Podcast: Postcards From Palisade

Scott High of Colterris joins me to talk about an exciting new space opening soon in Palisade: Colterris Collections. On June 23^rd, Colterris Collections will open their exhibit space, housing over 16,000 pieces of wine memorabilia accompanied by fascinating stories from the world of wine. Join us to hear a few of those stories, along with the story of how Colterris came to be in Palisade!

Visit Colterris Collections at 3708 G Road or colterris.com/colterris-collections

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.

Today, Scott High of Colterris joins me to talk about an exciting new space opening soon in Palisade: Colterris Collections. The Collections location has been open as a tasting room for a couple years, but on June 23^rd, the name will be fully recognized with the opening of a space housing over 16,000 pieces of wine memorabilia.

Scott and I chat about how he got started with collecting and he shares the fascinating stories of just a few of his favorite objects in the collection. Colterris is Colorado’s largest fully Estate Grown winery, so we also chat about how Scott and his wife Theresa got into winemaking, what’s changed in the decades since they got started, and what originally brought them to Palisade.

Join us for some wild stories from the wide world of wine, on today’s Postcard from Palisade.

Lisa: I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me.

Scott: Oh, my pleasure.

Lisa: And especially the pre-meeting, too. I thought that was really helpful just to see what you have going on here and kind of get the thoughts together. So thank you so much for your time.

Scott: Sure. Your enthusiasm gets me excited.

Lisa: Good. You should be excited. This is a really cool thing.

Scott: Yeah, I think so too.

Lisa: So if you could just introduce yourself and we can start there.

Scott: Okay. Well, that’s easy to do. My name is Scott High. And I grew up in Denver, Colorado. Born and raised there. Love living in Palisade.

Lisa: So we’re recording right now at Colterris Collections at 3708 G Road. And the main thing I want to talk to you about was the or is the new collection. But, first, let’s just give people a visual of this amazing room we’re sitting in, which is also new. so tell me about this room and what kind of events you’re going to host here.

Scott: Well, when we purchased the facility, we saw a potential for this room. It has a lot of nice lighting to it and it’s just the right size for a small, intimate venue for winemaker dinners, guest chef dinners, culinary student dinners, food and wine pairing events, wine educational seminars. There’s a lot of things we can do in here. The Colterris tasting room is, we added this on when we purchased the facility, and it’s just the right size for a group of people. We can seat 34 people. And one of the nice things about this room is everybody has a view of the chef working. And if the chef wants to discuss a course or something, he has everyone’s attention. He or she can visit with the people as he’s preparing things, a winemaker can stand up in front of him and talk to the entire group. No one has their back to the venue, which is really good. There’s a presentation area that everybody feels comfortable seeing it, seeing what’s going on, listening to the winemaker or someone giving a little talk. And it’s really nice. We did it in leather. The center table that seats 18 people is solid oak and it was made the 1950s, so it’s about 75 years old. And it was a conference table at the First National Bank Building of Denver in the 50s and 60s. So it’s really a cool, old table.

Lisa: Very cool. It looks beautiful.

Scott: And so everybody has a community style seating event there.

Lisa: So you call it the Tastevin Room. What is a tastevin?

Scott: So yeah, yeah. The Tastevin Room. Tastevin is something that I learned about at a fairly early age. And tastevins really developed in the 15^th and 16^th centuries. And wine merchants and winemakers would have to go down in these deep dark caves with no electricity. And they had to have a method to check out the color and the clarity of wine. And so they had these shiny little bright objects that would reflect candlelight very well. And tastevins were used for four or five hundred years until electricity came around and they don’t need to do that anymore. But you could carry one in your pocket. If you were in a carriage or on horseback, you wouldn’t bust. And you got familiar with your own personal tastevin. So it became a professional tool for someone in the wine trade. It was a very important thing. And we have about on 300 of them on display in the Colterris Collections and some stories to go with them.

Lisa: Wow. So that’s a good kind of intro to shift over to talking about the Collection. So that’s in the room next door to where we’re sitting right now. And you graciously gave me a little preview tour of it a couple weeks ago. And when we met you were very, very adamant that it’s a collection and not a museum. So I thought that was really interesting. What’s the significance of that distinction?

Scott: Well, when I started collecting these objects years ago, we weren’t really thinking about a museum. But they just. It took on a life of its own and people seemed to enjoy looking at these objects. So when I talked to my wife Theresa about starting this idea, I used the word museum quite a bit. And there was some reluctance on her part to use the word museum. And we discussed it and I think she’s absolutely right. For me, there’s a lot of positive connotations in the word museum. I think it as being place of education, a cultural. How should I say that? Where you have cultural appreciation and it preserves historical objects. It’s a connection to the past. So I like going to museums. Some people do, some people don’t necessarily.

But I think nowadays there’s a negative connotation to the word museum for some people. And sometimes and I think that connection or that connotation for the word museum, sometimes people think of museums as being too formal. They’ll think of museums as being stuffy, antiquated, you know, so outdated sort of feelings. And I don’t think everybody likes to go to museums. They think of it as a drudgery. Or sometimes it reminds them of having to go on an excursion when they were in elementary or junior high school. And they would have to get on a yellow school bus and then get off and stand in single file. And the teacher told them to be quiet until they went into the museum. And they had to not ask questions in the museum and they had to listen and pay attention and be attentive to the person who was gonna guide them through a museum.

So nowadays, I think at least some generations, that’s what their feeling about a museum is. So we wanted to call it the Collections. And I kind of got that idea because of the archives at the Vatican Collections. And there’s a beautiful art gallery in Napa Valley called the Collections. And so it’s a word that, we thought made sense. And so the Colterris Collections, it’s really just a private collection of our objects that I’ve created and collected over 50 years. And so I just don’t want to use something that’s going to be negative. I think when people come to Palisade and they’re on vacation, they might not be expecting to find a wine museum. So, it’s. We’re treading new water here a little bit with this.

Lisa: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Museum stuffy, old, and it definitely is not that it’s gorgeous. So how did you get into collecting? What was the first thing you found and what made you just keep going?

Scott: Well, when I turned 16, I got my driver’s license and I bought a $400 Chevrolet Biscayne, which was my first car. I was looking for any excuse to go driving around. I wanted to go visit friends. I wanted to run to the grocery store for my mother. I wanted anything I could do to get in my car and have this freedom that a driver’s license allowed at the time. So one day I happened to go down to an area in Denver called Antique Row on South Broadway. And I was perusing through an antique store and this little corkscrew caught my eye in a case. And one thing led to another, and so I worked up enough money to go buy that corkscrew. And I have it on display here in the museum.

But what happened when I obtained that corkscrew is I started doing some research about corkscrews. And one of the most interesting things I found out was before the invention of the crown cap and the screw cap and modern bottle making techniques where they were all manufactured the same size, so screw caps worked. Everything that was consumable of a liquid form had a cork in it. It was finished with a cork. So corkscrews were a lot more prevalent in society then than they are now. So women would have to carry a corkscrew in their vanity case to open their perfume bottles. And people would have to have little corkscrews in their pocket all the time if they were gonna have any tonics or medicines. And beer had corks in it and wine certainly had corks in it and spirits and everything else.

So corkscrews were something that everybody used at the time. And a lot of people in the 19th century decided they were going to try and invent a type of corkscrew that was easier to use. So there are over 3,000 patents on corkscrews. And that kind of piqued my interest. So I tried to find out more about it, and I discovered that no matter how much I learned, there was more to learn. I did. I was very fortunate one time to obtain a corkscrew that actually received the first patent for a corkscrew in 1795. So we have that corkscrew on display and it’s kind of cool.

Lisa: Very cool. So corkscrew was kind of the intro object. And I guess in a way that. Do you feel like that kind of got you started your whole wine career?

Scott: Well, my parents were wine merchants even at that time. And let’s try that again. This is frequent. This is more than it should. Well, we could go upstairs. There’s a conference room up there. Should we try that?

Lisa: Yeah. Any refrigerators in there?

Scott: This is doing it much more often than I thought. No, not there isn’t.

Lisa: Okay. Okay.

Lisa: thanks to the magic of editing, you might not be able to tell just how often the fridge and freezer were kicking on and off in the tastevin room. While this equipment is super important for the functioning of the kitchen, it is not ideal for the recording of a podcast! Fridges are my podcast nemesis. Once we moved up to the conference room, the recording went much more smoothly…

Lisa: So we were just talking about if the corkscrew was the thing that brought you into the wine industry or if it was something else.

