river basin.

Lisa: Right. So, yeah. So do you see many like healthy growing tamarisk around anymore?

Fred: Oh yeah, lots.

Lisa: Yeah?

Andrea: Yeah, lots.

Fred: But not like it was.

Andrea: I mean you’ll even see it in. Well, we go to the San Rafael swell a lot to ATV and even in the canyons there, where you wouldn’t even think it would be there. There it is, you know, but it probably got spread by a bird, picked up a seed and got dropped off by an animal or a bird or something. But yeah, it’s amazing how quickly it will take over a willow, a natural willow. where willows can be just as thick and dense to get through as a tamarisk culture. But the willow is native and that was one one problem that a lot of people were against releasing the tamarisk beetle because there was an endangered bird that nested in the tamarisk

Fred: Willow fly catcher.

Andrea: the western willow fly catcher. But what they didn’t realize is as soon as the tamarisk is gone, the willows will come back and there will still be the place for the bird to nest. well, I don’t know if I should go into that.

Fred: There is a real missing component of biological control, and it comes back to the nature abhors a vacuum, is if you bring in an insect and it wipes out whatever weed was there, you’re going to have bare ground, something is going to come back in. And if man doesn’t do it, and we aren’t currently doing that very well, it’s going to be another invasive weed. You can see it in De Beque Canyon where we had the big fire that killed all the cottonwoods and a lot of the tamarisk. We’ve got a huge Russian knapweed problem coming in there now.

Andrea: taken over by cheat grass.

Fred: If there’d been a mechanism for having people to come in and re-seed it and re-vegetate it, we would have maybe been able to prevent that from happening. It’s a missing component.

Lisa: Sure. Yeah. Because what’s gonna take over after something has been burnt especially is whatever grows the quickest and easiest.

Fred: Yeah, that’s gonna be an invasive probably.

Andrea: Invasive probably. more than likely.

Lisa: Before we end, I’m curious from each of you. What’s your favorite thing about Palisade? That’s something I like to ask people. Like what keeps you here?

Andrea: that is small. and there’s no traffic lights. And other than the big gas station out by the interstate, it’s pretty much, light pollution free.

Lisa: Yeah. Great stars.

Andrea: It was a great place to grow up. And the fruit here is very beneficial too. So.

Fred: Yeah. I love our small town culture and the people that we have in Palisade. We’ve got some really great people here.

Andrea: It’s a friendly place for the most part whereas you go into Grand Junction, people just put up their little blinders and keep on doing what they’re doing. But you know, here you can pretty much stop on the street and talk to anybody, which I like that about a small town. I wish my nieces and nephews would have grown up in a small town.

Fred: If you’re an outdoor recreation minded person, there’s so many things. It might not be right next door in Palisade, but we can go into the Utah canyon country. We can go look for petroglyphs, we can cross country ski on Grand Mesa, ski at Powderhorn, raft the river. Not very many places that have all those things right together.

Lisa: Well, thank you both so much for your time. This is really great. I really appreciate it.

LM: As I was editing this episode, I realized that Fred, Andrea, and I spent a lot of time talking about invasive species but we didn’t get into what the average person could do to stop their spread. So I reached out to them afterwards to get their thoughts. This is what Fred said:

“Regarding invasive species, it’s most important to be knowledgeable and aware. For most people this means just to be aware that invasives are a problem for any ecology […] just the idea that it’s a problem without knowing specifics is good enough.

Buy plants from a reputable local nursery; [choosing] native plants [is] a way to avoid invasives and [is] better for our environment since they are adapted to our climate, possibly drought tolerant, and may benefit other natives like native pollinators. [To paraphrase something we talked about too: don’t collect seeds you find somewhere and plant them at home because you could easily be planting an invasive species.]

If in doubt get expert advice. Colorado State University’s Tri-River Extension office in Mesa County will have the best up to date science-based information on plants and insects. Call or visit them at the county fairgrounds and they will direct you to an expert.” You can reach them at 970-244-1834 or https://tra.extension.colostate.edu/

Thanks to Fred for the great tips, and to Andrea and Fred for the hard work they continue putting into improving the valley they love.

Are you currently doing work in these or other biological fields in the Grand Valley? If so, I’d love to hear from you. I’m also still looking for more Grand Valley myths and legends – either your take on what we covered last episode or others that we didn’t get into. You can email me at lisa(at)postcardsfrompalisade.com.

The podcast’s theme music is Riverbend by Geoff Roper.

Thanks for listening. With love, from Palisade.

Go deep into a few of the most notorious Grand Valley myths and legends with two of my Palisade pals, LisaMarie Pinder and Corinna Scott. Hear the stories behind the infamous jar of Grand Valley dirt (8:18), the thunderbird on the Mesa (18:51), the vengeful train conductor (26:47), where you can find bits and pieces of historic coal mines (29:58), why Palisade has twin houses (33:50), and where you can find old labor camp cabins around town (37:02).

Are you familiar with these stories? Or maybe you know a slightly different version? Are there other Grand Valley myths and legends that we didn’t cover? If so, I’d love to hear from you. You can email me at lisa(at)postcardsfrompalisade.com. I’d love to share more stories on a future podcast episode.

Theme Music: Riverbend by Geoff Roper  

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Transcript:

Welcome to Postcards From Palisade, where we hear from the people who are shaping our slice of western Colorado. I’m Lisa McNamara.

Today we’re talking about a few of the most notorious Grand Valley myths and legends with two of my Palisade pals, LisaMarie Pinder and Corinna Scott.

We go deep into the stories behind the infamous jar of Grand Valley dirt, the thunderbird on the Mesa, and the vengeful train conductor. We also chat about where you can find bits and pieces of historic coal mines, why Palisade has twin houses, and where you can find old labor camp cabins around town.

Keep listening to hear LisaMarie and Corinna’s favorite Grand Valley myths and legends, on today’s Postcard from Palisade.

Lisa: So today I’m joined by two of my wonderful friends. LisaMarie Pinder.

LisaMarie: Hello. Nice to be here with you.

Lisa: And Corinna Scott.

Corinna: Hello. Also nice to be here with both of you. All of you.

Lisa: I think that you are both two of the most interesting people that I know. And you both have such great stories and are such great storytellers. So I’m really excited to talk with you both and just hear about all the myths and legends that you know about Palisade. do you want to go ahead and start first and introduce yourself?

LisaMarie: I am LisaMarie Pinder. I was born and raised here in Palisade, Colorado, graduated from Palisade High School (Go Bulldogs) in 97. I moved, to Austin, Texas in 1998, and then I returned home in 2020 and I’ve been here last four years with my awesome husband, Garry, and I take care of my mom full time and she has Alzheimer’s disease.

In 2021, my husband was finally able to come and join me here in Palisade. And you know him coming from Austin, Texas, coming from a big city. He’s, a music producer and a professional musician, as well as having a real job, which my mom loves, but super talented, incredible producer, and has a ton of music out there. So if you want to check out his stuff, just look up Install on Spotify and you’ll find all of his stuff. Or check out Bandcamp and search Install or Mr. Garry Franklin and check out his, music.

Garry, and that is with double Rs. Not one R.

Corinna: Oh, Garry two Rs. Yes. We love Garry two R.

Corinna: I started a million years ago in Austin, Texas. and then we moved to Pennsylvania, when I was fairly young. So I grew up outside of Philadelphia. I came to Palisade for the first time around 2008. Had a friend who moved out here, and I came out to visit and, as I like to tell people, I caught a Ute curse. And, now here I am all these years later. I moved out permanently with my son in 2018. He is now a freshman at Palisade High School. Go Bulldogs. and we just love it here. You know, I never wanted to be anywhere else. Once I went up the monument one time. It’s pretty much how it worked. And then I moved here and met you incredible ladies and our great group of friends and, you know, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

Lisa: And I don’t know how many people know this, but Corinna is the voice, the punster behind the sign at Dinomart.

Corinna: Yes, yes. I, manage the Sinclair Dinomart, here in Palisade. 309 West 8th Street. Please come visit us. And I absolutely love being able to try to be concisely clever, in putting phrases, words, whatever I can up on the sign. Sometimes they’re really super personal to the store. Lots of happy birthdays. you know, we have our regulars. We really enjoy being like, we’re family owned. my boss is me, him and two other people. It’s just four of us that run the store and we really like being a part of the community.

Lisa: what’s the favorite sign you’ve ever done

Corinna: I think my favorite, if I had to pick, Snoop Dogg is a very. I think Snoop’s been mentioned pretty, regularly on there. but I had one after the super bowl that I was able to put Snoop d o double g. And that really, like, made me happy that I could fit that phrase. and then I think the most popular one that I heard about, like, from the furthest reaches, like, I got a picture of a screenshot from somebody else in like Nevada maybe, was the temps are higher than Willie Nelson one. That one was very well received.

Lisa: I love it.

Corinna: The Palisade Dinomart is across from the C&F, which is a Conoco, which I find hilarious because if you go into my store, you will see right by the front register. Priscilla Walker gave us a, picture of the store in 1968 when it was a Conoco gas station. So it was the original gas station in town that building I believe was built in 64. The picture that we have is from 68. And there’s like a really specific way to line it up.

When they redid the store, eventually they added on kind of to both sides. So then we got Diorio’s on the one side and then the liquor store, and the Kratom shop on the other side. But it used to just be that one section, and it was a Conoco. And then at some point, you know, I don’t know when they built the actual C&F and then it became a Sinclair. And it’s been a Sinclair, as far as I know, for at least 30 years.

LisaMarie: Longer than that.

Corinna: Longer than that. I know that dinosaur needs. My poor dino needs a paint job. Anybody knows anything about painting fiberglass, let a girl know. You can really like line up, you know, like that window. when they did.

LisaMarie: I think I remember it being like.

Corinna: It used to be 5Bs.

LisaMarie: Yeah, like a gas station. But more. Had more automotivey kind of stuff too. That’s what I remember it being when I was, you know, like really young.

Corinna: And then it had the sandwich shop. It was 5B for a long time. And the B

LisaMarie: I forgot that it was the 5B. Oh my god.

Corinna: And the 5B was the like it was the kids names. They all started with B. And there was two twin girls

LisaMarie: I totally forgot about that.

Corinna: that drove. I have heard legend of these hot twins that drove a jeep in their cutoffs in the early 80s and worked at the store. And I love hearing. it used to be the old man coffee stop like way back the guys like there used to be more of a counter area in there. and they would come in and they got free coffee and they would just sit there and shoot the breeze for hours and hours. but so then every once in a while somebody will walk in and look around and be like wow. They did a full renovation about eight years ago because there used to be a pass through into what is now Palisade Kombucha. Used to be a little sandwich shop. And you would like go in the store and you could walk through the back and get to the sandwich shop. so they. I guess about. It’s probably been eight or nine years now that they renovated that and got rid of it. or closed that off and made it like its own separate thing.

LisaMarie: You just like unlocked a memory. Like I had this flood of like. Oh my gosh. How many things I remember I had like. Sorry Sinclair, I didn’t mean to block you out. Apparently I’d forgotten about it but now that was. That was great. Thank you. Thank you for unlocking a core memory. I remember getting a sandwich there and going down and fishing underneath the Colorado bridge off a Highway 6 down like where we drop in to go rafting. A core memory of sitting there with my dad fishing and eating a sandwich from the 5B.

Corinna: The 5B. Yep. I can’t remember all the Bs but you know it was like Barry, Barbie. Well I guess that’d be Barbara but it was the kids names were all B. So that’s what the parents named the store was 5B and the family owned it for quite a number of years. I’ve had one or two of the actual family members stop in. but I found out about that legend from the old football coach. He’s one of my regulars and comes in and tells me.

Lisa: and if you don’t already have right. I’m sure you have a ton of regulars. But if anybody doesn’t go to the Sinclair and knows stories about the building, you’ve got to go come talk to Corinna.

Corinna: oh please come talk to me. I’m there six to two Monday through Thursday and all kinds of other random times too. If you need me, go to Sinclair. They will get me there post haste.

Lisa: We’re here to talk about legends and myths. And so just to define what a legend or myth is is that there’s going to be different interpretations of it and somebody listening is going to say, that’s not how I heard it from my mom. Or that’s not what I believe. And so that’s the point though. There’s facts behind everything, but a myth or a legend is a story at the end of the day. So, was there anywhere you want to start?

LisaMarie: Well, funny you ask Lisa, because I brought my jar of dirt. So when I, was a very smart person and graduated high school, I decided to run away to the big city and moved to Austin, Texas. It was like August of 1998, I guess. I grew up, growing up here in Palisade. I had two aunts. One, my aunt Jean, who very much followed a lot of indigenous culture, myth and mythologies. my other aunt, Roberta Keeler, was also, a kindergarten teacher in Teec Nos Pos, Arizona on the reservation and also lived in Cortez for a long time. She happened to adopt three Ute Indian children that were. Her best friend was very ill and so she took over the care of them. So growing up from a very young age I was surrounded by a lot of indigenous culture, whether it be Navajo, Anasazi, Ute, and then obviously having three adopted cousins that I love very, very much. my aunt really wanted to keep their spirits alive of like, who they were. And so we went to a lot of pow wows, things of that nature. Anyhoo, when I was gonna leave, my Aunt Jean was like, you better get your jar of dirt. I was like, is this a prank? Like what are we talking about here? But I kind of heard about it, but didn’t really know all that much about it.

The mythology of taking a jar of dirt with you when you leave the Grand Valley stems from, from what I have been told. back in 1881 when the last Ute people were forced out of the valley, the legend is that the chief cursed the valley and that nothing would come of this place. It would stay desolate and that anyone that moved here would, you know, be forced to stay here and suffer kind of. Is from my interpretation of what I heard. So the only way to circumvent said and then if. Then also so you’d be stuck here forever. So the only way you could ever leave the valley and be prosperous when you left, is you had to take dirt from the four corners of the valley and take it with you and keep it with you always. And the legend follows that if you don’t take said jar of dirt that you will be forced to return here under dire circumstances.

Corinna: So I think we’re similar. I’m glad. Okay.