Scott: So when I was growing up, my parents were wine merchants in Denver and I developed an interest in wine from a very early age. We would have family discussions on Sundays about wine and I would ask my dad what’s the difference between a three dollar bottle and a thirty dollar bottle? And that would lead to more information probably than I wanted at the time. But we studied wine and I remember riding my 10 speed bicycle to the public library and checking out books on wine and going to used bookstores and buying books on wine. It’s kind of an odd thing for a young person to do that. But I wanted to know why wine was, why it involved so many subjects. Why it involved history and culture and science and it just seemed to be an all encompassing subject and it was something that I enjoyed on Sunday evenings at dinner, even as a young person. My dad would make sure that we all got a little taste of the wine.

Lisa: So corkscrews, you mentioned you have a few. I would guess it’s the largest object by far that you have in the Collection, is that right? And if so, how many or how many do you have?

Scott: It is, we have probably close to 18,000 antique corkscrews.

Lisa: Wow.

Scott: And we’re going to end up with probably 3,000 or 4,000 on display. There’s a lot of duplicates and there are things that aren’t as meaningful as others, so we’re trying to put collections together, on exhibit that makes sense, that tie together for different reasons, whether they’re from the same country or the same inventor or the same time period, things like that. But I think they’re fun, you know, they’re not only a tool, but they’re fun, to look at and fun to use certainly. And it’s really odd because at Colterris I decided to go with a Stelvin closure, which is a type of screw cap on our wines, nine years ago. So I don’t need a corkscrew to open my wine. But if I did, I have plenty of them.

Lisa: That’s pretty funny. That’s actually really ironic. I didn’t think about that.

Scott: Yeah, it’s kind of odd.

Lisa: That’s pretty funny. So getting back to the collection, we had talked about maybe picking like three to five of your favorite objects and going into a deep dive on them. Is that something that makes sense that you want to talk about or.

Scott: Sure. It’s hard to narrow it down to three objects, you know, three things that I’m proud of to own. But there are some unique things and some of the things that I purchased over the years were from descendants of the person involved in that object. So, for example, I have this tastevin, once again, that was presented to Napoleon Bonaparte during his hundred days of reign in 1815, where he met his Waterloo later on in the summer. But Napoleon was out on kind of a recruiting trip. He had escaped the island of Elba in exile and he’d kicked Louis XII back off the throne. And he was trying to reamass his troops and get a lot of new soldiers because he knew the seventh coalition was going to be coming after him again. So he was trying to raise a couple hundred thousand people into his military very quickly. So he was visiting different cities and different towns and he happened to drop by a small village called Saint Jean de Braye, and it’s outside of Orleans.

And he had kind of done a favor to one of his adjutants to go to this small village because one of his loyal people was from that village. And he asked the emperor if the emperor could just go by and do a 10 minute recruiting trip and a little speech on the town hall steps. And that so that someday when that adjutant retired, he would be kind of the big man on campus. He would be the guy that they’d point to on the park bench and say that old man brought the Emperor Napoleon to our village and that sort of thing. So he wanted to see if he could talk the emperor into doing that. And I can’t imagine him even bringing up the subject. But Napoleon quickly acquiesced. They were going to go right through the village area anyway. And Napoleon parked his garrison of troops and rode his white horse into the village. He met several hundred people, around the town hall. The mayor of the town presented him with a little tastevin, believe it or not, that’s engraved with the date of the event and the fact that they were celebrating Napoleon’s visit to their city. And he presented to Napoleon. Napoleon graciously accepted it. And then when the speech was over and they walked down off the town steps, Napoleon gave it back to the mayor. He just said, I’m not taking your silver. You know, the French Revolution was just a few years ago. And the last thing I want to do is to accept something that you scraped together to do that for me. So he was appreciative gave the tastevin back to the mayor.

And I got it from, I think the seventh generation descendant of the mayor’s. And so it’s something that the emperor actually held in his hand. And it means a lot. We had an exchange student who came to Palisade High School and stayed with us for a semester a long time ago. And I showed him this tastevin, and he started to cry when he held it. He couldn’t believe that he was touching something and holding something that the Emperor Napoleon had actually done the same. So he, he teared up. And then I showed him another object that I’m very proud of. I showed him a corkscrew, a wooden handled corkscrew that was recovered from the Battle of Waterloo, in June 1815. And then this young French, student, he got angry, the tears stopped, he got angry, and he said, we should have never lost that war. And he became very, very nationalistic in his approach to the corkscrew. But he was delighted to be able to see those objects.

This Battle of Waterloo corkscrew I bought from a descendant of the man who basically helped to loot the battlefield after the battle. And at that time, French officers, generals, and colonels and above, they were provided corkscrews. And they received bottles of wine and bottles of brandy before their battles. And they would need a corkscrew to open the bottles of brandy and wine. I think they called it a little bit of liquid courage at the time for the soldiers. But the infantry and the cavalry, they didn’t need a corkscrew because they drank wine out of barrels of wine, so it was not required for them. But this corkscrew from the Battle of Waterloo actually has a French artillery symbol on it and Napoleon’s crown. So that’s how we were able to authenticate that the story I got when I bought it was true. It might be the only one in existence, I’m not sure.

Lisa: Well, that’s really cool.

Scott: Yeah, it’s pretty special. Something else I have that’s unique is, I obtained a sherry glass that had King George III’s emblem etched on it. And I wasn’t sure it was what I thought it was, but so I sent it off to the Victoria and Albert Museum about 20 years ago, and they wanted to keep it. And that told me it was real. So they wanted to keep it. It was the only one that they had ever seen that had gold dust rolled into the stem of the wine glass. And the glass blower must have done that at quite an additional cost. But they theorized that it was probably part of his King George III’s inner circle to have the gold in it. And it’s amazing that something that’s so fragile and could be broken so easily has survived that over 200 years. So it’s really a special thing, and I’m very proud to have that. I get nervous when I have to handle it and put it into the display case, but now it’s sitting pretty. I didn’t want anything to happen to that. So there’s a lot of fun things. It’s hard to narrow it down.

Lisa: Yeah. Is there anything that you’ve really wanted to collect that you weren’t able to get or anything you’re seeking that you haven’t been able to find so far?

Scott: If my wife listens, I’d have to say no, I have everything I need. I don’t think there’s anything else ever I would need in this subject. It’s hard to figure out what the next thing is that I might uncover or find. But nothing comes to mind that I really wished I had right now. No, I can’t really think of anything really, per se.

Lisa: Okay. All right. Good answer. So you just touched on a few of the objects out there. There are a lot more. And I know when you walk into the museum, there’s going to be a little bit about the history of Colterris and Palisade winemaking. Can you talk a little bit about what you’ll feature there for local wine history?

Scott: Well, what we’re doing there is we’re basically trying to answer a couple questions that someone will ask when they come in to see the Collections. And already we’ve had some sneak peeks where people have seen things. And the questions they ask are, where in the world did you get this? And how much did you pay for that? And where did this come from? How did you find this? So those sorts of questions. So in the very first display cases, when you enter the museum or the Collections, you’ll see a little bit of family history in how Theresa and I met in the wine business and how we have this common passion about the world of wine. And you’ll see a few things about places that we traveled and times that we spent out and about learning more about the world of wine and visiting famous winemakers and famous places. And it’s more about our background. And there’s a little bit about Colterris in there and a little bit about the Canyon Wind Winery that we purchased and the Plum Creek Winery that’s here at this location that we purchased for the Collections. Not an awful lot about the history of Palisade wine in there. I don’t want to start competing with the Palisade History Museum and Priscilla Walker and that sort of thing. She does a great job, and I would like to leave most of that up to her. But we have more of a worldwide view about wines, so not a lot of local history.

Lisa: So a good day would be start at the Palisade History Museum. That’ll give you the whole picture of wine in the Grand Valley.

Scott: Sure, yeah. And I love what Priscilla Walker did over there. It’s really fun to see the history of Palisade, especially displayed the way she did it.

Lisa: Walk me through the space. It’s absolutely gorgeous. It’s a very big room. Beautiful chandeliers, shiny floor, shiny cases, lit up artifacts. How do you want a visitor to experience this space and what’s their visit going to be like?

Scott: Well, I think some things that I’d like for people to know about would be that, we designed the display cases here locally and we had them fabricated here locally. And all the components for the display cases were made here. We had Osburn Cabinets do the melamine inserts, and we had SSD Plastics make all the glass fronts, and The Glass Brokerage did the shelving, and Clemmer Welding did all the displays. And so we wanted to be 100% local, if possible. Theresa had the chandeliers custom made, and they’re fine art chandeliers. They’re traditional but yet modern. They have a modern twist to them. And we wanted to provide some lighting up there. But I’m very proud of the fact that we have different sorts of lighting. And it’s all on dimmers. We have track lights that point up into the architectural clouds that absorb the sound. We have track lights that illuminate the floors in front of the cases. Everything seems to be very clean.

And we have little areas where the display cases, you can fall into a little pod area where there’s four or six display cases around you and you can enjoy those for a time and really not see anybody else necessarily in the next pod of display cases. So there are nine or ten of those pod areas where people can kind of get immersed into those subjects and really feel like they’re interacting with the exhibits themselves, which I think is fun. It’s not dusty or dirty or old or, it’s very modern and clean and efficient. And we have a lot of stories. So one of the things that I think people can do is they can work at their own pace through the museum. They can go at their own pace, where they see something of interest, they can spend more time there. If they see something that really isn’t of that much interest to them personally, they can just get an overview of it and move on.

So I did have some people who told me that they want to come and read every display case and every sign and they want to absorb it all completely. And the gentleman started looking at one case, and he spent about 20 minutes on that one case. There are 60 of those. So I’m not sure we’ll be open that many hours that day. There’s a lot to see. I think that’s the gist of it. And a lot of different stories. And I’m really proud to put those stories in there.

There’s another story that I think is really fun. Sometimes I tell this story, but I put it in writing as best I could. But there was a traveling salesperson who worked for a printing company in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. And this traveling salesperson, his job was to go see customers in different cities, particularly in the Midwest. And as he traveled around and fell into the Great Depression era, he discovered that he had to try to find the best places to eat that were the cleanest, the most sanitary, that provided the best food. Because a lot of people in the 20s and 30s were getting food poisoning. There weren’t any chain dependable restaurants. Everything was independently owned. And so he kept a little log book of the best place to have breakfast in Nashville and the best place to have ribs in Kansas City. And so he started little list. And then he ran into some other traveling salespeople that had lists. And so he exchanged lists and his list of good restaurants to eat in grew.

And so with that, a Chicago newspaper one time ran an article about his unusual hobby of collecting good places to eat in his notebooks. They wrote an article about him and his unusual hobby. And he then became inundated with letters and phone calls from people who said, they’re going to Santa Fe, where’s a good place for dinner. So he started spending almost all of his time answering letters and trying to be courteous and polite to people who wanted to know a safe place to eat or a good place to eat. And he realized that he was putting too much time into that and not enough time into his job at one point.

So in the fall of 1936, he printed up 1,000 pieces of paper that had 167 different restaurants on it. And he mailed them to everybody he knew. He put them in his Christmas cards, all of his business associates, all of his customers. And he thought, that’ll put an end to it by doing it. He’ll just put an end to it. And so he’ll provide the list and then he’ll be done with it. Well, that fueled another problem because then everybody, it seemed, wanted a copy of that list. So in the spring of 1937, he printed up another thousand. And to cover his printing costs and stuff, he sold them for a dollar a piece. And in 1937, $1,000 for 1,000 pieces of paper was a lot of money.

So that fueled the idea for him to finally self-publish a book. And he printed up a book that had, I think by that time, almost 400 restaurants in it. But he was very, a person of very high integrity. And he couldn’t be bought off. He couldn’t get a restaurant on there if someone paid for it, if they weren’t any good. So he had really high standards and people admired that. And then before long, he was selling 5,000 books a year, then 10,000 books a year. And in the course of the rest of his life, until 1960 or so, he had sold 3 million copies of this, which turned out to be a restaurant guide. And he became somewhat famous at the time. And then a cake mix company in Nebraska asked him to recommend their cake mix. And after five years of trial and error to get this cake mix the way this man wanted it, he finally acquiesced and let them put his name on the box. And his name was Duncan Hines.

Lisa: Oh my goodness.

Scott: And there really was a man named Duncan Hines. And he was not just in charge of cake mixes, but then he licensed his name for other things. Well, I have a bottle of French Beaujolais from 1953 that on the neck band says a Duncan Hines selection, just like the cake mix. And I think that’s a funny story.

Lisa: That is funny. I have to say there’s not where I thought it was going to go.

Scott: Yeah, but people don’t realize that there really was a Duncan Hines. There really was not a Betty Crocker. So it’s kind of an interesting thing. I have a fun letter that he personally wrote to some friends of his he was gonna go visit in Indianapolis in the 1940s. And he must have been a character because he asked if they still had their liquor cabinet because he wanted to enjoy some of their beverages. But he must have been a partier.

Lisa: It sounds like. Sounds like the life of the party, the one person everybody wants to go to. That’s really funny. Yeah. Not expecting that to go there. So in the room itself, when you enter, you have a beautiful bar to your right. It seems like part of the experience is also designed for someone to come in and have a glass of wine and maybe sip a glass of wine as they’re walking around too.

Scott: Right, exactly. we wanted this to be a kind of a fun place, a place that people would enjoy coming to. And we’d like for people to come back more often to, we’re going to be changing exhibits once in a while, but when you come into the museum, you can certainly have a glass of Colterris wine and carry it around, walk around. We’re going to have some benches to sit at, and we’re gonna have some cocktail tables and our wine barrels to sit your drink on when you’re enjoying the tours. And I think it’s gonna be a nice event because I know that when I used to ride those school buses, they never offered me any wine to go to those exhibits. So, yeah, it’s a wine museum. It’s a collection of historical wine objects, but you can enjoy it with a glass of wine because we are in Colorado’s wine country, so it made sense to us.

Lisa: Yeah, makes sense. So tell me about the grand opening. When does it open? What’s that going to look like?

Scott: Well, it’s, coming up pretty quickly. After 54 years of collecting these things, I finally get the chance to show them off. We are going to have a pre-grand opening for some invited guests that are mostly related to the local governments in the Grand Valley. And then we’re going to have the local Palisade industry, the other wineries, and the bed and breakfast, and the restaurateurs and people who are associated with the tourist business. We’re going to invite everybody to that regard so they can get a little preview of it. And then Monday the 23^rd, we’re gonna open at 10am and then every day except major holidays from then on, we hope.

Lisa: Wonderful. And there’s an admission. Right. So there is an admission cost.

Scott: Yeah. So to defer all these expenses that we’re incurring here, we’re going to have to charge an admission and it’s going to be $20 to come into the museum for as long as you want to stay that day. And if you’re a wine club member at Colterris, it’s $15. So I think that’s reasonable.

Lisa: I’ll be having to come back a few times to see everything.

Scott: Yeah, what we want. That’s what we want to hear, Lisa.

Lisa: Is there anything else you want to say about the collection space? Like maybe any events that can be hosted here?

Scott: Yeah. After we laid it out and we had this little set of all these displays that kind of serpentine around the perimeter of the room, I looked at it and I thought, it’s a big enough open space in the middle that we could actually put some tables in. We could move tables in, have parties. We could have concert nights. We could play acoustic music in particular. I don’t think it’s a place for a big rock and roll venue, but.

Lisa: Don’t want to shake that glass.

Scott: Yeah, don’t want to shake. No, I don’t want to shake up the display cabinets. But I think we could have a comedy night, certainly. We could have, like I said, acoustic music, enjoyable evenings like that. One of the things I thought would be really fun is to bring back a little bit of a Copacabana or Coconut Grove night where we have 100 people, dim the lights down, candles on the table, have a classic singer perform for an hour or two and make it feel like the old enjoyable rooms of the 1940s and 1950s where Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and those people entertained. I think that would be a fun evening here where people can do that.

So to that end, we have one area that’s specifically laid out so we can bring a portable stage in that we have. And we put professional stage truss lighting up on the ceiling that’ll illuminate that area. And we have over 60 large, acoustic panels up in the perimeter of the ceiling around to absorb most of that excess sound. And as I alluded to earlier, we have a lot of architectural clouds that include 88 wine barrel heads that have acoustic tiles on the backside of them so you don’t see them. And they kind of hang down in different areas around the pods. So it kind of brings the ceiling down a little bit and has a little more of a feng shui sort of feel to the space where you don’t feel like you’re in a big open spaced warehouse kind of.

But yeah, we’re excited to the possibility of having events down the road. We also, we’re going to try and have some tours down the road, we’ll come to a point where we’re going to do some guided tours and we’re going to work on an audio descriptive narration where people can either get on their iPhones and search in what that display has and then they’ll hear a narration of it. And we hope to do it in multiple languages down the road.

So the next few years we have a lot of work still ahead of us, but I think we want to make this a not just a local venue, but we’d like to make it kind of a regional and a national venue. I had a gentleman visit two weeks ago from France in the wine business and he was shocked at what’s in here and he basically said he’s toured all over the world and been to a few wine museums in France and Italy and Greece and he’s never seen anything quite like this because he thought it was nice to have it a little more lighthearted and not laid out in a chronological fashion so you could just experience a lot of fun, little different things about the world of wine. He was really surprised to find this in Palisade. So I think it’s something I want the whole area to be proud of.