LisaMarie: Yeah. So that’s always what I’ve told. And my aunt, you know, I’d heard it kind of before, but my aunt really impressed upon me that I needed a jar of dirt. Right before I left, a girlfriend of mine came over with this beautiful, you know, foot tall jar. it’s like a 3 by 3 inch, I don’t know, 12 inch jar. And she says, get in the car, we’re going to get your dirt. So her and I had a wonderful afternoon riding around and we went to the four corners. Or what we thought would be the four corners. So, in this jar there is dirt from the bookcliffs. Right here.

Lisa: Okay. Which is kind of like a lighter whitish color.

LisaMarie: Yeah. At the bottom and you can kind of see that it’s real shale right there. then the next one is on top of the mesa. So this is the very top of the Grand Mesa, like kind of near lands in road where the best chipmunks or land squirrels if you want are. And then this guy is from the Colorado National Monument. This is like from Cold Shivers point. Went and got this dirt. And then this guy’s from the Uncompahgre. So we went down like Dominguez Canyon, I guess more it Escalante Canyon off a Bridgeport road out past White Water. And so these are my three corners or four. Four corners of the dirt.

Lisa: So it’s like whiteish, brownish, orangeish, greenish. It’s very visually beautiful.

LisaMarie: So I took this jar of dirt and I left, ran away of the big city, went to Austin, Texas. And I’ve had this jar of dirt always sitting in the living room where I can see it the entire time I’ve lived in Austin. in 2020 when Covid hit, I got a call from my mom’s friends because my mom still lives here in Palisade, that my mom was not acting right. And so I flew down here right away to check on her and find out what was going on and quickly realized that dementia had hit her pretty bad. So with it being Covid, I stayed here and was here taking care of my mom while my husband and daughter’s still in Austin. And I didn’t have my damn jar of dirt. I was just here without my dirt. So it was pretty upsetting. Anyways, come to find out, my mom, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and I’ve taking care of her ever since for the last four years. And she’s the awesomest, bestest lady in the world. She deserves the best care because she is literally a wonderful mom and been a wonderful friend and a wonderful steward of the community. Anyways, finally 2021, my husband was able to come up here and join me and I went and got my jar of dirt in Austin and packed her up and brought her home.

And some people are like, well, you still had your jar of dirt but you still had to come home for this bad circumstance cause of your mom. And you know what? I had already wanted to come home to Colorado. I was so sick of being in Texas, for a lot of reasons. I wanted to come home and be back in the four. You know, the have four seasons being in the mountains. Be back in a small community. I missed having a small community rather than just being a number in a big city.

So honestly, coming back here and being able to spend the time to quality time I’m spending with my mom. Moving back here allowed me to make wonderful friendships. Moving back here made me allowed me to be part of the community like I want to. I volunteer my time as a planning commissioner for the town of Palisade and I love being able to do that. And so while I do have my jar of dirt and I did have to come back here, ultimately it was one of the best decisions I could have made for myself and hopefully for my husband, but and ultimately of course for my mom. But I think my carrying around my little jar of dirt this whole time actually was part of happiness rather than despair.

Corinna: I love it. Yeah, I love your jar of dirt.

Lisa: That’s beautiful.

Corinna: And so our stories or not stories, but like our understanding of it is not too dissimilar. Although in my head, although these are very visually different colors. The Uncompahgre comprises like technically is not the monument.

LisaMarie: They were the four. That’s the furthest spot that way. That’s the furthest spot that way.

Corinna: So when I heard the story, it was more that the valley is made up of a triangle, right? Because you have the Uncompahgre on this side and you have the mesa here and then you have the bookcliffs here. So you’re like in this triangle. So you had to take dirt from or the way that I’d heard it originally was if you didn’t take dirt from all three areas of the valley or all three corners, but I guess, you know, we’re going triangle. then you were always destined to return. So my thing was I was like, well, I wouldn’t wear the same shoes if I hiked up Garfield as I would if I went and like hiked on the monument. Because I didn’t want to accidentally. The way that I heard it was that if you did not take the dirt with you, then you were always destined to return. Not that it was a negative thing necessarily, just that you were always destined to return to the valley if you didn’t leave with all the dirt with you. So in my head, if I didn’t leave with those mixtures of dirt with me. Right. Like, then I was good.

Lisa: Yeah. So you would stay here.

Corinna: So I kept returning.

LisaMarie: Well, there’s.

Corinna: And here I am.

LisaMarie: I’ve heard the legend also be that you had to get it from the top of Mount Garfield. Specifically one dirt. Then I’ve heard the three. I’ve heard the whole three triangle thing. And one of them is, at where the Colorado and the Gunnison meet or what was the Grand in the Gunnison that led to be calling Grand Junction.

Corinna: Love it.

LisaMarie: That you had to take dirt from there, the monument and the bottom of Mount Garfield. So I’ve heard that one too. And that’s very specific as to where exactly supposed to get it, but with the same connotation. And I was actually trying to look up like Mr. Dave Fishell and Palisade Historical Society Tribune woot woot!

Corinna: Love them.

LisaMarie: And I couldn’t really. That’s pretty much the gist of the same thing that I kept reading with everybody else. But, with the way I grew up and having more exposure to more indigenous cultures, it made total sense to me. And I thought that I should not mess with this legend.

Corinna: Yeah, for me too as well.

Lisa: But I like the way you’ve interpreted it where you’re like, I don’t want to accidentally collect all those three dirts so that I’m not going to be able to come back.

Corinna: Right, right. So like, I spent 10 years coming to visit before I moved. Right. It was. I came out here in 2008 and I was like, boom, 10 year plan. My oldest was at the time, eight. And I was like, I’m gonna get you through high school and then, you know, we’ll go from there. And so that was always the plan. That’s what I did. Took me ten years. but I would come out here for the weekend because it was cheaper to fly out here and get a cheap rental car. Like, I would fly to Denver. I would get a cheap rental, like 12 bucks a day. Amazing. And I would fly out here. I would stay with my friend. You know, we would go do too many shots for a flat lander at the distillery before they measured their pours. And I can no longer have cherry lime aide flavored anything. So there’s that. That might be the Palisade legend.

Lisa: oh my gosh

Corinna: is that if you don’t wind up on the floor after a night at the still.

LisaMarie: we could have a whole podcast about the livery. I mean, come on.

Lisa: Oh, my God yeah. Oh jeez.

Corinna: we can. I like to point out the bullet holes in the ceiling to people that have not noticed them.

Lisa: Yeah.

Corinna: It’s always fun. It’s just like, yeah, just look up.

Lisa: Actual bullet holes are in the ceiling.

Corinna: Yeah, there’s all kinds of great, wonderful things that have taken place at the livery.

Lisa: Yeah. Well so before we move on from the dirt, though. So I think the moral of the story is basically, if you want to leave, just get as much dirt as you can from everywhere. And then get out of here.

LisaMarie: I would think it should be take dirt from whatever area means the most to you. If it’s your childhood home and it’s a happy or, something that gives you good memories, dig up some of the dirt from there and throw it and jar and take it with you. Or if it’s a special place or a park or wherever. I think that’s the moral of the story is taking something that means to you, you know, means something to you.

Lisa: I like that.

LisaMarie: so that’s how I would apply the jar of dirt theory.

Lisa: Good stuff

LisaMarie: for collection purposes.

Lisa: Yeah. Okay, cool.

Corinna: I like it.

Lisa: So, yeah, going back to the liv, then. I mean, we can’t talk about anything that we’ve done there.

LisaMarie: What? I’ve never been there. I don’t know what you mean.

Corinna: Is that the livery over here.

Lisa: I have never been to livery.

Corinna: Can you take me to the livery? People have asked me before. Yes, I will happily take you to the livery.

Lisa: All right, next myth. What’s the next one you want to talk about?

Corinna: I like the Thunderbird story.

LisaMarie: Thunderbird story is gonna cause controversy.

Lisa: Oh, yeah. Ooo.

LisaMarie: Because everybody tells it a little different. But I think you know it the best because I’m sure you’ve heard Dave tell it.

Corinna: I’ve heard the Dave version, and I learned it from Dave shout out to Dave Smith Pali Tours. Dave’s who taught me that story existed so then I went on my nerdy deep dives, which is what I like to do. And that’s how I know so much random facts about Palisade. If we’re being honest. A: I have done the historical society’s walking tour numerous times. Maybe not always walking, usually on a bike. Love a pedal. but then I literally in my phone, if I were to go over there and get it, but I’m not gonna. My top saved search window in my internet is Colorado historical papers. So, like, if I hear a story, like, I decided I wanted to look up more about the Gearhart mine, there used to be a man named Zeke Phillips that owned that mine. If you look up Zeke Phillips in the Palisade tribune, you can get all kinds of stories. Zeke like hit a train with his truck and still drove the truck away. You know, just limped it on home. He wasn’t gonna be stopped. But that’s like the kind of things. So I get off track. What was I talking about before that?

Lisa: Thunderbird. Dave Smith.

LisaMarie: The Thunderbird.

Corinna: Dave Smith, you’re gonna edit all that part out. So, yes, shout out to Dave Smith, from Pali Tours for telling me about the Thunderbird. and then if you go online, Seth Anderson, who is one of the founding, brothers that founded Loki Outdoor Gear. Seth, has numerous, published articles and stories. And it’s. I mean, most of what you can find about the Thunderbird online, somehow is like. Like either it’s Seth’s telling of it to various things or it’s him like saying here like, I’ve read quite a few. most of them start. But it always. You get Seth Anderson. You can find it. There’s many a pathway to a different, Thunderbird article.

But so the story that I know of the Thunderbird on the side of the mesa is that there was a great warrior who came home to the village one day and all the village children were missing. and so he rounded up some other warriors and they went on a search and, they went up and they found small children sized bones in the Thunderbird’s nest. So in retribution for their, losing the youngsters from their tribe, they took the eggs from the Thunderbird’s nest and dropped them into the, river. And so then the Thunderbird comes back to its nest and sees that its eggs are missing, and is searching for it and is picking up boulders and tossing them down and picking up boulders and tossing them down, and then finally realizes that the snake, AKA the river, has its babies, picks up the snake shakes it all around, fills in the holes. And that’s how we get 300 lakes on top of the mesa. Because the Thunderbird angrily threw, which understandably, threw down these boulders and created all these beautiful lakes. and then the river filled it in. Now I will say that the river filling it in. sometimes in my telling of it, I like to be really dramatic and say that the Thunderbird’s tears filled it in. but I have to be being in a very dramatic mood.

LisaMarie: Hey, it’s folklore, man. You can change however you want.

Corinna: So I’ve told this story both ways, to different groups of passengers, I’m sure. But usually I stick to the snake because then I get to talk about the river and I love the river.

Lisa: So. And so then that’s what’s in the side of the cliff then memorialized. Is the Thunderbird picking up the snake?

Corinna: Yeah, because if you look, you can see like the sides of the wings. And then you can see it’s like talons like grabbing like what looks like a snake. And there’s our Thunderbird.

LisaMarie: Right. So it looks one wing. Looks like there’s a like a snake dangling from it.

Corinna: Yeah.

LisaMarie: I’ve heard so many different variations of that story. I did see an idiot one time post online, like, what’s the name of the bird shaped, image on the mesa that was carved in by the Ute tribe? I was like, okay, now this is when you’re like, no, that’s not remotely true.

Corinna: That’s actually not how that happened.

LisaMarie: which I’m sure a lots of people would have to say, especially about the Thunderbird in particular or, you know, even things like the swan on the side of the mesa. You know, and you’re supposed to don’t plant your crops until the swan’s neck breaks. you know, those kind of little things. on the very front of the mesa, some people say it’s a bear, some people say it’s a rhino. That’s also contention sometimes.

Corinna: Well that’s what the mesa is known for is the rhinoceros population. Yes.

LisaMarie: Yep.

Lisa: Of course.

LisaMarie: It’s clearly a bear.

Lisa: And I know, I know Corinna, you mentioned one time that you wanted to hike up and try to find that location and just see what it looks like.

Corinna: I do. I have also circling back to Seth Anderson. read his tale. He almost died on the Thunderbird. Like. More than once.

LisaMarie: Yeah. hiking something and got lost.

Corinna: Yeah. Well, I think once was snow maybe related I don’t want to mistell that story. The other was like basically a rock slide. But I have a 14 year old son who likes to say things to me like don’t forget mom thrills kills when I’m telling him of the wild things I would like to go to like go rock climb the Thunderbird or something like that. I got four more years to constantly remind myself that my kid can’t be an orphan.

LisaMarie: I actually have. I went to the base of the Thunderbird this summer and I had never been up there. But being part of the planning commission, I went with other commissioners and our town trustees and town water public works and awesome fire department and people that do wildfire rescues and wildfire prevention. I was able to take some ATVs and go all the way up through our watershed. the cool part about touring that was seeing you know, as things need repaired in town as we look at the future about trying to protect our water supply here in Mesa County. It was very cool to go and look at all of that and understand it so we can make sure we get the correct funds allocated to help protect our stuff.

Anyways, coolest part is the one of the top of our part of our watershed is, is the bottom of the Thunderbird. I got up there and I thought I was going to. Well, I think I did cry. It was actually my birthday. but it was just very cool to see it up close. Because when you’re in far like in. Let’s say if you’re in Grand Junction and you’re looking east to the mesa, you see it so much more clearly. and it just still looks like this really large, large outcrop rock outcropping. but when you get really close to it it totally changes your whole perspective of how it looks. like all of that volcanic. It’s not basalt.

Lisa: I think it’s basalt.

LisaMarie: Is it basalt?

Corinna: It is basalt.

LisaMarie: Thank you.

Corinna: smarter than I look

LisaMarie: I don’t know my rocks right now. Huge outcropping of those rocks. But it is really kind of amazing to see up close.

Lisa: Yeah. All right. Four years. Maybe I’ll know how to rock climb by then. Probably not.

Corinna: Well, we got you. Will be fine.

Lisa: Just hoist me up.

Corinna: I know like if you do the rim trail hike even you can see it. there’s all kinds of cool rocks. Sorry, you said rocks. because there’s that there used to be like they used to pull gypsum like there’s a mine claim right there like just to the east when you’re going up that first pitch.

Lisa: Oh yeah.

Corinna: Right before you get to the rock that has the thing that that guy put on there. That little thing.

Lisa: which that mystery was solved.

Corinna: But yeah you can see like gypsum rock right there which I don’t know I find I think that’s really cool.

Lisa: Yeah. So.

LisaMarie: smoke break?

Lisa: You want to do smoke break?

LisaMarie: Yeah, keep going or smoke break.

Corinna: I’m always down for a smoke break.

LisaMarie: So we can regroup and think about what we other stories we can tell. So it’s not just us rambling.

Lisa: OK, to be continued.

Lisa: Okay.

LisaMarie: Alright. What are we talking about next?

Lisa: ghost stories or train stories or mine story.

Corinna: Yes, we could just start with the. We’ll just start with the mine and then. Or we’ll just start the Train, I don’t know.

Lisa: Oh, let’s start with the train. And then the train ties into the mine too. So. So I know one thing that somebody had asked me, I think it was Bill McDonald had said, you should do an episode about the trains. And I’m like, yeah, okay, that’s really interesting. But like, I don’t even know where to start with that. But I know something that I always wonder, especially when I’m laying awake in middle of the night listening to the trains, like, lose their minds. Is like, why do the trains make different sounds? Who brought it up first?

LisaMarie: I did.

Lisa: Okay.

LisaMarie: I live on one. Lisa Ann lives on one side of the tracks, and I live on the other side of the tracks. We both live in a close proximity to the train. And as I’ve been living closer to the train, so I grew up closer to where Golden Gate is. the trains have different sounds and different rumbles. So it has like a bigger, more boosty rumble to it if it’s obviously carrying something really heavy like coal and stuff like that. but I noticed that there’s different train horns and there’s different pitches apparently, depending on what type of train it is as well to the horn.

But I started to notice that there’s one conductor in particular that instead of just honking at the rail crossings, he comes around De Beque Canyon and just lays on the horn all the way through Palisade to like past maybe 34 road. I’m not sure where his madness stops, but it’s just very distinct, like, oh, there he is every time he does it. So someone had told me it like oh, well, you know why that is, right? I’m like, why? Well, apparently that conductor, his ex wife lives here and he wants to make sure that he hear. She hears him every time he comes through, town and wakes up. So that is the, tall tale legend that I heard about, the train and why it is so very noisy on occasions.

Lisa: Interesting.

Corinna: I have heard very similar. I live down by the river, not in a van, so I don’t get interrupted in my sleep from the trains as often as you two do. But I have heard that same story. I also know that legally the train conductors are required to blow their horn 20 yards before and after every railroad crossing. And because Palisade has so many roads and streets that cross over, it is easier if a conductor didn’t feel perhaps like lifting his hand up to just lay on that bad boy until he gets all the way out. And like, it’s like past the mine.

LisaMarie: Well safety first. Right. We want everybody to be safe. Not condoning not having honking of horns. It was just a funny story.

Lisa: Yeah, no, I love it because I know which one you’re talking about. And it does seem like there’s just one that just lays on the horn.

Corinna: People do love that story.

Lisa: Is it ex wife or is it just laziness yeah, who knows? Maybe a little bit of both.

Corinna: Probably combination of both. And that’s why he has an ex wife.

Lisa: Oh my God, that’s great. Okay, so that. So that takes us to the mine

Corinna: to the mine

Lisa: on the other side of the valley.

Corinna: Yes.

Lisa: And yeah, so I think a lot of people know that there’s a lot of coal mining history in town. Around town. And the one in particular.

Corinna: Yeah. And so there were like 13 mines total, from my understanding. Or somewhere around that number. from like the De Beque Cutoff Road. If you’re heading up the mesa that De Beque Cutoff road, like into the Bookcliffs. And like, I think the Carpenter Mine is probably one of the further ones out. And that’s closer to Fruita. having not grown up in an area known for mines, I grew up in eastern Pennsylvania and western PA, which is where all the coal mines are. So I don’t know nothing about no coal mining or I didn’t grow up knowing yet.

but when I moved here with a young boy, it’s one of the things that I made sure that, like, I talked to him about. And the Gearhart Mine, which is the mind that you can see if you are looking at the book, you’re standing in Palisade and you’re looking at the bookcliffs, depending on where you are, for the most part, you can see it. Sometimes you can be a little bit too close or not at quite the right angle, but pretty much. If you can see Mount Garfield, just about a quarter mile to the east of Garfield, you’ll see a big black mark. And if you’re closer and you look a little bit closer, just above that black mark is actually the old mine. Like pieces of the old mine.

And if you do that amazing hike up Mount Garfield. Love it so much. It’s brutal, but it’s great. but if you do that hike, you’ll see, you know, chunks and pieces of this big mine. So, I do wine tours as well as manage the gas station. so it’s one of the things I always like to point out to people, especially if they’re not from this area or they didn’t. You, you know, like me didn’t grow up in an area where you can just like look up and see things on the side of the mountain. It’s really cool, to point out. And you know, it was in practical purposes, it wasn’t a super profitable mine. I think they only took about 200,000 tons of coal out of it, which sounds, I mean it’s a lot of coal. But the De Beque Cutoff mine, they pulled closer like 4 million tons of coal out of. So like to see those, you know, size disparities, you know, they got it where they needed it, but that’s where a lot of the, you know, original orchards were planted by coal miners. Right. They mined coal in the winter and then tended their orchards all through the spring and summer. So, I think it’s a really cool part of Palisade’s like, visual history. You know, if you can visually look and see the mine or you can look up and see the Thunderbird. I think it’s one of the really unique parts of living in this little section of the valley. Like our view of Garfield is always that view. And so everybody else in the valley’s view is the opposite side view. So, you know, like I have a tattoo of Garfield, but it only makes sense if you know it from the Palisade view.

Lisa: And I have like a sketch of Garfield. And then somebody pointed out to me really early on, I bought it right after we moved here. And then they were like, that’s from the wrong side. It’s from an artist who lives in Junction. Right. So I’m like, oh, it is from the wrong side. Yeah. That’s funny. Yeah, it’s so amazing too. Like when you’re hiking up, like the stagecoach trail or you’re a cameo and hiking back past the shooting range, and you can just see these big deposits of coal like in the side of the cliff and it smells like coal. And like. Yeah, like you, from growing up in the middle of the woods and never having ever seen anything like that. It’s pretty amazing that you can actually touch coal. Like, in the ground.

Corinna: Yeah. there’s a really cool spot up the Cameo road. you can like stand in like they started maybe to dig out a hole for coal. Maybe it was just a personal mine, I don’t know. Because it’s about the size of your office.

Lisa: I climbed up in there. It, it’s my height.

Corinna: Right. Like, I mean you can could pretty much stand in there with your arms stretched out and it’s, you know, not much. It’s like 12ft deep. Like just deep enough for you to go and disappear. But then you know, like one step forward and you can easily be seen.

Lisa: Okay. Yeah. How are you guys doing?

Corinna: Well it’s Friday the 13th.

LisaMarie: True.

Corinna: Everything’s going well thus far. I will happily retell a tale that the historical society tells. I don’t think JoAnn or I love Priscilla and I think Priscilla would love for me to tell this story. it’s one of the great parts of that walking brochure. There’s. That walking brochure is fantastic. It really is. I love our historical society. They’ve done you know, a really good job putting all that online. But the story is if you’re on Main street and you walk to the end of the main street, there’s white house and it’s got white picket fence. It’s really super cute. I can’t remember which number it is on the walking tour. but it’s next door to the Crissey house, to the east. so that was one of the first houses built in Palisade. For who was then the notary public was Mr. Bancroft and his wife. And a notary public in the early 1900s was a super important job in a very small, you know, brand new town. Palisade was incorporated in 1904. The house was built in 1904. So you know, it really truly was one of the first Palisade homes on first street because that was the first street in Palisade.

Okay, so if you go to the end of Main street, next to the Crissey house is this white house, a white picket fence. It was built in 1904 for Mr. Bancroft and his wife. The wife’s brother was the builder whose name escapes me right now. And I am so sorry. I usually do know it, but. So he was the builder and he built the house. It’s a lovely house. It’s cute little house. It’s not even little. It’s just a very cute. It’s adorable. and then if you turn around and you continue your way down Main street and go to fifth in Main. the house on the corner of fifth and Main. And if you stand on fifth street and look at it, you’ll see that it is exactly the same house. Like he built her an identical house. There’s, it’s a twin, there’s another set, but that’s like the first set of, you know, twin houses. When I think of them now are like two side by side houses. But before the age of subdivisions and like house is always looking the same. They were usually very unique. So in that, you know, time, it was kind of weird to have two identical houses. But the wife’s house, the second house built is just a little bit nicer. Like its pitch is just a little bit steeper on the roof. So that makes it just a little bit bigger. there’s hand painted roses that they still have. They’re beautiful. And the people who own it now, have maintained it very well. It’s really, really beautiful. They, the gardens are very well taken care of, but there’s hand painted roses above the like front bay window and the door. Like the wife literally was like, you know how you built your sister’s house? I liked it. Just make it a little bit better. And he was like, okay.

Lisa: Oh I wonder if there’s rivalry between the sister and the sister in law then.

Corinna: You don’t know that I’ve looked, because if you look at old Palisade Tribunes it is literally like Mrs. LisaMarie Pinder went to De Beque to visit her cousin Mary. They had petit fours and returned back by 6 pm. That is what the old Palisade Tribunes were because I mean, you know, we’re a small town now.

Lisa: It was like Facebook at the time.

Corinna: literally. Yeah, but it’s. There are really cute little stories like that. You can go down to the park. you know, I think a lot of people, if you don’t look at the west side of the park, if you never wander that far over.

LisaMarie: to the migrant camp.

Corinna: To the migrant camp.

Lisa: Yeah in Riverbend you’re talking about.

Corinna: It’s such an interesting part of history. And then you can go see those cabins. Like you can see where they were and you can read this like great little thing about them. And then you can go up to Restoration. Restoration has I think seven or eight of those cabins. Carboy has one of those cabins. Carboy’s cabin is really cool because it’s open so you can go inside and like really look at it. And they don’t. Not that it’s got stuff. I mean they like chop literally off the one wall. They have a lot of great musicians that play in there. But they oriented it a little bit different. Like they turned it. So if you look out, if you look above the one window it says Garfield View. So you know that when it was at the camp it was like oriented that way. So when you looked out the window you saw Mount Garfield.

LisaMarie: Wow, cool.

Lisa: That’s so cool. I didn’t know that those were the actual cabins like at Restoration and Carboy.

LisaMarie: Oh yeah, they moved them all out of the camp.

Corinna: yeah.

Lisa: I just sort of have assumed they would have torn them down.

LisaMarie: No, people like were able to buy them. They bought them for super, super cheap.

Corinna: they were super cheap

LisaMarie: and they moved them.

Corinna: I mean it was literally like. I think it was, you know, I don’t want to say it was a dollar but it was something very

LisaMarie: very cheap.

Corinna: very cheap. And then because you know they had to the expense of moving them. You know it wasn’t until I moved here that I saw a man fix a tire with a blowtorch and some lighter fluid. Whoo. That was a day. So these are the men that were like yes, I can pick up that cabin and haul it up Suicide Hill.

LisaMarie: Imagine taking it all the way up there.

Corinna: No, can you fathom

Lisa: and they did it with a few of them.

Corinna: Yeah. Several. There’s at least a dozen of those old cabins up there on the mesa.

Lisa: You know, it’d be really fun to go around and try to find them all.

Corinna: yeah, well. And I’m sure that there

LisaMarie: That sounds like a great wine mission. You start at peachfork, and then you’re working your way through. It’s a great idea.

Corinna: A great idea.

Lisa: Okay, I’m gonna stop recording.

Corinna: fine

Lisa: but thank you both.

Corinna: thank you.

Lisa: I just know that I, know so many more stories, even more from you, so I can’t wait. People only get a little. Little tasting of what you have.

Lisa: All right, let’s. Ready, drink. Ready for drinks. Okay.

LisaMarie: Oh, I was gonna plug Garry.

Lisa: I can just. I’m gonna, like, paste all this stuff together. So don’t.

LisaMarie: Oh, let’s see.

Corinna: So start by saying, like, when you said that Garry moved here in 2020 so you can do it there and then she can feed it into that spot.

Lisa: You listen to tons of podcasts.

Corinna: Listen, I love you, Lis. I’m just trying to make your job easier.

Corinna: Hold on, are we not going to talk about having the only single of our group of, like, bajillion couples and how then I get to be the entertainment for the evening when I have these crazy stories? Like the time that I matched with the doctor on the Facebook dating and then found out that this man is one of the most prolific catfish in the valley?

Lisa: But wait, so would you. Would you not want to be the entertainment?

Corinna: no. I actually. I get to tell all the best tales.

LisaMarie: It’s very true.

Lisa: I know. I’m like, I can’t picture you not having a story or knowing something and not telling it.

Corinna: Yeah, no, imagine me not sharing.

LisaMarie: I also have a problem with showboating, so I relate to your problem.

Corinna: I don’t know what nonchalant is. I am always shalanting. I saw that meme and I was like, oh, my God. Someone described it.

LM: What did I tell you, great storytellers, right? Over cocktails at Fidel’s after we finished recording, we compared the differences between LisaMarie’s and Corinna’s versions of these myths and legends and wondered how many other versions are out there.

Are you familiar with these stories? Or maybe you know a slightly different version? Are there other Grand Valley myths and legends that we didn’t cover? If so, I’d love to hear from you. You can email me at lisa(at)postcardsfrompalisade.com. There’s a link to my email address in the show notes too. I’d love to share more stories on a future podcast episode.

The podcast’s theme music is Riverbend by Geoff Roper.

Thanks for listening. With love, from Palisade.

Wake up your wanderlust with this episode featuring Sarah Steele, travel advisor with Find Your Why Travel: Wine Edition. Sarah grew up in Palisade and after living around the world, found her way back to the western slope and to Colorado wine. 