Lisa: Yeah, absolutely.

Scott: Yeah.

Lisa: I’ve heard of rumors that originally you were going to open the collection in downtown Palisade.

Scott: Well, to this. Yeah, you’re right. To this end we purchased what a lot of people call the depot, but it was actually the Palisade branch of the Grand Junction Fruit Growers Association. And that building then later it became the Mountain Lion Building. And it’s architecturally just a fabulous building right in the center of town. I just love the brickwork and the Italian Renaissance roof line. And it has a lot of history to it.

At one time it went over 400 feet to the west as a big packing shed that was on the railroad siding there where they processed Palisade peaches and shipped them all over the country. That burned down I think in the 1970s. But the main offices that were brick didn’t burn down and they were saved. And we still have that, but we bought that because we thought that’d be a great venue for this wine museum. And I think it would have been. But one of the problems was there just wasn’t enough off street parking. And the town proposed that I just use the streets around there to park cars. And I was starting to get some resistance from some of the neighbors, understandably so. And I understand why they wouldn’t want cars parked in front of their house all day.

So we backed away from that project, even after I had done an extensive asbestos remediation of it and had worked up some architectural plans for it and submitted them to the town. And everybody was moving forward until we started to see that there wasn’t enough parking. That was the main thing.

Lisa: That’s a bummer.

Scott: Yeah, we still own it. And as soon as this museum gets opened and rolling, we will start working on some ideas there. But if anybody has any ideas, I’m all ears. So please seek me out and let me know what you think because it is a challenging, fairly difficult place to do something with because from an engineering standpoint and stuff, we’re not sure what the foundation’s like on the building and we’re just not. It would require a lot more investigation before we do anything special with it. But I would love to preserve the building if possible.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah. Oh, I can see, I love that building. I can see it from my window. And yeah, just, just want to make sure it stays. But I see the parking thing because if you look at it, you think, okay, well that land around it is part of it, but it’s actually not like, especially in the front. I think that’s technically, like, technically Peach Street.

Scott: Right. Yeah, no it is, it’s Peach Street.

Lisa: Okay. So yeah, so that’s not even part of the lot.

Scott: Exactly. The east property line basically is just after the bottom step of the building. So there is Peach Street extended there and the town is certainly willing to work with us on that. But the issue is in the existing building right now there’s just not enough square feet to make any economically feasible business operate. It’s just not big enough from a square footage standpoint. So you have to add on probably to the west. And by doing that, then that’s where the issues come in, is how much do you add on, how much parking do you leave available between the building and the next property line to the west. And it’s challenging. I wished it was easier to come up with an idea, but it’s challenging.

Lisa: Yeah. Interesting challenge. So you’re welcome, or you’re open to people reaching out with ideas?

Scott: Sure. Maybe they should, filter them out a little bit themselves first, but, yeah. But, yeah, it is. We’d love to do something with it and something good for the downtown area of Palisade. But it has to be compatible with the desires of the town and the neighborhood and everything. And it’s a beautiful building. We’d love to save it if we can.

Lisa: It is. Yeah. Well, I appreciate your being thoughtful about it.

Scott: Yeah. I wished I could come up with an idea.

Lisa: All right, we’ll be thinking about it. So, shifting over to you and Theresa, what originally brought you to Palisade?

Scott: Well, we came over here for a friend’s wedding. They were actually, they got married in Vail, and we decided to not stay in Vail for one of the pricey hotels. We decided to come on over to the Grand Valley. And she had never been over here before, even though she lived in Denver. And she fell in love with the area immediately. She just said it reminded her of Sonoma County 30 years ago. And she liked the rural aspect of it and not a lot of traffic lights. And certainly the agriculture was very attractive to both of us. We always wanted to have a vineyard somewhere. And matter of fact, to that end, we had looked in Sonoma county and Napa county in California, and Bordeaux, France, and Mendoza, Argentina, and the Willamette Valley. And we had looked all over for a place that we might someday have a vineyard. Growing up in the wine business and being in the wine business all my adult life, it’s a natural thing to try to figure out a way to grow grapes someday. And we saw that opportunity over here, and after the time that she. After that day she fell in love with it, there was no looking back. We actually bought 10 acres, I think within a month or two of her first visit over here. So, that’s how Colterris kind of got started.

Lisa: Okay. And I see some of the lore on the Colterris website is that you promised if Theresa would marry you, that you’d buy her a vineyard. Was that really what sealed the deal?

Scott: Well, we talked about having a vineyard someday, before we were married. And we certainly had that mutual desire. And I think I might have expressed to her that it’s more likely that I would be able to provide her a vineyard someday than a rose garden. And it’d be more compatible with my thoughts and ideas. But now she has both, because we have a rose garden and a vineyard. And so I think she, she got her, her deal there. She got what she wanted. We actually got engaged on a trip in France and Italy visiting vineyards. So, yeah, I think she’s summarized it pretty well that I did promise her a vineyard.

Lisa: I love it. So really, wine has really been the through line of your life and your life together.

Scott: Yeah.

Lisa: So Colterris is the largest estate grown wine producer in Colorado, meaning that Colterris uses your own grapes to make all of your own wine. And you’ve been around for almost 15 years? Is that right?

Scott: Yeah, I think so. I think that’s right. Yeah. Our first vintage was 2008. We didn’t release it until 2010. So I’m not sure where you start with the vintage or the release of the first wine or whatever. But yeah, we really started in 1999 when we bought our first acreage up here is where High Country Orchards and Colterris really began. The first 10 acres we bought were all peaches and the peach trees were just too beautiful and the peaches that came off them were fabulous. So we just kept that peach orchard, got into the peach business and kept looking for another plot of land that we could plant a vineyard. And now we have both.

So we’re very proud of the fact that we’re Colorado’s largest estate winery. It means a lot to me for the authenticity of the wine to actually have the grapes grown here in Colorado. Some wineries, they don’t have that same feeling and they, it’s not as important to them where their source of grapes comes from. But I think if we’re going to have a Colorado winery, we should grow the grapes. I think that’s important. So to that end, we have almost 70 acres of vines now and we’re able to supply the needs of Colterris going forward, for the short term anyway. And we have two really talented winemakers that I’m very proud of, from Colorado actually, which is nice. They were trained in California and elsewhere, but they’re really good winemakers. And we’re operating very compatibly with their abilities and our desires. So we do want to make Colterris always and only from our vineyards. That’s our goal.

Lisa: Yeah, that’s good principle. So in the past, so I’d say. Okay. So since 2008, obviously a lot has changed here in the valley and in the wine industry in Colorado and the world, really. But what do you think are some of the most kind of notable changes or surprising changes to you in the last, ah, X number of years since you’ve started making wine?

Scott: Well, it’s fun to see new wineries come into the area. That excites me when I see another winery come into the area. It saddens me when I see a winery go out of business. So I want everybody to succeed, as far as the wine business goes. I haven’t noticed a lot of changes. I mean, when I first got here, I was really. I remember the Palisade Tribune newspaper. I remembered the breakfast cafes that we used to go to, and I remember all that. I wish that Palisade was progressing faster than it has. And I’m sad with the fact that we haven’t got more fine dining places, places to eat that people would enjoy. We do have really nice ones that are here, but I guess I just want. I want it to prosper better.

I mean, other changes that. Let’s see. Well, one of the things that I think is really remarkable are the people that I’ve met here in Palisade. Looking back, at first, it was kind of difficult to be an outsider and to come in and especially jump into the peach business without a lot of background in it. I think it was challenging. And now we finally feel like we’re part of the community, so that’s a nice feeling.

Lisa: Yeah. So you personally, when you open a bottle of Colterris wine, what’s your go-to? What’s your favorite one?

Scott: Well, it depends on the situation. Depends on the food that we’re preparing or having for dinner. The older I get, the more I like Sauvignon Blanc. I just think our Sauvignon Blanc is delicious and our dry Riesling. Bo and Justin, our winemakers, I think they’re making really good wines. We had a gentleman here yesterday that worked at a winery in California, he tasted five of our wines and he bought a bottle of each. So I think that was a good thing. He liked all five of them. Saying what my favorite wine is is difficult. It’s like saying which one of my children’s my favorite, and that varies every day with their situation with me.

Lisa: I love it. You love them all for different reasons.

Scott: I love them all for different reasons. Right. They’re all they’re truly unique, just like our wines.

Lisa: That’s cute. Personally, I love the Coloradeaux, the Bordeaux style blend. It’s really nice.