Sarah and I chat about why she loves to bring Colorado wine to France and how you can take part in that kind of adventure, why travel agents/advisors are still very necessary, why group wine trips are so much fun, and why no wine or wine making style is bad (especially when you’re on vacation). Sarah also shares some of the cool things she’s learned about winemaking techniques in places like Georgia (the country) and Croatia and why some of her best travel experiences happened when she faced her fears. 

For more about Sarah and Find Your Why Travel: Wine Edition, email her at sarah@findyourwhytravel.com or go to ⁠wineadventureswithsarah.com⁠.

Theme Music: Riverbend by Geoff Roper.  

Photo Credit: Hilary Stumpus

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Transcript:

Welcome to Postcards From Palisade, where we hear from the people who are shaping our slice of western Colorado. I’m Lisa McNamara.

It’s the time of year when all winter-denialists, myself maybe leading that pack, have to admit that cold weather is here to stay for a few months. What better time, then, to daydream about travel?

Today I’m talking with Sarah Steele. Sarah is a travel advisor with Find Your Why Travel: Wine Edition. Sarah grew up in Palisade and after living around the world, found her way back to the western slope and to Colorado wine.

Sarah and I chat about why she loves to bring Colorado wine to France and how you can take part in that kind of adventure, why travel agents/advisors are still very necessary, why group wine trips are so much fun, and why no wine or wine making style is bad (especially when you’re on vacation). Sarah also shares some of the cool things she’s learned about winemaking techniques in places like Georgia (the country) and Croatia and why some of her best travel experiences happened when she faced her fears. I learned a few things I didn’t know and my wanderlust is fully awake after chatting with Sarah!

A quick aside before we get started: if you’re interested in finding out what’s happening in Palisade every week in one easy to read list, I have started a substack called Palisade Weekly Calendar. Each Monday, I publish a list of everything that I can find that’s happening in Palisade that week, from town and library events to live music to happy hour deals and everything in between. It’s a huge list. Go to https://palisadeweeklycalendar.substack.com/ to find past issues and subscribe to future updates. It’s just one more way I am trying to help connect neighbors and support our local businesses, so we can all continue to make Palisade a great place to live.

But let’s get back to the subject at hand – wine and travel, on today’s Postcard from Palisade.

SS: my name is Sarah and I started Find Your Why Travel: Wine Edition, which is a wine focused, travel company. So I wanted to bring people from the States to international wine destinations and I wanted to make sure that people were having really intimate experiences that allow them to explore areas that maybe they wouldn’t necessarily be able to because maybe they’re off the beaten path and people don’t necessarily have that connection. You know there’s gonna be things that keep people from being able to have those types of experiences, whether it’s language barrier, whether it’s savviness of travel, whether it’s fear, because we all have fear sometimes of going places and experiencing new places that are unfamiliar and kind of out of your comfort zone.

And also another thing is, I’m going to start doing local tours, with people from Aspen because that’s where I live. So I wanted to bring more awareness to Colorado wine and I wanted to bring people that are coming from all over the world, but also people that are coming, you know, from California, New York and places that people don’t associate Colorado and wine in the same sentence. It’s not something that’s a common thing. So I want to bring more awareness to Palisade because it’s my hometown and this is where I grew up. As somebody who grew up here, if you’re from Palisade or you live in Palisade or you know anything about Palisade, it’s evolved a lot as far as our mindset is concerned, as a community. But when I grew up here, it was more close minded and I just felt like I needed to explore the world and see other things because I kind of felt sheltered in a way.

LM: Sure. And I saw in your bio you’ve lived in five different countries. I think so, what countries have you lived in?

SS: It’s ironic. It’s kind of come full circle for me because I lived in five of the top wine producing countries in the world. But I wasn’t into wine at that point. I mean, I was, but not in the way that I am now. It was kind of like, oh, I would drink wine, I had a relationship with wine. But once I moved up to Aspen when I was 19, I had the ability to really experience connecting with people from all over the world because it’s such a melting pot of people that travel there. And so it really broadened my ability to connect with people from other countries and other cultures. And so it just inspired me to kind of explore the world. And so I moved to France and I was a nanny there for about 10 months. And then I moved to Australia and I was there for a year and then I was in New Zealand for a year and I backpacked and picked grapes and worked on vineyards and that was really fun. and then I moved to Italy and I was there and I was a nanny. and then I lived in South Africa.

And that I think was kind of that pivotal moment where I was getting older and I was kind of really starting to think, okay, well, I still love travel, but it felt very organic when I experienced going to some different wineries and just kind of learning more about wine in general and the history of wine. And then, I ended up wanting just to make wine as a hobby. And then I came back to Colorado and I was gonna actually travel again and start teaching English in South America. And then there was this brand new viticulture and enology program at the college. And I thought, oh, well, I mean, it’s something I’m interested in. Maybe I just try it.

Going back to college at 29 is. Can be intimidating. And so I decided to go back and I did. And it just kind of. It just organically unraveled and just turned into something that was completely different. And then Covid happened. And you know, that was also part of why I wanted to do this was because I knew if I worked in wine, I could travel internationally and work different harvests all over the world. And so that was some of the driving force behind it as well because I knew I always wanted to do something that had to do with travel. but I didn’t know it would also be wine related as well.

LM: Yeah and so those things just totally came together. It was like you couldn’t have even planned that.

SS: No, no. And then of course it happened in my hometown where I grew up surrounded by wine. And so, now, you know, because before I thought, oh, I’ll never move back to Palisade or Grand Junction. I never want to be back there again. You know, I want to be as far away as possible. And now it’s such a huge piece of my life and a big part of my heart and soul being here, and still coming home. And I mean, even just driving in today, I was like, oh, it feels like home still.

LM: Yeah, that’s so interesting. I mean, what a, cool experience to have. And so it sounds like you really kind of supported yourself as you worked around the world. what was your favorite place that you lived?

SS: Oh, that’s always such a hard question, to answer because I loved everywhere for different reasons, but I think South Africa is really special just because it was, you know, Europe is Europe and which is amazing. But it’s comfortable in a sense. Maybe not comfortable for people that don’t travel all the time, but it’s more comfortable than other places in the world.

You know, and then Australia, I felt very, you know, everyone speaks English. Everyone speaks English in New Zealand. but South Africa was something that was so out of my comfort zone, in so many ways. Whether that was, the language, the people. South Africa is not the safest place and I’m a white woman from America, you know, and so I think that traveling there from time to time, I took the bus at one point and did the garden route and was traveling by myself. And that was really intimidating.

There’s moments where when you’re traveling, you have this fear of whatever it may be because you read stuff online, you know, and almost that’s. I sometimes think that that’s almost not the right thing to do is to freak yourself out before you travel because it’s other people’s experiences that you’re reading about. when I went, I was like, okay, I’m going to do this. And I was pretty nervous. And then once I was there, it was like, okay, I got this. Like, you just. I just need to be secure in my ability to travel and know how to conduct myself. And I ended up meeting a lot of really beautiful people.

And it also puts things into perspective about your life and what you do have and what you should be or not should be, but what you are grateful for and your community when you do come home, you know, and the simple things, you know, running water and being able to use the restroom, public restrooms and, and you have a meal every day and, you know, just those little things. And so I would say obviously it’s a special place in my heart just because it’s something that really was a pivotal moment for where I am now. but also I love Italy. It’s just one of my favorite countries in the whole world. The language, the people, the food. I mean, who doesn’t, who doesn’t love it? So.

LM: I don’t know. It’s impossible.

SS: Well, and recently I was in Croatia. and Croatia is incredible. I mean, that’s a trip I’m working on putting a group together to do wine there because I think it’s an untapped place for wine. Croatia is definitely like on my top three of places that I love.

LM: And like Croatia, I mean, is a lot of grape varietals and things like, started in Croatia. Right. It’s the origin for a lot of different things like Zinfandel and things like that.

SS: Yeah, exactly.

LM: Which is my favorite wine. That’s why I know that.

SS: Exactly. Yeah. And people don’t realize that Zinfandel is from Croatia, which is really fascinating.

LM: Yeah. There’s just so much history. well, so one of the trips. I know that you do, I think you do this regularly, but the Palisade wine, bringing Palisade wine to France, I definitely want to know more about that and understand how that whole idea came about, what you do and how people react to it when you’re there.

SS: So we just did. We did. A group of us went to Bordeaux back in March. and so the concept is with a river cruise company out of. Excuse me, out of Europe. they’re based in Europe, their family owned. And they’re a wonderful company to work with. I don’t. I’m not an employee, but I’m a travel advisor that works with them. And their goal with these, river cruises that are specifically wine focused. So they’re the celebration of wine cruises. And so what they do is they look at North American winemakers and they, rely on maybe the travel advisor like me that goes out and seeks people that would like to host a cruise and bring their wine over to Europe and not in a comparison way, but to look at them and see how they’re similar and how they’re different, but not in like a quality to be like whose is better. It’s not a competition. It’s more about understanding terroir, understanding, you know, style and really understanding old world versus new world style of wines. Because sometimes it’s a hard concept to grasp and understand, but when you get to actually go there and see the way that it’s made and talk to the winemakers and understand their historical way of winemaking, because it’s, I mean, for them it’s generations after generations of family that have been passing down these wineries. And so it’s very. They’re very rooted in who they are and what they’re doing and their ability to continuously make consistent, really amazing wine.

Again, this is another way to bring more awareness to Colorado wines because based on the wineries, you know, they’re sending their wine over and they’re exposing themselves to other demographics of people that maybe didn’t even realize that there was wine, in Colorado and we were, there was a winery that had previously done a trip, to Europe similar to this, I think it was with AMA and they were a, ah, Eastern Slope Winery. And then Jenne Baldwin Eaton, she has, she hosted my Bordeaux trip and then she’s also hosting another one this coming July and we’re going to do the Rhone Valley.

I think because a lot of our wineries here are a lot smaller they don’t maybe necessarily have the volume of wine to send over. And so I was trying to figure out a way to kind of diversify the trip and bring more awareness to multiple wineries in the area. And obviously Jenne is one of the most influential women in Colorado when it comes to wine. And I’m so glad that she was my professor and the director of the program at the school because I just feel like she’s been such an incredible mentor and such a great support. and I definitely like wouldn’t be where I am now without her. And I just learned so much. And so now that she’s retired, kind of low key, she’s trying but you know, she just, she loves, she loves doing what she, what she does. And wine.

LM: It’s not work. If you really love it, it’s not work.

SS: Yeah, yeah. And she still continuously works in the valley with different wineries consulting and is still a huge support. And it’s just such an ambassador for, for Colorado and our wine and so, I reached out to her and just said, would you be interested in hosting a trip? Because obviously, all these wineries that we work with really trust that you’re going to bring awareness, but you’re such a good person to talk about their wines and know about their wines. And so she was a great person to be the host along with these other wineries.

So, the first one we did in Bordeaux, we had Restoration, Red Fox and Vines79. And we had a huge group, and it was so much fun. We had such a great time, and everyone just. They loved it. And, I mean, people made new friends. You know, there were people that didn’t know each other. And, you know, since then, we’ve kind of had little groups where we’re like, let’s get together and talk about the trip. And, you know, now we’re. It brought our community closer in someways as well, which has been really great.

and so then this next one that we have, that’s going to be on, the Rhone, that is going to be in July, and we are gonna have BookCliff Vineyards and Whitewater Hill as our two wineries that are going to be going on. On this. This cruise. And, we also look at wineries that. That have some of the same varietals that are indigenous in that area, in those specific areas. because we want to also showcase their wines and how they’re similar and how they’re different to those wines in that region.

LM: That’s fascinating. So that’s gonna be more like Riesling? White wines or?

SS: No, so it’s going to be. We’re looking at, like, Grenache Syrah, Mouvedre. Like, I would say Syrah is probably the main star. and then we’re gonna throw in some, you know, little surprises in there. But, Yeah it’ll be. It’ll be really great. It’ll be a really great trip.

LM: Okay, you said that’s in July.

SS: Yeah, so that’s July. It’s for a week. It’s really great because it’s. Those trips are all inclusive.

LM: So you just get on the boat and you just enjoy yourself. For a week!

SS: Yeah. Well, and the best part is that, it’s a river cruise. So they’re a lot smaller. The boats are a lot smaller. You’re looking at about 150 people. and that just allows a lot more intimacy within the experience. But also, I mean, you end up making new friends because you can sit at dinner with everybody on a different night and get to know other people. But also because it’s a river cruise, it’s really unique in the sense that it’s not an ocean cruise where it’s you and 20,000 other people or 10,000 other people and you’re all fighting to go do the same activities at all the ports. You know, this is. You travel a lot at night, so you’re getting a maximum amount of experiences when you’re ported during the day. And sometimes we even stay overnight. So if you don’t want to have dinner on the boat, you can venture out and go do other things.

But the other thing is that you’re always in a port where you’re close to a lot of things. So you can just walk right off the boat and go straight to a restaurant or go to a museum. And a lot of the excursions that we do offer, they vary. So you know, you could go bike riding like in the summer when we do this July one actually the Tour de France is going to be going through there as well.

LM: that’s cool.

SS: yeah, I’ve been working with the cruise company to see if we could do some type of special excursion, while we’re there to see it. Because they’re really accommodating with that kind of stuff. but also, it’s really great because every excursion is broken up into multiple smaller groups. So everybody has a different experience. And so, you know,

LM: so you have something talk about. At dinner. You’re like, what did you do today?

SS: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And even if so say it’s the same excursion in the sense that you’re gonna go to do a specific wine tasting that day. Each smaller group goes to different wineries. So they have completely different experiences. And so then you come back and you’re like, oh my gosh, what did you experience? Where did you go? What was the wine like? it really allows for a lot of connection and interaction with, with other people that had a similar experience, but it was totally different.

and then one of the really great things that we do on board is with the wines that come over from Colorado, we do a wine pairing dinner. Jenne, for instance, or the host, they’ll sit with the chef and they’ll put together a wine pairing menu with the wines that we have sent over. which is really cool because it’s just a completely different experience because you’re. You’re tasting local cuisine with wine that’s from Colorado, which is. Yeah, it gives me the chills just thinking about it, because we had such a great experience this last time in March. But then we also do some. Jenne will get up and, do some workshops with the wine as well. So she’ll pour some of the wine blind. And then it’s fun because we kind of get to pick and choose. Like, do you think this is a local wine? Or do you think this is a Colorado wine?

LM: that would be fun.

SS: What style of wine do you think this is? And then she kind of goes into the actual, like, learning and teaching about the wine in that area and how. How the Colorado wines might differ stylistically or terroir wise to the local wins that she’s pouring.

LM: awesome. that sounds like an amazing experience.

SS: It’s so much fun. We had so much fun on this last trip.

LM: So it’s, like, fun for you too?

SS: Yeah, yeah, it’s so fun. And that’s part of it, right? That’s part of why I really enjoy doing this, is because I just love seeing people light up and travel and have fun and get out of their comfort zone and learn something new and get excited for travel. And it makes me even more excited to see people that I know that are local, that we get to share this experience together. But also, you know, bringing the Colorado wines, I think is something that’s just extra special and unique for me because it’s like, I get to bring “home” with me on these trips and share it with people.

LM: To what you were talking about earlier with why a travel advisor is important, why you’re not obsolete, would you. How would you answer that? So why would you say you need to work with a travel advisor, and this is what I can do for you that, Expedia won’t do.

SS: Yeah. Well. And, you know, it’s interesting. Okay. Yes, Expedia is. I don’t want to say it’s basic, but it. It has kind of set the tone for people to book flights and hotels. That’s pretty common. That’s a pretty easy thing.

LM: like, utilitarian.

SS: Yeah. You know, and that’s based on reviews and what other people say, but sometimes you’ll find that it’s not always super reliable and you could book something and then the booking doesn’t go through and then you find out right before you leave and then you didn’t book directly through the company and you know, it’s a third party.

I had my own personal experience when Covid happened. I had bought a ticket through Expedia or something to go to the Philippines and I had to fight to get my money back because it was through a third party company. I. The amount of time that I wasted in doing that. And so when you have a travel advisor that is knowledgeable about who to work with, they’re the ones that go to bat for you if something goes wrong. You know, they’re there for support while you’re traveling.

But also, we’re such a great tool and we’re such a great resource for people because, yeah, you book it yourself, but what if something happens? the amount of time that you spend on the phone with the airlines, or on the phone with, making sure that your hotel room is right. for what I do as far as wine trips are concerned, you know, when you’re trying to travel, you travel to Napa, okay, go online, Google, what are the best…
LM: best wineries in Napa!

SS: 100% right? And then you make a reservation online. Well, you don’t have that same ability to do that, while you’re in Europe. I mean, I put together a trip for a gentleman who wanted to spend a week in the Rhone Valley. And I strategically had to look at the location of all the wineries. I strategically, I mean, I was emailing, calling. A lot of them are small, they don’t speak English. I spent a lot of time on the phone connecting and reaching out to these wineries that you can’t just go online and make a reservation.

LM: Right.

SS: And so for him, he just showed up and was like, okay, I’m here, you know. And so I did a lot of that legwork for him, which allows for you to go and have an experience that just. You didn’t have to stress about it. You didn’t have to like put all the, I mean, I literally drew a map of where the different wineries were that he preferred and the distance between them. You know, things that you don’t really think about when you’re putting these types of trips together, but also knowing in the hotels, knowing some of the experiences that I’ve experienced myself that I can say, oh my gosh, you’re gonna love this. I mean, he went to Chapoutier in the Rhone Valley, which is one of the top wineries in France, and especially in that region. And I hiked through the vineyards, and I said, this is something you have to do. And he did it and he said it was incredible.

LM: so you’re getting that benefit of your experience, your research and all of the, all the like quote unquote work you’ve done.

SS: Yeah.

LM: Finding all these places.

SS: Exactly. And building their relationships with people. And that’s the other thing is people think, oh, I can just go on and go into chat GPT and go on to AI. Right. Well, it’s not gonna. Well, it’s funny, because.

LM: You don’t know what you’re gonna get.

SS: There’s this woman who she did a whole like webinar on it. And she, she was like, okay, it’s me versus AI because she specializes in Disney trips. And so she put in, okay, this is, this is what the client wants, and this is what the client told her that she wanted. And she looked at what AI came up with versus what she had and she was like, no, I totally win. Like she, she went back and forth and was like, no, the way that they laid it out and laid the trip out and had everything. She’s like, they’re not gonna get the same tailored intimate experience that is gonna blow them away.

LM: Right. Because Chat GPT or AI or whatever, it’s just taking the average. It’s taking the averages of everybody’s experiences.

SS: Yeah, exactly.

LM: Who wants average? But you know, earlier I thought you said Rhine, not Rhone. So sorry about that.

SS: No, that’s okay. Oh, Riesling. Yeah.

LM: And I’m like, oh, wait a second. but I know this isn’t the same, but even corporate wise. So I traveled a ton for work. Traveled a ton for work. And things always go wrong. I worked with a travel agency. You know, all you have to do is just call them and say, hey, my flight got canceled. Can you help me? And they, you know, hang up the phone, go back to sleep, they rebook you. It’s like incredibly wonderful to just have so you’re not in the middle of this already annoying situation, having to figure it out yourself. You’re just like, hey, this happened. Can you help me out? And then they do and it’s like magic. So I know that’s not the same, but, like, the benefit of having somebody to call to help you when things go wrong, who actually knows what they’re doing and knows the, places and the companies. It’s invaluable.

SS: Yeah! Well, and the fact that, I love doing groups because I love having these experiences with people. But, you know, it really helps when I’m there and I’m on the ground, because, there was a group of some of my clients, and they came in on the train, and then for some reason in Bordeaux, their local, like, tram system just stopped working. And so I was trying to come to meet them at the train station, and I was like, I can’t get there. And they’re like, well, okay, well, what do we do? So I’m there on the ground. Problem solving. I’m like, okay, this is what we’re going to do, you know? And then eventually they got there and it was. And they were so thankful that I was there to help get them to where they needed to be and was there to support them.

And then, I had some clients whose suitcases got lost and so then they called me and I was like, okay, let me. I’m gonna call the company. We’re gonna, we’re gonna get this sorted. And we did. And it just, it, it was so. I want them to rely on me. I want them to know that I’m here to support them and help them have the best experience, because that’s what I’m here for. And I really enjoy it. It’s something that I really, really like to do. And I love knowing that because I’ve been there, I’ve been that stressed out person that was like, man, I really wish I had somebody to just take care of this for me!

And because I’ve traveled so much, it’s these little things that maybe you wouldn’t think about until you’re in it. You’re like, oh, man, I really wish that I would have foreseen that these are all the things that could possibly happen, like my passport. My passport went missing when I was living in France, so I had to go to Paris by myself, speaking no French. And I’m in Paris by myself all day trying to, like, navigate the train system, and trying to navigate getting to the embassy and getting a new passport and getting a new photo. And, you know, this was, this was years ago, so now it’s a little bit easier, but it’s still scary.

LM: Yeah.

SS: and it was something that I was like, okay, well now I know that you always take a photocopy of your passport. You take a few. You have one on your phone, you have one in your email. You know, there’s just certain things that again, you don’t think about and then it happens and you’re like, oh, so that’s again, that’s why I’m here to be like, these are all the potential situations that you can find yourself into and these are all the ways that we can solve them.

LM: Yeah. So like, you’ve lived it.

SS: Yeah, exactly.

LM: I’ve lived this. So you don’t have to.

SS: Yeah, exactly. Let me be the one that goes through these experiences so that you don’t have to. Because it could be stressful and sometimes it can like ruin your trip.

LM: Yeah. Definitely.

SS: You know, and I just don’t want, I don’t want people to do that. And again, I think it’s, I think it’s fun. Some people don’t think it’s fun to plan a trip. They’re kind of like, I just want it to be easy.

LM: you mentioned that you were just in El Salvador and Mexico. do you have any, upcoming trips planned that are in the future that you’re excited about other than the July trip?

SS: so, well I was just in Croatia, so I’m working on a Croatia wine trip for 2026. I did have an Argentina and Chile trip planned for this February, March. but unfortunately it didn’t fill up. So, and that trip was, I’m going to shift it and move it, to 2026 just because it’s a really incredible trip. But I think Argentina is difficult sometimes when it comes to putting together a group or pricing because their economy is so unstable. And so I was dealing with a lot of ups and downs of trying to get pricing and everything to plan that trip. you know, I don’t think I gave people enough time to make the plan to go on that trip. so yeah, Argentina and Chile. but it’s already built so I’m just gonna move it to 2026. so I’m working on dates and then we’ve got, I’ve got the Rhone one and then, I’m working on South Africa. and then just for something fun that’s not wine related, I’m doing a group to hike the Inca trail in Peru.

LM: You’re like naming all things that I want to do.

SS: in October of next year.

LM: Awesome.

SS: And then I’ve also put together a Portugal trip next September, which is going to be, you know, it’s, there’s a lot of people in Colorado that are really active. So it’s a hiking and winery, trip. So we’ll do hiking a lot throughout the day, but then at night, you know, we’ll stay at these little bed and breakfasts where we do like wine pairing dinners. And so it starts in Lisbon and ends in Porto. and then I’m also doing, I’m going to Greece, in May for a research trip and then I’m also doing a research trip in Sicily.

LM: Oh, awesome. that’s another place I really want to go.

SS: Yeah

LM: So your group tours or group trips, what, size you usually try to target.

SS: So with the river cruises they can be a little bit bigger just because, you know, they’re on a boat and they have the, we have the accommodations and all of that. But typically with, with my groups that I’m putting together, I don’t like to do more than 16, cause I typically like to stay in places that are smaller and more intimate. And so those tend to be, have less rooms, obviously, less mass hotels or anything like that. More bed and breakfast style. and then, you know, also you have to think about transportation. I don’t want people feeling like they’re in a giant tour bus. if we can’t all fit inside of like a transit or a smaller van, then I don’t really. I feel like that takes away from the intimacy and from the experience. because obviously the more people you travel with, the more personalities there are, you know, so it’s nice for people to feel like that they can kind of just do their own thing if they need to, but also interact with each other doing different experiences and excursions and stuff. So and then also when you’re going wine tasting, it’s a lot to bring a huge group to do a wine tasting, you know, but also get those really intimate, knowledgeable experiences. When you’re getting tours of vineyards you’re getting tours of cellars, or you’re doing these tastings, it’s like the smaller, the smaller, the better.

LM: Yeah. is there anywhere that you haven’t been that you’re just really itching to go?

SS: Yes. So this is a research trip that I’m trying to put together this year because I’m just really excited. But Georgia, Georgia the country. Because it is one of the oldest wine producing countries in the entire world. So orange wine has become, you know, a pretty known thing in the last few years and it’s trending. And they, I mean that’s basically where orange wine came from. Because their old style of winemaking was they would do it in what they call a, it could be pronounced multiple ways, but Kvevri, Qvevri. But they’re these terracotta pots that they basically put underground. Because underground your temperature is consistent.

So for winemaking back in the 1700s, 1600s there was no way for them to regulate temperature. And so they really had to find a way to make sure that while during fermentation, you know, that they could kind of control the temperature a little bit. Not control, but it’s a more controlled environment. It’s consistent. Right. If you bury something underground. But also in these terracotta pots, they allowed subtle amounts of breathing, but also it allowed the wine to be in a dark, cool environment as far as fermentation, because fermentation causes heat.

And so basically what they would do is they would just throw all the grapes in there and just let it ferment naturally with whatever the yeast that’s already occurring on the skins. Even white. Typically white wine is going to be white grapes that basically the juice is just pressed off and fermented so it’s not getting skin contact. And red wine is caused from the skin contact and that’s how it gets its color. So with white wine, what causes the orange color is the color extraction from the white grapes from the skins. And so for them, what they would do is they would just throw all the grapes into these terracotta pots underground and just put a lid on it and cover it with dirt and then come back, you know, a few months later.

LM: That’s amazing

SS: to check on it. Right. So like that. And they did that with red and white because obviously they didn’t know that was just how they did it. And so orange wine is very prevalent there. And they’re still very attached to their old style of winemaking. And it’s so fascinating because they’re still, you know, from an archaeological perspective, they’re still finding a lot of these pots that have been. That are like broken underground. But they’re still able to find, like, residue from wine.

LM: that’s so cool.

SS: Yeah. And so from a historical perspective, it’s super fascinating. But also just from a cultural perspective, you know, they’re not super known as a wine region, but they’re one of the oldest and some of the most experienced, even in comparison to like the French.

LM: Right.

SS: And so, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, like that whole area, that whole more like Eastern European area, they haven’t fully exploded from a tourism perspective. So, like, their infrastructure for tourism, isn’t touristy. And so you’re getting more of this intimate experience with locals that are, really sharing their story with you. And, you know, you re probably gonna hang out with someone’s grandma and she’s gonna want to pour you their family wine that they make. You know, whether it’s the best of the best, it’s still an experience. And so that’s really high on my list because it’s just such an interesting country and culture. And everyone that I’ve spoken to that’s been there has just like, they love it. It’s one of their favorite places and it’s so unknown.

And that’s kind of how Croatia was. Back before they became part of the EU and so now that they’re part of the EU, you know, and they’re on the Euro, it’s, definitely, it definitely has. Well, and the Game of Thrones that definitely brought a lot of knowledge to Croatia. But I was there back in like 2011, so it’s been almost 15 years since I’ve been there. And that’s when I really fell in love with it. And even when I just went back recently, the trip that I did was with this local family and I helped them make wine in a very traditional way. And they taught us how to make bread. And we did a cooking class and we went bike riding and we went to like this local fishing village.

LM: that sounds lovely

SS: I milked a goat! Like it was just. And this is the same experience that I want my clients to have. and then I went, to this other area and went wine tasting in Croatia. And again, I think they’re not super well known from a wine perspective, but they’re gaining more attraction. I think when people think about wine, they’re like, oh, France, Italy, Spain, and, and they’re beautiful and they make really amazing wine and it’s really great. But there’s also these other little hidden gems that I think deserve a lot of acknowledgment to what they’re doing.