Scott: Yeah, it’s really nice. That’s kind of our. I tell people that our Coloradeaux is, it’s our version of a French Bordeaux, obviously. And in the wine business in the United States, if you’re going to have a wine made from vitis vinifera grapes, it has to be 75% that particular grape variety. If you’re making wines from a different species like vitus labrusca or something, it can be 51% Concord and still be called Concord. But for our purposes, when we make a wine, it has to be at least 75% of that varietal. And to me, when I taste a wine that’s 75% Merlot, for example, and 25% something else, it doesn’t necessarily always taste like what I would expect a Merlot tastes like.

So for us to have wines that I would consider to be varietally correct in flavor, they usually have to be way up into the 85, 90, 95 percentile range of that variety. We do want to add some other varieties for complexity and to make the wines more interesting. So we add layers of flavor by adding a little bit of Malbec to the Merlot or Cab Sauv to the Merlot or Cabernet Franc to the Merlot. If we want the Merlot to really be a full bodied, rounded wine with good mid palate flavors and good finish and good aromatics and nice color.

So blended wines are really where the state of the art for winemaking falls into, especially for red wines. But sometimes the winemakers will decide that they want to make a really interesting wine or they can make a really good blend of those variety grapes and not have it be 75% of one of them. So if it’s a varietally named wine from Colterris, I can guarantee it’s way up into the 90 percentiles of that variety. So it’s typical of that variety. But Colterris Coloradeaux is a wine that the gloves can come off for Bo and Justin, and they can make whatever they want. They don’t have to hold to the 75% minimum restriction of a single grape variety. And so it’s kind of their chef special every year. Like a restaurant would have a chef’s special to keep the chef from getting bored with the same thing every day. So once a year, we pretty much allow them to blend to their heart’s content to make an interesting red wine and it truly is one of our standout red wines. Our Coloradeaux Reserve got a double gold medal last year in San Francisco. So it holds its own very well from a national viewpoint of quality. And, yeah, I’m really proud of it. I think it’s an interesting wine every year. It’s special. I’m glad you like that. By the way.

Lisa: Absolutely. It definitely allows their skills to shine. And yeah, it’s always really delicious.

Scott: It has a lot. It has a lot of flavors. And the thing about Coloradeaux, because of the complexity of the grape components of it, it’s going to age and evolve and change quite a bit in the bottle. So it’s one of those wines that will be totally different a year from now than you taste it now as the components ebb and flow. But it’s a special wine.

Lisa: Is there anything else that you want to talk about with the collection, with the winery, with anything?

Scott: Well, our hope and our desire and our goal with the Collections is that it really contributes to the valley, that it really helps the tourism in the valley that we become thought of as a more serious wine growing area in the United States. And the reputation for Palisade is already growing very quickly and very well. It’s doing great as far as the quality of our wines go here and the high altitude viticulture that we can provide for our vineyards is exceptional. I mean, we’re extracting great flavors from our red wines in particular and high acidity in our white wines. And I think we’re making wines that are going to be well thought of in the future from a national standpoint. But I really want the Colterris Collections to be something that pleasantly surprises people when they come to the valley and something that they talk about when they go home, wherever they’re from, and they go, you won’t believe what I saw in Palisade. Little Palisade, Colorado. You won’t believe what I saw. I think it’s a world class venue that is just going to surprise people. I mean, it surprised you, I think.

Lisa: Oh, yeah. I think you’ve accomplished that.

Scott: Yeah.

Lisa: It’s, the only word I could tell everyone afterwards was, wow, you’re not going to believe it.

Scott: That’s the word I heard even from two people this. Well, the gentleman from the California winery that came here yesterday, he and his wife were just touring the area and I said, I’ll give you a little sneak peek of something. He said, sure. And the first word out of his mouth was, wow. And the second word was, wow. And I think the third word was, wow. And it’s just, that. That’s the most descriptive word I can think of that it’s not what people expect. And actually, when you pull up to the Colterris Collections facility, the roof line is such for the front of it that you don’t really think there’s a big building here. It’s deceiving. And when you walk through the door, it kind of takes you by surprise.

Lisa: Yeah.

Scott: And that’s a good thing.

Lisa: Yeah, you definitely pulled that off. Well, I cannot wait to visit after the 23^rd of June.

Scott: There we go.

Lisa: I’ll definitely be here. Can’t wait to check it out.

Scott: All right.

Lisa: Thank you so much for your time.

Scott: Absolutely. Lisa, thank you. We appreciate everything you do for us too. Thank you.

Lisa: Thank you so much.

Lisa: Go be pleasantly surprised by the Colterris Collections at 3708 G Road, then email me at lisa(at)postcardsfrompalisade.com to tell me how many times you said wow – I’m betting it’s going to be at an Owen Wilson level of wow.

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

Thanks for listening. With love, from Palisade.

When you bite into a peach or a cherry or any other delicious piece of Palisade produce, can you taste the more than 200 federal regulations and five governmental agencies behind the workers who helped provide that bounty?

Kim Noland, an independent H-2A agent based in Palisade, explains what agents do to help farmers manage the H-2A program and why the program is a critical economic necessity for Palisade. Marvel with us at the bureaucracy, and the people, behind the program while learning more about how it works and about how Palisade has changed over the past 30 years.

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.

When you bite into a peach or a cherry or any other delicious piece of Palisade produce, can you taste the more than 200 federal regulations and five governmental agencies behind the workers who helped provide that bounty?

Today, Kim Noland joins me to share her perspective on the H-2A program in Palisade, based on her work as an independent H-2A agent for farmers here and around the country. Kim manages the entire H-2A process, from employer certification to coordinating workers’ visa applications and arrivals.

Kim’s husband is also a farmer who owns Noland Orchards, which gives Kim a unique perspective on the process and a bushel of stories to share about how Palisade has changed over the past 30 years since she moved here.

Marvel with us at the bureaucracy, and the people, behind the program that is a critical economic necessity to Palisade farmers and foreign workers alike, on today’s Postcard from Palisade.

Lisa: Thank you again for coming in to talk with me. So today I’m talking with Kim Noland, and after I published episode number 40 with Iriana from La Plaza about La Plaza’s work with H-2A workers, Kim actually reached out to me just to let me know that I missed a really big piece of the story. which I really appreciated. So of course I had to have you on and understand a little bit more about what I missed and how everything works.

Kim: And I also listened to the other podcast with, the historical

Lisa: with JoAnn.

Kim: JoAnn. Yeah. And that was very interesting because a lot of that was the historical part of the program. So that was kind of interesting. It just wasn’t a lot about what goes on now.

Lisa: Right. And how. I mean, it does tie together, though, which I found kind fascinating. Sort of like when that story stops, then the H-2A story kind of picks up again.

Kim: It does. Yes. I mean, the history. You know, you guys had kind of talked about that the, Bracero Program was basically the first, step. And that was, like, in 1942. And Bracero basically means a foreign worker. And they did that until 1952. And that’s when they actually. The immigration and nationality act was implemented. And that is what H-2A stands for is it is the code, it is the section under that act. It’s the H-2A section that addresses that visa and what they can do. And so that started back in 1952. And then they did another round of immigration reform in 1986. And they split the H-2 category, it used to be just H-2 and then they split it into H-2A and H-2B. And H-2B, I get a lot of people call me for that. That is pretty much everything that is not agriculture. So H-2A is agriculture. And your business has to be an agricultural business. And the job has to be associated with agriculture. And H-2B would be, construction and those kinds of, and even hotel, you know, restaurants, hotels, stuff like that would all be under H-2B. But the problem with H-2B is the number of visas that the government will issue is capped every year. And H-2A has no cap. So if you put in, any employer can put in for an H-2A visa or get certified. H-2B, you have to put in, but then it goes into a lottery, because they always exceed how many visas are issued. So that’s a tough one.

Lisa: Interesting.

Kim: So I’m an H-2A agent. And basically what that is is I facilitate the application certification process for the farmer, the employer, to actually get certified to actually bring in foreign workers for a temporary period of time. That’s kind of it in a nutshell.

Lisa: Okay. But I’m sure there’s a ton more that goes into it than that.

Kim: There’s a ton. There’s a ton, yeah.

Lisa: So you’re an independent H-2A agent, right. You started your own business?