LM: And it’s going to a be a different kind of experience. It’s what kind of experience you want to have. Do you want something real and authentic or something that maybe has a little bit more of a tourist layer on it, for lack of a better word. Well, that sounds really amazing.

SS: Yeah, it’s exciting.

LM: let’s see. What’s your favorite kind of wine? If you can pick.

SS: I think there’s a time and a place for everything, you know. and it’s funny because you think that you have a very like, specific winery that you don’t like a certain kind of wine, and then you try one from a different region or a different country and you’re like, oh my gosh. Okay. My perspective. So I think this is a really great example of understanding, you know, like, Riesling.

So we’re, not geographically, but, from a growing perspective in viticulture, I would say we’re pretty similar to Germany, which is why Riesling grows so well for us. And so, I was in Germany, we were on the Rhine because I actually. So I actually had another group go last July. I did not go on that trip, but it was with a Washington winery and they did the Rhine. And they started in Amsterdam and ended in Basel in Switzerland.

And I did a similar trip a few years before that with a different river cruise company. Not as a group, but just I went on my own. And I had always seen Riesling from a Colorado perspective. Yes, stylistically we were making it very sweet. Not a lot of dry. That’s just what worked for us. That was the demographic of people that were drinking wine at that time for us in this area. And so stylistically it made sense. And so I hadn’t really explored a whole lot of Riesling other than, you know, here in Colorado or whatever you could get at the grocery store. And then I was in Germany and it just completely blew me away. Riesling is a very underrated wine.

LM: I agree.

SS: Stylistically. I think it’s because people think the new world style was more on the sweeter side. And you know, I would say actually one of my favorite Colorado wines was a dry Riesling from Guy Drew. and he, I believe is still down in Cortez area. And I just, I love, loved his Wine and dry Riesling is just one of my favorites. But going, there and getting. We went to this wine museum where you had over 150 different wines from the local area. And I would say most of them more like Gewurztraminer and Riesling and a lot of the local varietals. And I just was blown away and really getting to understand how, the different from, like, dry, semi dry, sweet, semi sweet. You know, understanding the full spectrum and understanding how they’re all so different. But why that specific growing region makes it a certain way, because it showcases certain fruits and aromas of that specific varietal of the Riesling.

But again, Riesling here is going to be totally different from Riesling in New York. the Finger Lakes region, they make really good Riesling. And also, the Finger Lakes area is one of the only areas where they can grow some of the indigenous Georgian varietals. so that’s, that’s really fascinating as well. So, again, it just really just depends on where you are. And it’s really amazing. I mean, all 50 states pretty much make wine. I was just recently in Vermont and went to a winery and that was really interesting to kind of see. You know, they were, they were all, hybrids because we’ve kind of had to evolve with just weather changes and climate change and all of that.

Even when I was in France, back in March, it was really fascinating because they were saying that due to climate change, you know, and people are drinking less wine in France, which seems really crazy to think, but they’re actually paying winemakers to pull out vines, and to make less wine because they’re. They just don’t have enough consumers. So consumer tastes are changing too. So these are all things that you have to take into account. And that’s why I’m so excited for Colorado, because we’ve evolved so much from the super sweet, fruity wines to other wines now that we’re just, like, blown away by some of the wines that we’re making here, that really showcase not only who we are as, as a state and our growing abilities from a viticulture perspective, but also just stylistically how our palettes are changing and our style of wine is changing and how we have people here that are seeing those trends and satisfying them and bringing more people here to, to explore and taste and understand.

LM: last episode I talked to Richard with Colorado Vintners and cliff dweller. What he was kind of saying, what he felt so fortunate about was being able to kind of grow up with industry here and that it is so young and there’s so much room to explore and to try new things. And, it’s a cool time to be here and be a part of it.

SS: Yeah.

LM: Because you are kind of growing up with it and you can have, you can have almost like an. I don’t want to a say out-sized, but like, you can have a bigger influence here than you would going somewhere like Napa or Sonoma or something like that. Because it’s still so small.

SS: Yeah, we’re a little. We’re a little pocket. And you know, when people think, oh, ah, Napa Cab. If you don’t fit within that idea of what a Napa Cab is, people are like, what is this? You know, or a California Chardonnay, where it’s like super buttery and super oakey. Because stylistically that’s how people recognize those wines from those areas. And so when you don’t have these, like, strict expectations, consumer expectations around your wine and your style, it allows you to broaden and be. Be more open to trying new things and exploring and I guess it’s more about allowing yourself to be more experimental and knowing that you have a solid following. That’s like, cool. Yeah, let’s try this, you know, like, Sauvage, you know, Kaibab. Venturing out with Pet Nat. Pet Nat isn’t a totally known. I mean, it’s a very old style of winemaking in France as far as, like natural sparkling. but that wasn’t really ever a thing stylistically here in Palisade. So it’s really exciting that he’s doing that because he’s finding other alternatives because making wine in a méthode champenoise way is really time consuming. And after being in Champagne, I just have a completely different appreciation for. For champagne and the amount of work that goes into it, you know.

LM: Yeah, years. It’s years of aging.

SS: Yeah, it’s years. But it’s also, it’s space. You need so much space because you have to. The way you have to store the bottles on the riddling racks, you have to turn them every day. You know, they literally pay somebody to come in and turn thousands of bottles a quarter of a turn every day. like the art that comes into that, it just. And people wonder why champagne is so expensive.

LM: Yeah, I know. I wondered why it’s not more expensive after you really see it and understand how it’s made.

SS: I mean you’ve got millions of dollars sitting in bottles in your caves down below your, your winery. You know, it’s like, of course it’s, it’s gonna be expensive, but it’s worth it.

LM: Absolutely. champagne is like. But I love the pet nat too. I love the pet nat from Sauvage.

SS: Yeah, I love pet nat.

LM: It’s so delicious.

SS: And it’s fun to make. I mean I’ve made it before and that was totally experimental for us too. I mean I was working at this winery in Oregon and we just were taking all the leftover juice samples and I don’t even know what was in it, but it was just like random different varietals and we just decided to like make a pet nat out of it, you know, so. And it was fun and it was really good.

LM: I love that.

SS: because the more you try to control something sometimes the less control you have. And that is a great metaphor of wine, and I think that’s like one of my favorite things about winemaking is that you don’t always have control. And you can try to control it. Jenne always called it Ouija wine board making is how it used to be before we really knew about like how to test and what we were testing for and knowing what your brix were, like knowing what your sugars were before you fermented and knowing what your acid was at and your pH and you know, knowing all those things that you need to know for a successful fermentation. so sometimes that’s still happening, especially with like a spontaneous fermentation or from smaller wineries that don’t really have the ability to do any testing. They’re just like, well, does it taste good? Yeah, cool.

LM: Good.

SS: Cool. Move it on. That was like the family, that I was staying with in Croatia. they, when I was helping them make wine, he used, so they, they used these like giant plastic bins for their fermentation. but he used this really instead of using like a filtering not system but typically in a tank, it’s got a spout and so you need to keep the grapes and, and the juice and everything from coming out. So you would have some type of like spout or something on there or like you would have kind of like a filtering thing on the inside of it. And he used a plant, he used this like really rough plant that he just tied with a string and shoved it in there. I have pictures of it. And I was like, okay. And he goes, well, my family, we’ve been doing this so many years, and this is just how we do it. And I’m like, okay, I’m not asking any questions.

But it’s those types of things that they’re just like, okay, this is just how we do it. We don’t ask questions. We’re not changing anything. And this is just how we do it. And it is what it is. And I’m like, okay, great. I love that. I love that you’re not. This, for you, this is truly just because you have a passion and excitement for it, and you’re not trying to complicate it and make it something that maybe it’s not, if that makes sense. And so that’s the beautiful thing about wine, is that. It doesn’t have to fit into everybody’s box. It’s like you kind of just let it be what it is to show its true expression.

LM: I love that.

SS: Yeah.

LM: So there’s no, there’s no right or wrong.

SS: No, there’s no right or wrong. It’s just like, are you gonna want to drink it or not?

LM: is there anything that we haven’t covered already that you wanted to be sure to talk about?

SS: No. I mean, I think that my goal is really just to bring more people on really, really great wine adventures and to bring more awareness to Colorado wine and, to just advocate for our region and our state, but also, advocate for travel advisors and just bringing more awareness to the fact that we are not obsolete and that we can make really great itineraries and really awesome trips that I think really enhance people’s experiences.

I think travel is such a beautiful thing, and it’s meant to be shared, just like wine. And it’s even more beautiful when it’s together. And so I think that’s one of my biggest driving forces for, starting this business and going down this path and just inspiring people to bring themselves to a new realization of the experiences that they can have.

LM: thank you so much for spend spend the time to talk about this. It’s so much fun to talk about wine and travel. Its like, I could talk about it all day.

SS: I know.

LM: Now I just want go somewhere.

SS:. I know. Well, come on a trip.

LM: Sounds good. Thank you.

SS: Yeah. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. And this has been really fun talking about things that I love. And thank you for sharing that excitement with me.

 

LM: OK, who else is ready to plan a vacation now? If you are interested in learning more about what Sarah does and the trips she has planned, there are a couple ways you can get in touch with her.

SS: So I have my website, which is wineadventureswithsarah.com so that’ll have my all my trips on there. But then also you can subscribe to my email list. and then you can also just reach out via email. and then I’m on Instagram, of course. So @wine_adventures_with_Sarah. And then I also have my Facebook page.

LM: S A R A H.

SS: Yes. Sarah with an H. Yes.

 

LM: I’ll be back again in January with more episodes. Until then, happy holidays and happy new year. Keep talking to your neighbors in person and keep supporting our local businesses.

The podcast’s theme music is Riverbend by Geoff Roper.

Thanks for listening. With love, from Palisade.

Today I’m joined by Richard McDonald. Richard and his wife, Aly McDonald, own Colorado Vintners and Cliff Dweller Wine, where they make a couple of my favorite wines in the valley. Their newest venture, Grand Valley Enology, is an on-site wine lab that provides juice and wine chemistry analysis to grape growers and winemakers in the Grand Valley. Richard’s goal is to provide lab services for everyone, from commercial wineries to home winemakers, to improve the overall quality of wine coming out of the Grand Valley and to save everyone some money along the way.

Richard has had an expansive career in the wine industry, working all over the world in some of the top wineries and vineyards. We chat about his experiences working in Australia, Napa, New Zealand, Europe, and back again, why he and Aly decided to open a winery and lab in Palisade after all that, and the best things about owning a winery in a relatively young wine region. Richard also expands on why he wanted to start a wine lab, why it’s important to have a local lab resource, and what he and Aly are getting into next.

More about Richard and Aly’s projects at coloradovintners.com
Email them at lab@vincollect.com

Theme Music: Riverbend by Geoff Roper.  

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Transcript:

Welcome to Postcards From Palisade, where we hear from the people who are shaping our slice of western Colorado. I’m Lisa McNamara.

Today I’m joined by Richard McDonald. Richard and his wife, Aly McDonald, own Colorado Vintners and Cliff Dweller Wine, where they make a couple of my favorite wines in the valley. Their newest venture, Grand Valley Enology, is an on-site wine lab that provides juice and wine chemistry analysis to grape growers and winemakers in the Grand Valley. Richard’s goal is to provide lab services for everyone, from commercial wineries to home winemakers, to improve the overall quality of wine coming out of the Grand Valley and to save everyone some money along the way.

Richard has had an expansive career in the wine industry, working all over the world in some of the top wineries and vineyards. We chat about his experiences working in Australia, Napa, New Zealand, Europe, and back again, why he and Aly decided to open a winery and lab in Palisade after all that, and the best things about owning a winery in a relatively young wine region. Richard also expands on why he wanted to start a wine lab, why it’s important to have a local lab resource, and what he and Aly are getting into next.

All that and more, on today’s Postcard from Palisade.

RM: My name’s Richard McDonald. We had a great idea at the end of 2019 to start our own winery in Palisade in 2020. And we moved here the 1st of March, and then we all know how that kind of went down. but it gave us a lot of opportunity to kind of think, about what we wanted to do. So prior to harvest 2022, we started where we are right now, which is, Grand Valley Enology. So we’re a. We are what, I like to call crush pad to finished wine focused, wine analysis. So we kind of focus more on the winery side of once you press your grapes to tank, we can do juice analysis, we do juice panels.

I moved to Colorado and started working with Bookcliff in 2018, and I was just like, how do you do? You know, we did very basic, just wet chemistry, ph, sulfur, and that was about it. And I was like, hey, how can we do checking, you know, potassium levels and tartaric and malic and, you know, everybody. And even still right now, a, lot of people send to ETS labs, which is like, kind of a gold standard lab in California, and you have to pay the overnight shipping charges plus the sample, you know, you’re looking at almost $200 a sample. It’s, like, quite, quite expensive. along with it gets lost in the mail. So you pay for overnight, and it takes three or four days. And by that time, your juice is fermenting, like today is 100 degrees. So if your samples are warm and then they sit in the mail truck and. Yes, and it’s hot in California as well. It goes across Nevada desert. Yeah. So it’s not. Not ideal, you know, especially when you spend big money and you don’t get the accuracy that you want.

my background, you know, I mean, this year is, like 20, 22 years in wine. So I started, my first harvest was in 2003, just like straight out of high school. Just worked in a cellar, just got a job. I’m from Australia, obviously, and, the area I grew up in, Griffith, that’s got. There’s a big winery there. Yellowtail is kind of like a really big international claim to fame, but there’s a lot of other wineries, big scale wineries there

LM: I’ve had some of that in my day.

RM: Yeah. So it’s, you know, it’s just well known. That’s everywhere. literally everywhere. so it’s a big ag area. in general, it’s very similar to Palisade in that it’s irrigated desert. So we have a large, river that runs close by, and then it’s irrigated ag land. so there’s some big wineries there. Yeah. The winery I worked in was considered smaller. And, you know, we did 25,000 tons, like seven days a week, 12 hours a day. And then I kind of enjoyed it. And then that was also met. There’s a lot of international people, French and German guys working in the cellar. And they were, at that time, they were like, oh, yeah, you know, we travel, we do this Australia back to Germany or back to the northern hemisphere, and you can do this, what they call the endless harvest.

And, I had a good friend from high school, and her brother was actually the winemaker at that. Ah, he’s like, oh, yeah, you should, like, you know, you could go to. There’s a college 2 hours away, Charles Sturt university. They got a great program. And he’s like, yeah, it’s a great job. And I was like, okay, cool. And I applied. I took a gap year in that year. Just worked a lot of that. Worked that for six months. And then odd jobs out of season. And, yeah, planned for University, got in, and then kind of the rest is, you know, history, so to speak. Did a lot of Australia, and then I did the endless harvest for about six years. So between Australia, New Zealand, yeah, to Europe, back to Australia, the US, back to Australia. And then, met my wife, Aly. And we were both, just working in wineries in Napa, California. it was before smartphones, so, yeah, we just met at a bar the old way.

LM: the old fashioned way.

RM: Yeah and we got married in Australia. So I was working there again, back in my hometown. But then the opportunity came back up to come back to Napa. And, so we lived in Napa for six years, where I was very lucky enough to work in some very higher end. Kind of is probably a good way to describe it, where, you know, quality was the number one priority at all times. which is the basis that Grand Valley Enology is focused on. Because once, you know, you start a wine brand and anyone can start a winery, and then. But once you start going out into retail or restaurants, you, know, it’s perfect timing, but it’s like that’s the Olympics every day, like, you come up against the best wines in the world every single day, once you step outside of your tasting room. And the best wineries in the world are, doing this sort of stuff, like all the time, checking their lots, checking their wine. you know, that’s kind of the goal here, too, is, we have our, winery cliffdweller wine company and our tasting room, Colorado vintners. And it’s just building the brand of Colorado wine, improving consistency, improving quality, because also in the general market, Colorado wine is a little bit on the expensive side. Just when you talk about a lot of wine, consumers are very kind of conscious. They want good value and they want really good quality. That’s what we’re here for, to help build that quality that consistency. And I’m a big believer in all ships rise with the tide. you know, whoever it is makes a great wine, gets good write up, helps everybody out.

LM: Yeah, that was one of the questions I had, which was, you also kind of represented the same, attitude through vintners. You know, when you were starting up, you’re bringing in other wines from around the grand valley and around the, around Colorado, from west elks, and kind of pouring them side by side with your wines. So I can see this being really tied into that same concept where you’re not just kind of focusing on, like, this is all we do. It’s only us. It’s more about the community and the wine community in general.

RM: Yeah. And, you know, it’s a pretty exciting time right now in Colorado wine. you know, I have, some vendor friends that come out, you know, selling barrels and whatnot. and it’s always, it’s pretty funny. They’re like, man, I feel old out here because there’s a lot of, you know, you want to say young blood, but there’s a kind of, a little bit of a younger vibe. There’s definitely, you know, a lot of the founders are still around when. And it’s crazy to hear where. You know, it was only 20 years ago and there’s only six wineries in Colorado, and now it’s close to 200. but they’re great resource. They’ve seen it from a tiny thing all the way up to what it is now. but it is, you know, there’s lots of youth and enthusiasm there, I think is probably a good way to put it.

Well, I just grew up and that’s how I shop, too. You know, I want good quality stuff. And I do like to support local and the Colorado vintners idea for our tasting room. when I first started with bookcliff, so that’s. The winery is based out of the front range near Boulder. And so I was living on the front range and we’d come out. They own vineyards out here. They farm 50 acres out here. so we’d come out quite regularly to vineyards. get caught up doing vineyard work all day. And then you finish about 4:30, 5. And you’re like okay, I’ll try to do some tasting rooms. And everything was already closed. And there was a few less back then, too. But it’s very spread out, too, you know, where if you try to catch some places, you know, kind of ten, five to ten minutes away from everybody. and then Aly has an extensive background in restaurants. At the time, there wasn’t really a Colorado wine bar. there was the cafe. They had a whole bunch of Colorado wines, but it was a little, you know, they would kind of had weird hours.

LM: It was more food focused, too.

RM: And it was a cafe.

LM: Yeah.

RM: And so that was the original concept behind Colorado Vintners is. Anybody that came to visit Palisade, Grand Valley, we just wanted a spot where you could taste four or five or a handful of wines and be like, dang, man, Colorado wine is awesome. You know, just blow people away. because that is kind of a small problem in Colorado wine. you know, you can have two, three great wines and there’s kind of not a great wine and then just that consistency factor. And so, you know, you always remember the bad stuff and then you forget the good stuff.

and then it was also, you know, we were right in Covid probably in 2020, and it was kind of just helping to promote a few, like, we’re very lucky. We’re in a great location, kind of right on highway six here. And there’s a lot of great wineries, but it’s a drive, you know, so Mesa park is a good, you know, it’s not around anymore, but it’s 20 minutes drive from Palisade out to there. and then we had, chill switch and cedar edge is roughly an hour away. And a lot of people never heard of it. They didn’t even know that exists over there. So it’s, you know, you can take kind of that back, way back to Denver and go through Cedaredge, then go through Hotchkiss Paonia. Yeah. And then, So we, you know, we have always kind of have some storm cellar around, really great friends with Steve and Jamie. They’re doing an amazing job out there. I don’t know how they do it. And crazy. And then, yeah, along with Alfred Eames and, Qutori, when they have stock available. So. Yeah. And it’s just focusing on a little bit of, hey, you know, it’s just along that same theme of, hey, you know, it’s worth exploring. you know, everyone kind of knows the big wineries right off the highway. But there’s a lot of other cool stuff going on too.

LM: Yeah, absolutely. Well, so coming back to Grand Valley Enology, this is, like you said, this is really unique. So.

RM: Yes.

LM: there isn’t necessarily anything like what you’re doing here. Right. for any of the wineries around town who want to do this sort of testing on their samples, they’d either have to invest in all this equipment themselves, or they’d have to ship things to California, which you already kind of talked about the pitfalls of that.

RM: Yeah. So that’s exactly nothing like this really exists. for the winery side. that’s true. You know, it gets expensive very quickly. You can do some very basic stuff, very cost effective, but then once you get outside of the basic stuff, it gets expensive very quickly.

LM: So what sort of, services do you offer? Here, like, what kind of testing do you do and how often do people, like, how often would winemakers need to do these things?

RM: Yeah, so we, you know, it started out with, basic, just juice analysis. So, you know, for your juice panel, you want to check like the gluc fruc, which is glucose, fructose, two main sugars in grape juice, along with like your malic acid, tartaric acid, potassium, and your yam, like your yeast assimilable nitrogen. So that’s kind of the nitrogen available for your yeast fermentation. So that’s where you do, supplement to have a healthy ferment because you can’t otherwise the yeast don’t get happy. And then there’s a lot of off aromas or you’ll get stuck ferment. And that can lead to. Once you have anything with sugar in it, everything else likes to grow in it too, you know. So the yeast are quite great at kind of out competing all that stuff. But then once they’re not happy, everything else kind of moves in. It’s like guerrilla warfare going on in your ferment. And it’s a fine balance. you know, eliminating those problems early on is 95% of the way there to making a great wine. Like, you just, you have, you have a great ferment, you make a great wine. and then it all comes down to not ruining it later on. Yes. Yeah.

LM: Yeah And you need to know what you have to work with to know what you need to do. Right.

RM: Yeah. So, like, yeah. And that’s, that’s how it started out. I just asked around a lot of the wineries here. What are you currently doing? hey, if we were to invest to get this going, would you support it? Like supporting local and. Yeah. Very lucky that a lot of people jumped on right away, like, yes, because that’s, we work around the. We try to have people drop samples off in the morning. We try to same day turnaround, if not turnarounds done by noon. And just with my experience in the winery, it’s like, okay, I press the tank, I get my juice, get my samples in analysis, and then I can rack the tank that evening, get the yeast in, get my additions in, and then like, in the same day. So it’s like trying to help. Yeah. Otherwise you would ship it out and waiting three, four days, and then by that point you’re like, okay, I’ll just shoot from the hip and do a couple things.

LM: It might have changed along the way. So. Yeah, that’s. Wow. Yeah, that’s a huge benefit to the community.

RM: Yes. And then it’s also, we try to do it as cost effective as possible. Cause we’re a small business. A lot of everyone here is a very small business. So, You know, this is a very crucial step, I believe. So if we try to make it as cost effective. so the savings alone, You know, if you’re sending 10, 15 samples out, you know, hopefully we can almost save you like a couple thousand dollars there. that hopefully you are able to reinvest into, you know, maybe a new barrel or a cellar some help, you know, because everybody’s like, labor is very lean, you know, and it’s the hours are long, and then sometimes you’re like, oh, well, I’ve already worked 15 hours. I’ll wait till tomorrow. And then tomorrow can be too late. So it’s hopefully everybody’s able to reinvest in the quality, you know, so very quality driven.

LM: Yeah. Yeah. So you do the testing on the front end. And then you were mentioning you also had some equipment now to kind of do the final analysis to determine the alcohol content.

RM: Yeah.

LM: At the finished product end.

RM: Yeah. So yeah, we can You know, we’re very lucky. We were awarded a grant for the farm to market. So we were able to invest in a couple of new pieces of equipment now. So we can now do the majority of your wine analysis. here in house. We can do all of the juice plus then monthly, monitoring. So you know, your monthly. If you have a barrel program, like, like your monthly cos sulfur, monitoring, along with va. So you can kind of find problems very early. It’s probably the one big difference. Like I worked at, you know, working in Napa, we had 90 different lots of Cabernet sauvignon. Right. So if you had one or two that went great. It’s okay. We still got a whole bunch more to like make a great blend where here you may have one lot and it’s in two barrels, so you can’t really afford anything to go wrong. Or it’s like one lot in one tank. And this is all I got. So it’s a little bit more important to. And it’s. It’s also much harder. It’s smaller lots because smaller lots go bad quicker. So we can do all your monthly monitoring for sulfur and va. And then also like post ferment in red wines if you’re doing secondary malolactic fermentation. We can monitor your malic so you know, when it’s finished. so you can get your sulfur in preservative or you can, you know, there’s a lot of bio controls now so you know where you’re at. And, and then we can do your pre bottling analysis which is kind of your sulfur and any kind of chemistry you’re looking to touch up at the end. and then we can also do alcohol now. So. Which is for your labels. Yeah, it kind of gets important with your labels. Labels and federal regulations and stuff. So we can, we can now run alcohol analysis.

LM: So it’s a full life cycle of anything that you would need to do during winemaking process you all can do.

RM: Yeah. And then you know, we’re also here like if, if you are, we have a couple clients where, you know, we can kind of see their analysis and we do a little like some very basic tracking for you where if we see the results and we can kind of say, hey look, I’m not sure if this is the same lot, but you had one with the same name and we could say, hey look, you know, this is your va’s creeping or something’s going on.

LM: Yeah, very cool. And so you do all the same things, I’m sure, with your wines too. So it’s just a nice benefit.

RM: Yes. Yeah. And that’s, that’s comes out of just working. just where we went, where I worked in Napa, it was like every month we would do this. And it’s, you know, because obviously you’re dealing with a lot more, you know, great expenses. You know, it’s much bigger, kind of operation. We can’t afford to have anything go wrong. So it’s like your monthly checking and. Yeah, no, so it’s a big, it’s a small investment in your product, but then it does make a better product at the end. And then there’s consumers like yourself and everyone coming in every day and they appreciate, I believe, you know, they can really tell when people are caring about the product.

LM: I’m sure you can’t talk about who uses the lab, right?

RM: no, we can’t. But you know, it’s a large majority now, like probably more than half the wineries in this area now.

LM: wow

RM: So we’re like. And we’re gaining a couple more. I got a couple of new ones, just in the last few months doing like some pre bottling stuff. And then. And Yeah, so it’s slowly growing. and then we are Just because we’re just being really light staffed is a good way to put it. We do a lot of stuff here. So we’re now slowly opening up to potentially where front range people could ship it and ship samples in. Because that’s one beauty in Colorado is like, you just have to do ground freight overnight. Like from, especially from Denver to Palisade, it’s overnight just paying the, you know, $12 ground shipping.

LM: Yeah. And you’re just crossing the Rockies, so it’s not like you’re going across the Nevada desert. Or anything like that.

RM: Yeah. Hopefully not too hot. Yeah. You just need like an ice pack in there. You know, the ice packs wear out, after, like two days in the desert. Yeah.

LM: Yeah. Well, that’s so cool. So, I mean, that’s a lot to keep up with because you. It’s probably the busy times are also when you are busy with vintners and cliff dweller.

RM: Yes. Yeah. So that’s, You know, I’ve been very lucky. you know, Hillary Eales with Mafia princess. she’s kind of been here from the day one. And she really helped us get off the ground because they were like really small. She had some extra time. And, then, now it’s getting to the point where I’m able to, collaborate with the CMU tech and Ryan. And, about to a hire an intern from their program, there. And it’s, it’s also because, you know, I did enology at university and you learned like, all these manual ways to do stuff. And I can say I’ve never done half of that stuff ever. You know, you do the test and that’s the last time I touched any of that equipment. But this equipment that we have here now is you could, gain experience here and you could go to pretty much any winery, any wine lab almost in the world. And it’s very similar. Yeah.

LM: That’s so cool. That’s such an exciting thing to have here. And it just, it’s awesome to hear that. It’s been really well received and people are

RM: yeah And we do, you know, if there’s any new wineries out there, and if you’re currently sending your stuff out or if you’re doing it in house, we do offer, you know, we’ll do one or two samples for you, like where you do it your way, we run it here. you know, we just ask to share the results so we can double check. And, you know, we want everyone to be happy with the results. So that’s the worst thing is like you pay money for results and then you’re like, man, I don’t even know if I can trust this stuff. Yeah. So, you know, and I get that too. You know, I have vendors and you’re like, okay, well I’ve, you know, I’ve been doing this the same way for five years. Why would I change? And it’s like, okay, so you know, and that’s hopefully the benefits of being able to drop stuff off and you know, do your vineyard sampling. You know, I did some grapes this morning and you know, vineyard sampling in the morning. get the results back today and they’ll pick tomorrow maybe, or they updated their irrigation for tomorrow, they want to pick next week. Or just that benefits of being in, in the area.