Kim: I did, I did. We used to. My husband farms. And, he’s used the H-2A program for probably. Oh, my gosh, I don’t know, it’s probably 20 years now, at least. And he had an agent out of Arkansas. And I believe that agent serviced several people around here, several employers used that agent. And he passed away unexpectedly. And my, husband was like, in a panic because it was January and you have to start the process three months before you need the workers. So, he was in a panic and he’s like, do you think you can do this? And my background is in government contracting. I’ve spent my entire career in government contracting. And, I said, well, I’m pretty sure, I’ve worked with so many different government agencies. They’re all like. And I had worked with our agent, so I was giving him a lot of the information for the process. So I just started studying and did our application. And then my husband just started telling everybody, and I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, I need to get through one. And it just kind of snowballed from there. And that was about eight years ago.

Lisa: Oh, wow.

Kim: Yeah.

Lisa: Wow. So you really. It wasn’t maybe necessary. It was a matter of necessity at the time that turned into a career.

Kim: It. Yeah. And a lot of, them here, you know, that did use that old agent, panicked because it was the time to start for this area. And it kind of depends, you know, on what you’re farming, when you have to start that process, and when you need your workers to come in.

Lisa: Wow. So now you work with a lot of the different farmers here in the Western Slope?

Kim: I do probably. I have over 50 employers that I work with right now. And, in Palisade, there’s probably over 15 that I do just in Palisade. And then I do quite a bit in Western Colorado, different areas. And I have clients in New Mexico, Idaho, Arkansas, Alabama. It just kind of tends to grow. You really don’t have to be anywhere specific to do the process. It doesn’t matter because it’s all pretty much, doesn’t really matter where the farmer is. The application process is the same.

Lisa: That makes sense. So how does the whole process work? Like, just walk through, so three months before farmers…

Kim: Yeah. So the government’s, program, to apply for the H-2A certification, they have a limited time of when you can apply, and it has to be in between 60 days and 75 days before you need, before your start date. So if you need your workers here May 1^st, you have to start the process in February. And I mean submit the application at that time, because it literally takes three months to go through all the processes. There’s at least four government agencies that you deal with along the way. And, you need all that three months. If there’s any hiccup in the process, you need the three months or you won’t get your guys at that time. They’ll be late. And so actually, to get to the point to submit, you have to start even sooner than that. So usually if I have a new client, if it’s somebody I’ve been doing for a long time. I pretty much have a lot of their information. We just have to update it each year. But if it’s a new client, I usually need two to four weeks to pull all their information together and gather it from them to get the application ready to submit.

Lisa: And the timing, we know, is very, very sensitive.

Kim: It is. And a lot of times I have farmers that are like, well, I’m not sure how many I’m going to need this year. You know, and it’s hard because you kind of have to decide. Because once that contract is certified, you can’t change anything. You can’t change the number of workers. If you decide, oh, I needed five more workers, once it’s certified, you can’t get more. You would have to put a whole new application in. And that’s costly for the farmer.

Lisa: So that’s tough. That’s sort of like a gamble. You just have to guess.

Kim: It is. That’s what farming is, it’s a big gamble. Right, right.

Lisa: The whole process.

Kim: So that process starts like I said, and the first step is you, we submit a job order to the state of Colorado’s foreign labor department. And so they go through the whole job order, make sure everything’s, within the regulations, and then they put that out. Once they approve it, then they put that out to the workforce centers all across the country. And then once they get it approved, then the next step is to actually file the application with the Department of Labor. And, that’s an electronic process. That’s the process that probably takes the longest because it probably takes at least four to six weeks for them to actually certify it. And there’s things that go on during that process. That’s when the workforce center will come out and inspect the housing. And that has to be done every single year, even if you have the same housing. And then they have to do a recruiting effort, the farmer does, because the whole process is to ensure that we don’t displace any domestic workers. So the farmer has to go through a process, if anybody applies for those jobs, because they’re out on a job platform out there, by law they have to interview them or at least consider them if they have the experience. And so we have to submit recruiting reports after that’s done to show the government what they’ve done. And if they had anybody apply.

Lisa: How often do they have people apply?

Kim: Not very often.

Lisa: OK, I’m curious about that because

Kim: Very low. I mean, I have a few employers that might have one or somebody come by. Sometimes they have no, they don’t, they’ve never worked on a farm or something like that. But I would say it’s very low. There’s, there just aren’t the people that want to work on a farm and want to only work for up to 10 months. That’s the longest a contract can be. So it’s difficult.

Lisa: That makes sense. That makes sense. Because they’re also trying to hire somebody within that seasonal range as well.

Kim: And you only have this job for, you know, some employers do a three month contract, some do eight months, some do ten months. But yeah, it’s a temporary job basically every year. So we don’t get very many people, domestic workers that apply. A lot of foreign workers apply because they see it too, because they can get on the Internet.

Lisa: OK. You’re like, not yet!

Kim: I know. And I have a lot of, farmers there are like, oh my gosh, my email is getting inundated with all these emails. I’m like, I know, but they’re all foreign workers and they don’t have an obligation to hire any foreign worker. So after that, after that whole process and the Department of Labor, then we’ll certify the contract, the next step is I have to submit a visa petition to customs and immigration. And that, believe it or not, is a manual process still. They are not electronic, so it’s an actual physical application that has to be filled out and actually have to overnight it to them so that I have proof that it got there. And then that can take them anywhere, it depends on how busy, you know, different seasons are busier than others just because everybody’s farming stuff at different times. And that process can take oh anywhere from two to three weeks maybe sometimes for them to approve the petition. And once that petition is approved, then we can go and find foreign workers and I get them visa appointments. I actually have an agent, a local representative in Monterey because that’s where we bring most of our workers, out of Mexico. And the largest processor of H-2A visas is Monterey consulate. So they go there, I schedule their visa appointments and my agent actually reaches out to the workers, kind of vets them, for the employer, if the employer knows who they want, vets them to make sure that they can actually get a visa. Because if they have any kind of, you know, criminal background or something like that, we don’t want the employer to pay the fee just to find out they’re gonna get denied.

Lisa: Yeah, that makes sense. And yeah, as time is so critical. I’m sure you don’t want to go through that whole process and not only the fee, but the time.

Kim: Yes. And Then the workers and my agent works with them to get them make sure that they get to the consulate on the day that their appointment is. And it’s a three day process they have to go through. So he kind of coordinates that for me with those workers down there and then they travel to the work site. That’s it in a nutshell.

Lisa: Wow, that’s amazing. I mean, I wonder how many hands touch each application.

Kim: You know, to me it’s crazy that the government and none of these agencies, are hooked together. The only thing that probably is, is the state agencies can access the Department of Labor’s certification system. So that’s. We used to have to submit those on paper. I used to have to fill those out and scan them and email them to the state. So we can now put that actually into their system. It’s called FLAG. But those are the only two that are integrated. So it’s a challenge. And just trying to keep track of all the dates and you know, milestones and stuff.

Lisa: That we have to in the process. And yeah, I’m seeing like a huge project plan.

Kim: It is.

Lisa: It seems like a lot of your stuff probably hits at about the same time too, so.

Kim: It does. So my. It’s funny, I always say that my husband’s busy season is my off season and my busy season is this slow season because I get really busy from December to May and then that’s when he starts getting busy is from May through September. So we kind of have October sometimes. Well he hunts so,

Lisa: So maybe December.

Kim: Yeah.

Lisa: No, not even. The first two weeks of December.

Kim: Right.

Lisa: Oh, that’s funny. Okay yeah, so that’s a lot. There’s a lot of steps there. And in theory, like we talked about, farmers could do this themselves.

Kim: Right.

Lisa: So, I think I know the answer, but just for conversation’s sake.

Kim: I mean there are, there are farmers that do do it themselves. But the thing is is trying to stay up on all the regulations which change constantly. That’s one hurdle that they would have to get past. The other thing is the technology part. I mean, I know my husband and you know, he uses a cell phone, but he does not want to spend his time at a computer. I mean they’re out in the field and that’s what they do. They don’t really have time and it is time consuming and it is a process that has to be monitored all through, all through the three months. Those are probably the two biggest reasons they don’t do it themselves.

Lisa: Just like anything where, yeah you could do yourself. But hiring an expert is gonna work a lot better.

Kim: Right.

Lisa: So how many workers do we have? I think you had mentioned we were a little bit, Iriana and I were a little bit low on that number.

Kim: I think I looked it up. I can’t remember. I want to say I think I email that to you.

Lisa: I think you said about 500.

Kim: That’s what I was thinking. It was around 500, yeah.

Lisa: And I think we had. She was like, I think we’re at about 400. So it seems like it’s really rapidly growing.

Kim: It is. Even just since I’ve been in the, you know, in doing this for eight years, it has grown significantly. The H-2A program itself, I think in the last 10 years, I can’t remember what the percentage growth is, but it’s huge. And a lot of that has to do with, I always say that after 9/11, believe it or not, our borders did get stricter because a lot of farmers could. Their workers would just come up and that’s just how it was. They would just show up and they would get across the border. Well, after 9/11, it was very difficult for workers to do that. And so it’s kind of forced a lot of the farmers into the program because they can’t get their workers their old ways.