LM: Yeah, absolutely.

RM: It’s like you can drop it off and then you know, go to the brewery or Fidel’s or whatever for a beer or something and then we’ll have the results back to you and then you can go back to work in the evening and yeah, do your racking and get your stuff done. Yeah. Kind of how it works in harvest time.

LM: It works, yeah. Have a little date night, go out for dinner and then go home and keep working. I love it.

RM: Yeah.

LM: so you mentioned that when you, where you grew up and where you first started working in a winery is a similar climate to here. And then you’ve definitely got a similar situation where it’s a desert, irrigated type situation.

RM: Yes, yeah yeah.

LM: so does it feel familiar at all to you now working here, working in New Mexico, to where you first started off or are there big differences?

RM: It’s a little different, yes. My immediate family, my cousins and uncle, you know, they own vineyards still. it’s kind of good to talk to them because I’m like, oh yeah, you know, look, I’m pruning this little one acre lot, you know, for free grapes. Like I do a little work and they’re like, man, you know, cause it’s obviously at one point they had, you know, little over a thousand acres they were farming themselves. And it’s very mechanized though. So, you know, big tractors, everything’s mechanized machine picking, that kind of thing. So it’s very different and it’s great to chat with them about that. here. Yeah, I love the climate here because it, you know, I love snowboarding and it’s great because we do get a winter time here and it’s. But actually the winter time here is like quite mild, like living in the front range. And you get that two, three weeks where it’s single digits. It’s or the snow will hang around for a few weeks. Yeah. Here it’s great. Like, you get the snow. Okay, back to sun. And that’s kind of weird because then you just go 20 minutes up to powderhorn and it’s like blizzarding. Yeah.

LM: Yeah it’s great, I love it.

RM: So here, obviously, the one main difference is the elevation. where I grew up is only, was 250 meters. So it’s like 1200ft above sea level, like, much. So we don’t get the, the extremes. definitely late spring frost is a. But, you know, it doesn’t get. We don’t get the extreme cold die back. They can grow any kind of grape variety. Where here. There’s some grape varieties. Don’t work great because come January, if we get single digits, they don’t. They don’t like it.

LM: Right, right.

RM: You get the winter. Kill. Yeah. But, Palisade itself reminds me of where I grew up. Where I grew up is a little bigger. It’s like 20,000. But the community here in Palisade is awesome. you know, now we’re part of the business community, just along with all the other. The old part of the community, if you want to call it that. I think that’s the. It’s a crazy thing in Palisade. there’s just a great community vibe going on here, which I think it’s crazy. someone else explained it and then I was like, oh, yeah, it’s like very relatable in, you know, my in laws come visit sister in law, brother in law. And it’s like, all right, let’s go to the farmers market. And as anybody probably knows, you only get about like 50ft into the farmers market and you’re like, oh, hey, hey, hey. You know, like chit chatting and it’s like an hour’s already gone and you haven’t gotten anywhere. And they’re always like, man, like, do you know this whole town? And it’s like, well it’s a small town and it’s like. But it’s just that community, you know, they come from a community where they probably. They don’t really know their neighbors. Yeah. So that’s. That’s like a really cool thing here in Palisade. I love living here in Palisade. our kids go to school in Palisade, three blocks away. It’s great. Yeah.

LM: So just in terms of Winemaking though, was there anything about this area anything about this area that surprised you that you didn’t know coming into it or grape growing or winemaking that was different than anywhere else that you’ve worked? Because you worked basically everywhere.

RM: Yeah. So what’s really unique here is you know, we have a very unique climate here. It is kind of on the verge of like Palisade is very unique in. It’s on the edge for grape growing. And you know we have a very unique microclimate here in the Grand valley. Obviously guys in West Elks at 6000ft and you know, down south in Cortez at high elevation are much more on the edge than we are. They’re a little closer to the edge. We’re kind of behind the safety rail a little bit here. And it’s also really great in I don’t know how to put it but you know, like a lot of more established regions have. And it always comes up sort of here and there. But you know like Napa has Napa cab, right? So it’s like kind of like. That’s the thing. Right?

LM: a defining thing.

RM: And then like Willamette has pinot. So it’s like very defining where here much broader scope on varieties that can grow. It also has sort of a much shorter history. So a large part of people here are still like trying to figure it out. You know, like what does grow really well here? Because it’s like, okay, is Cab Franc great? And Cab Franc is great. But then you have a. We had a. You know, the winner kill year in 2020 and those didn’t survive too well. And so a few other things came up. You know, there’s teroldego goes makes a great one. Chenin Blanc is like really great. So it’s like there’s just like this opportunity here to make great wines with a number of different varieties, that are kind of all in the mix and they’re all great. And without being like, hey, I’m just here for the big. The big guy, if that makes sense.

LM: Yeah. So there’s no. It’s like there’s nothing that There’s no kind of legacy that you’re forced to follow. I guess you can be a lot more creative and try to do things and still learn.

RM: Yeah, exactly. You can be creative and I And it’s also. Ah, people. There’s you know, Colorado has like a bit of a stigma with the natives if you want to call that like it’s, you know, people tried it 20 years ago and you know, admittedly it wasn’t great. I know the first time I came to Colorado, man, it was like twelve years ago and there was a Colorado wine tasting on the front range in a liquor store. And look, it wasn’t great, you know, and there was a couple great ones, but it was like very hit and miss. And you know, we do some markets on the front range and everyone kind of thinks that all Colorado wine is like, all they do is like sweet wine or just this one style of wine or it’s fruit wine or you know, the mindset is there and so, but there’s kind of a lot of younger people, if you want to put it that way, or new people to the state a little more, adventurous, you know. And we’re able to do that here and it’s, you know, there’s, and that’s also cool, like if you, from a wine agritourism point of view because, it’s not like you can go to five different, five wineries here and it’s like, like here’s the same wines. You know, you go around and it’s like different at every place. you know, sparkling wines gaining traction here and there’s some people making some awesome sparkling wine and so, you know, even that’s unique as far as like if you came out for a weekend and traveling around.

LM: Yeah, no, I totally get your point though. It’s like, so I grew up near the finger Lakes region in New York.

RM: Oh yeah.

LM: I worked there for a season. I think I worked in the wineries and it’s like, you know, Riesling. Riesling is the girl there. But there’s tons of other great wines. But you would go, you could spend a whole day just drinking Riesling and comparing Rieslings. Yeah, I mean you can’t or wouldn’t want to do that same kind of idea here. You won’t want to just go taste a rose everywhere, right?

RM: Yes.

LM: Everywhere has a full portfolio of wines that they can make.

RM: Yeah. And that’s you know, and then it kind of helps a little bit too, because it’s like, hey, go here. They make like a great, you know, this variety and then this place makes this really great and it, you know, and yeah, so it’s, I say it’s great for the consumer along with like, hey, you can go rafting in the morning and then wine tasting afternoon.

LM: Right.

RM: mountain bike for a day and then wine taste the next day while you’re recovering and that kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah. Then this is like a super unique little, wine area that, you know, that’s very different. And, you know, there’s obviously a lot of outside aspects, kind of, you know, you’re asking on this uniqueness here, and it’s, you know, I love the outdoors. I don’t get a lot of opportunity to go to the outdoors, but it’s all like, right here on outdoor step, you know, with summit county is only 2 hours away, or if you want to head further south, like Durango or Moab’s only 2 hours away. you know, so much. It’s very unique out here, and I do feel it was very, like, almost unknown. And that is amazing. You know, I do work in our tasting room. People like, man, I drive past here, here for, like, 15 years and didn’t even know this whole thing was here. I didn’t even know this was happening here. You know, they’d heard of palsy peaches, right? Obviously. But they’re like, man, you guys have got breweries here and a distillery and wine, and, you know, no one. You know, man, we gotta stop over now. So there’s, like, a lot of people. It’s. It’s getting words getting out.

LM: Is there anything I missed that I just didn’t know to ask about?

RM: I think probably one big thing is, like, don’t be scared. Like, come in, get in touch with myself. or, yeah, like, through email or my cell, send me a text. also, if you do buy your own equipment, come and chat to us and, you know, we’ll help you. if you want to run a sample, we run a sample, we’ll help you do a couple of those things, get it dialed in. You know, I just want, ultimately, everyone to be making great wine. So, you know, I get it. Maybe you can’t do everything through us and you want to do some stuff in house, but we’ll help you make sure that what you’re doing is correct, you know, and if you have questions, you know, we’re here, too, for questions. Wine making questions. and that’s all from basic stuff all the way up to, like. Yeah, if you want to, you know, we could do some consulting as well. So it’s. We offer the full gamut. Yeah.

LM: Do you have a website or anything like that? I can put the link in there.

RM: right now it’s just through our website. Colorado vintners. no, that’s, like, the next step. We need to get our website up. right now. It’s like, just local. Yeah.

LM: So just word of mouth right now.

RM: Email is probably the best way. I just have a really bad habit with texts. you know, my phone will read them to me while I’m driving, but then I forget about it because then there’s like ten other texts and then you get buried in the texts inbox and I forget about it. But if email is like, great, because I, have my email set up to give me reminders on anybody I haven’t replied to. So I get that, like two days later. Yeah.

or just stop by the tasting room too. So come in. We’re open a little bit later in that, whole concept. And that’s, because, there’s a lot of people coming into the area and they don’t get here till 06:00 in the evening. And so we’re open a little bit later. We’re up until about 08:00 or, you know, sometimes nine on the weekend if there’s a lot of people having a good time. so just stop by the tasting room and, our tasting room ladies in there more than happy to help you and get you in contact with us here. That’s if we’re not here in the lab. So it’s. Yeah, we’re not always, you know, we have a lot of other stuff. We’re not always just sitting around in here.

LM: You don’t just live here.

RM: Yeah. Although it’s great on a day like today is like air conditioning and stuff. because we have a couple, you know, obviously we have, our other, like, Cliff dweller wine company. And that’s like, a bigger project. We’re almost, it’s kind of two years in the making there where, like, we. We just expanded our production. that was supposed to be ready before harvest last year, and it wasn’t ready till November, like, right after harvest, which is always fun. and then we are also moving into custom crush there. So we. Some grant money for production capacity there. And then it’s kind of building a small, little ecosystem here where it’s like, you can custom crush and then the lab analysis and the tasting room. Yeah. And it’s like, kind of to help, if you want to start your own winery, it gets very expensive very quickly. Yeah, there’s a lot of toys. So we can, help with some custom crush in that project to help save you startup costs. You can get going well, before you go, or, you know, before you invest in building your own place, or you may just get a couple years in and you’re like, man, I don’t do this anymore. That’s the worst thing is, like, then. Then you just have to liquidate. And, you know, that’s the. Because stuff is expensive, and especially if you’re leasing space, and then you have nowhere to store it, it gets. Yeah. So.

LM: Right. So you can help out. I mean, you’re here to support people who just want to give it a try and, like, see, hey, is wine making for me. I have this idea. I want to try it out. I have these grapes and.

RM: yeah a little bit yeah

LM: That’s really cool.

RM: Yeah. So, you know, like a, really good example of that. is like, say you have an Airbnb or a B and B, like a bed and bed and breakfast. And then you have a small little half acre vineyard. And. And, you can come to us and we can actually make the wine for you. that’s, commercially viable and all that sort of stuff. We can do all the compliance and it’s legit, that you can then with the right permitting. Obviously, I don’t want people to get the wrong idea, but you have the right, you know, it’s all legal, above board. you know, you can then sell it to your guests, and it’s like, hey, it comes from the vineyard right here. Or you can pour it in the. In your dining room and whatnot. Yeah.

LM: Very cool. That’s another really cool angle that, wow, I didn’t know that y’all were doing all of this stuff.

RM: it’s getting there. Getting there. We’re trying. Yeah, there’s a lot going on right now. Yeah. So it’s like kind of a whole another story, basically. Another podcast of what’s. Yeah, yeah, we can. Once, once we get that dialed in, we’ll be able to go over all that. 

LM: Cool. That’s exciting.

RM: no, yeah, it’s just, get in touch with us, like, we’re here. everything’s like, confidential as well. So I, Actually, I deal with a handful of, home winemakers, too. So, you know, even if you’re in much smaller yet, like, you’re still in the, in your garage and you just have some problems, you know, you can come in and we’ll chat to you and help you out a little bit. Yeah. So it’s. Yeah, we. We’re here for kind of everything wine related.

LM: Awesome.

RM: And, yeah, we’re usually around and, yeah, you can feel free to bring beer by if you want. That’s always good. Yeah. So it’s, But, you know, it takes a lot of good beer to make good wine, so it’s. Yeah.

LM: Any particular type of beer?

RM: Yeah, I prefer like, like a lager or pilsner, that kind of stuff. More refreshing. Yeah.

LM: Okay. Don’t want anybody showing up, with a double ipa or anything like that.

RM: Yeah. so, you know, that’s why we were super lucky. We got Palisade brewing here. They make great beer, so we’re very lucky here. It’s like a little local ecosystem.

LM: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me.

RM: Thanks for reaching out. And, yeah, I know it’s taking a little while to kind of get together, but it’s been great. And I enjoy this part. I listen to this podcast a lot, so I like hearing, you know, and it’s, just hearing on. All the unique things going on.

LM: Thanks so much. I’m glad we could add your story, too, the list of unique things going on.

RM: You’re welcome. Yeah. Thanks for coming by.

LM: Even if you can’t make use of the wine lab’s services, I think you’ll still appreciate what Grand Valley Enology will bring to the Grand Valley wine scene. It’s exciting to see the valley’s wine industry grow with those who are part of it and I’m looking forward to seeing what Richard and Aly do next! They’re just not allowed to ever stop making Ghostdance and Escalante, OK?

The podcast’s theme music is Riverbend by Geoff Roper.

Thanks for listening. With love, from Palisade.