Lisa: Interesting. So there’s no other option?

Kim: There really isn’t. There really isn’t. Unless you have, you know, a lot of local labor.

Lisa: Right. So as you say, I think everybody says this, H-2A program is critical for Palisade.

Kim: Yeah. I mean, it’s something you can’t live with, but you can’t live without. I mean, the cost to the farmers is a lot. They have to pay me, and then they have to pay application fees, and then they have to pay visa fees and they have to pay my local representative’s fee because he has to run them through. Then they have to also pay for all their travel and per diem and hotel costs to get them from their house to the consulate to here or to their work site. And they also have to send them home and pay for those expenses, if they complete 50% of their contract. So if a worker were to quit, and that happens, sometimes they have personal family issues or health issues and they have to quit for whatever reason. And the farmer doesn’t have to pay their expenses to go home if they don’t complete 50% of that contract.

Lisa: Interesting, makes sense. So, yeah. why is it so critical for Palisade.

Kim: Well, my husband says he can’t farm without it. I mean, there’s just no way, if you don’t have the labor to harvest and even to prune. I do a lot of employers actually do two contracts a year because the way the program is set up, they don’t allow staggered dates of need. So they don’t allow you to get a contract and bring in a few workers early, which a lot of farmers around here, because of trees and having to have them pruned and whatnot. They don’t need a whole crew. They don’t need 20 guys. They might need 10 or, you know, five to prune, and then they need to bump up come harvest. But the program does not allow that. We’ve tried to get that pushed through, and they still have not allowed it. So what they do to get around that is you have to do two contracts. So I have a lot of farmers that will bring in their pruning crews early, and then they augment it with another contract to add to the harvesting.

Lisa: And with the crops that we grow here, with the fruit, grapes, it isn’t something that can be automated, like in. Like a field of a hay. Or something.

Kim: Right. I hear it talked about a lot. But, you know, peaches and those kinds of fruits are just so delicate. I just don’t ever see those ever getting mechanized.

Lisa: Right. But there’s also just a very. Yeah. And there’s a certain amount of skill required when you’re pruning, you know, to know what to prune, how much, where.

Kim: I don’t even know. I look at them and think, how did they know what, you know, what branch to take off? It’s amazing. I mean, these workers that come up here, you know, every year. And a lot of the farmers that I work with, they bring back the same workers every year. They might have to replace one or two or whatever. But the majority of them, I would say, they tell me who they want to bring up. And they’re usually the same group of workers. Like in our, my husband’s farm, his workers are also all very closely related. They’re all related somehow through marriage or nephews or aunts and uncles. And they’re all kind of from the same area. And that’s common with a lot of other farmers, too, because you have these guys that are here for, you know, that many months, and they’re all living together, too. So that’s a challenge.

Lisa: Makes it easier to know somebody.

Kim: Yeah.

Lisa: Or maybe sometimes harder.

Kim: Exactly. I think. Yeah, I’ve heard that too from some of my employers.

Lisa: Right. So, I mean, any of our fruit, any of the crops here, it’s like the thinning of the peaches is something that’s a skill. And then knowing when to harvest and rounds of harvesting. So really, when you just think about the amount of effort that goes into this, it’s like, human effort that’s required.

Kim: Yeah. It’s so labor intense. And there’s just. I just don’t know how, you know, unless you’re a very small farm. But if you’re of any significant, you know, even smaller farms. I do a lot of smaller farms, but they still need that two or three guys or workers, you know, to come in, even though they’re small. I do some that only bring in one worker, so.

Lisa: It makes the difference.

Kim: Yeah.

Lisa: So you mentioned your husband’s farm a little bit. So I think it’s funny you refer to it that way, because whenever there’s, something that, I’m, not interested in having anything to do with, I refer to it as my husband’s whatever.

Kim: Yeah. We kind of keep things separate. I do the books for my husband’s farm, but that’s kind of about it. Our kids helping farm now that they’re older. So, yeah, I kind of like, that’s his business.

Lisa: Ok.

Kim: And then I have my business.

Lisa: I love that.

Kim: That’s why somebody asked me something about fruit. I’m like, oh, don’t ask me. I’m not an expert. I know about H-2A. I said, but I don’t know. Don’t put me out there to farm. That’s for sure. I can only tell you what I’ve seen.

Lisa: I love it. I just thought that was. That’s really funny. So it’s Noland Orchards.

Kim: It is. Yeah. Noland Orchards.

Lisa: And so that’s been, you guys, he has been around for quite a while.

Kim: Yes. So, my husband’s father, purchased the land up there on East Orchard Mesa. I think it was in the 60s, early 60s. He came from a farming background, then went in the military and worked for Aerojet General down in Denver. And so he was trying to find a farm, and he went to go look, I think it was a sheep farm down around Alamosa or something. And he went there, and the guy that was gonna sell it passed away the day that he. Or a day before he went there. So it wasn’t for sale. So I guess he drove around this way and came through here and he bought this peach orchard. And it was real small. And that was before Glenwood Canyon was, it was a lot smaller. It took a long time to get from Denver to Glenwood. And my husband said that him and his dad would come and mom would come up and farm every weekend until they actually moved here. I could not imagine that.

Lisa: From Denver?

Kim: From Denver, every weekend. They’d leave Friday and come back Sunday. Yeah.

Lisa: Wow. And they were. I think they were local legends. I didn’t.

Kim: Yeah.

Lisa: Get to meet them at all.

Kim: Yeah, a lot of people. My father in law passed away about five years ago. But, yeah, he was just. He was big in the Lions Club and he just. Everybody loved him. He was a great guy.

Lisa: So, on your farm do you bring in H-22A workers to help?

Kim: We do. We bring in 26.

Lisa: I think that was a dumb question because that is what we started with talking about.

Kim: That’s okay.

Lisa: That’s how you got into this. Okay. 26.

Kim: So yeah, we bring in 26 workers. Yeah. And we bring them in from the beginning of May to the beginning of September. So our workers just got here a couple weeks ago.

Lisa: Okay. And so have you had the same people who’ve come back year after year? Have you gotten to know some people over the years?

Kim: Pretty much, yeah. Like I said, they’re all sort of related. And in fact we just had one of our workers had worked for the farm, I want to say 40 plus years. He was old and older, I should say. And I think it was two years ago, he told my husband, I’m, not gonna be back. And he said he was crying. It was right when they were leaving. It was so, so cute. And he was like, I’m just getting old and you know this gonna be my last year. But then he kept coming and he came up this year, but he got sick and they told him that he had cancer.

Lisa: Gosh, it’s just such a big part of your life. 40 years.

Kim: Yeah. We had to send him home.

Lisa: I’m sorry.

Kim: Yeah. So it was hard for my husband because he’s literally worked with this guy ever since he was a kid.

Lisa: Wow.

Kim: Yeah. So.

Lisa: Yeah. That’s amazing.

Kim: That, like I said, that just happened. We just sent him home last week, so.

Lisa: Yeah, it’s sweet that he kept coming back though.

Kim: I know. I just thought that was so funny because he’s like, I’m gonna leave. This is my last year. And then he came back for three more years because he wanted to do it, he wanted to, he enjoyed it. And you know, they don’t, they make a lot of money for a short period of time and it’s really important for them and their families back there. A lot of them that come up here also farm back there. They have their own little farms.

Lisa: So what are some of the other stories that have really resonated with you just from people that you’ve met over the years?

Kim: I mean H-2A stories, I probably have 5 million of them. I’ve probably heard it all. But, yeah, it’s funny just dealing with different, you know, farmers are kind of funny. They’re kind of a different breed, you know, and, they don’t like all these regulations, which I don’t either, but, you know, it’s hard to kind of keep them under control because it’s like, I know, but this is what has to be done or you have to provide this to get certified. And so it’s funny, I mean, I have a lot of conversations with farmers that, and I know a lot of them that I’ve known them over years. So, they’re real openly honest and blunt about what they don’t like. And it’s just kind of funny. I kind of know each of their quirks and some of them don’t want any email, they don’t want to text, they want a phone call. Some want to see you in person. So I kind of know every farmer is a little different. You know, how they want to get their work done, and I kind of accommodate that. I don’t know if you went to a big agency if they would do that, but I kind of know how they are and I know which ones want their stuff a certain way, you know, or want the communication a certain way. So I always find that funny. And I noticed the younger farmers now that I’m kind of getting some younger farmers. And they’re all into, you know, the texting. And they’ll be texting me, you know, 24/7 on the weekends and everything. So there is one good thing about not texting or calling. But those, those situations are always kind of interesting. Getting to know all these farmers and their little quirks.

Lisa: I love it. Yeah. And then you just give that personal touch.

Kim: Yeah.

Lisa: How about some of the workers? Are there any stories you’ve heard or anybody that you’ve heard back?

Kim: I probably have one little funny story. I had two new employers. One last year, two now, both in Idaho. And they wanted their workers from Nicaragua. And I was like, well, okay, they knew who they were. I think they have a like vacation home there or something, these farmers do. And so they knew these workers because they work on their house there. But that was really a challenge because I don’t have someone in Nicaragua that can show these guys who have never been out of the country how to go get a passport, how to go the consulate, how to go get a picture for your visa that you have to bring to the consulate, all this stuff. I was contemplating making a trip to Managua and running these guys through myself because I was so panicked about how am I going to do that. And I told the employer straight up, I said, I’ve never gotten anybody from there. I said, but you know, if you can help, we can maybe figure this out. But I actually ended up, my agent in Monterey actually helped me out. And it’s funny because even though they both speak Spanish, the dialect is very different. So he said he, it was a big challenge getting over that dialect difference. But he was instrumental in helping me get with those guys and get them through the consulate because he has first hand knowledge of exactly what happens and how they have to go through and what they need to do. So that was interesting. I feel a little more comfortable now, but when first started out,

Lisa: So it worked?

Kim: It did work. Yeah, I got, yeah, I got two guys in last year and then four guys this year for two different farmers up there in Idaho.

Lisa: Wow. Yeah. You didn’t have a lot of time to figure that out, I’m sure. Same situation where it’s like, okay.

Kim: Yeah but you know, the Internet and technology is wonderful. And so, you know, years ago I just don’t know how you would do it. But with WhatsApp and everything, everybody around the world uses that. And, you know, you can translate and speak to people. So it’s funny how technology has made it so much easier to communicate with people.

Lisa: Right? Drastically. So you don’t speak Spanish?

Kim: Very little. Very little. I can read it a lot better than I can speak it because I email with my agent in Spanish. And so I can read it if I see something, I know what it says.

Lisa: Yeah.

Kim: But if I have to speak it, yeah, I’m no good.

Lisa: I’m the same. I’ve tried!

Kim: I’ve taken lessons. I took lessons after I started doing this, and it helped a little. But you really have to be immersed in it and speaking it every day.

Lisa: Yeah, totally.

Kim: My husband speaks Spanish. He’ll tell you he doesn’t. He says, I just speak peach Spanish. I said, okay. And then he’s out there talking to them. Or if we go to Mexico, he talks to them. I’m like, I thought you didn’t know Spanish? He does.

Lisa: That’s nice, though. Yeah, I know, like, restaurant Spanish.

Kim: Yeah, exactly.

Lisa: How to get to the bathroom, how to order.

Kim: Exactly.

Lisa: Food and drinks. That’s about it.

Kim: Right, yeah.

Lisa: That’s funny. That’s. That’s really interesting. An interesting challenge. So you mostly work with people from Mexico, then?

Kim: Primarily, yeah. I’ve brought in workers from Honduras before, but mainly Mexico. Just for one thing, it’s cheaper for the employers, just logistically, to get them here. I do have a new employer down in Montrose that this is his first year in H-2A, but he’s actually got another place I think, that he’s looking to buy in Oregon. But he’s talking about bringing people in from South Africa, I think, because they have a lot of greenhouse experience or something. So we’ll see how that goes.

Lisa: Yeah. Well, that could be a fun trip. Go to wine country in South Africa.

Kim: Yeah. It’s funny. Once they. Once these farmers get their workers, I usually don’t hear from them. I don’t hear from them unless there’s a problem. And usually the problem is, how do I get rid of this worker? Or, you know, what do I do? This guy lost his passport. Or, you know, they’re stories like that. Otherwise, if everything’s going good, I don’t hear from that farmer until I contact them, the next year to say, hey, do you need to start the process again? If everything’s going great, I don’t hear from them. Usually if I do, there’s an issue, and it’s usually has something to do with the worker. Yeah. Or they’re, you know, getting audited or something, and they don’t have their paperwork or they misplaced it or they want my advice on some of that.

Lisa: How often do people get audited? Is it regular?

Kim: Well, the government, so there’s several different kinds of audits. The Department of Labor, the foreign labor certification that handles the H-2A program, they can do a desk audit up to three years after, the contract. And that’s just. They will send you, you know, an email or you’ll get it in the mail and it says, we want, you know, provide us information on all this, whether it’s payroll records or whatever. Those aren’t very, you know, they’re not difficult. And then they submit that and you can get a response. And sometimes they’ll say, oh, you know, this is out of compliance. And they’ll just be like, correct that. You know, if it happened multiple times, you’d probably get fined. The bigger audit that most of the farmers hate and are scared to death of is the FSLA audit, which is just the Department of Labor that any employer can get audited. And that’s wage and hour division. And they’ll usually send a team over. Say for here, they’d send it over from Denver, and they just show up unannounced. And they can cover everything that has to do with wage and hour laws and all your H-2A regulations all at once. And, I think they were here. I don’t know if they came last year or the year before, but they didn’t hit many, too many farmers that year. It just, it just, you know, it’s just kind of a crap shoot. You don’t know when it’s going to happen. But that’s the scariest one. And they’ll do all the OSHA field stuff too, so they’re pretty, intense. When they’re in town, usually all the farmers are calling each other hey, department of labor is and town, warning everybody. Yeah.

Lisa: And that just highlights how important the record keeping is.

Kim: Right, right.

Lisa: to be able to have all that at your fingertips.

Kim: Right. And that’s just all. That’s all in addition to all the H-2A regulations, it’s just all the employment laws, that they’ll cover.

Lisa: Well, that’s stressful.

Kim: Yeah, it is. I think the worst part is, I think the worst part is having them show up unannounced, you know, because when you’re not prepared, you know, at least if you know they’re going to show up, you can kind of get your stuff together and be ready for it. And they can basically take a worker and they take them aside and they will ask them questions. And you cannot even be part of that discussion. So you have to make sure your workers, you know that everything that you’re doing, everything you’re supposed to, legally. Because if they ask them a question, they’re going to probably be honest, I would assume, and just answer the question, like, oh, are you getting breaks? You know, or now there’s heat laws, you know, there’s a lot of different agricultural laws that went into effect the last couple years in Colorado. So that are different from federal laws. So. Yeah. Over time for Colorado, agriculture went into effect. They phased it in three years ago. But federally, agriculture is exempt from premium overtime. But Colorado changed their laws three years ago, kind of following California. Unfortunately, Colorado tends to do that. And so now that’s really a burden on employers. Because if you have to pay premium overtime on agricultural labor, that’s a huge expense.

Lisa: Yeah.

Kim: Huge. And the thing is, is you don’t know. I mean, sometimes, you know, guys won’t have to work a full day in the spring. There’s not enough work. But then during harvest, if you have a lot more fruit maybe than what you estimated, they’re gonna be really working a lot of hours.

Lisa: Right, yeah. That’s just another piece that’s really hard to estimate. And again, yeah, it sort of goes hand in hand with what farming is. It’s just a whole big rush.

Kim: It is, it is, it is. It’s funny though, I used to think that when I married my husband and then I was like, well, you know, CPAs go through that. They have their crunch, you know, at tax time. And there’s a lot of professions that are like that where you have that big crunch where you’re working a lot for several months.

Lisa: So I know that a hot topic is always, well, what do you think is going to happen in the future?

Kim: Right.

Lisa: No one can predict what’s happening in the future. But do you see anything changing or staying the same?

Kim: You know. I. There’s some grumblings. I think there’s a proposal to revise the H-2A program again. They just did that a few years ago, but trying to make it so that it’s more of a system where they could just bring the workers in and they don’t have to be, I think what it is is the worker gets kind of certified and then they can come and work for up to three years at various employers without having each employer doing these separate certifications. Because a lot of H-2A workers do not so much maybe here, but a lot of H-2A workers jump from employer to employer, so they follow the crops. So if they were working here, then maybe they go and harvest something else in Minnesota or somewhere there that harvest later. A lot of workers do that and they can have H-2A visas, but they have to be transferred over to the other contract, which is kind of a complicated process and it costs the employer, too, to do that. But they’re already here, so they don’t have to go back and get another H-2 visa. But, they can do that continually and be in the United States for up to three years on, H-2A visa, but then they have to exit the country for a certain amount of months and then come back. So they’re trying to simplify it a little bit more. I think it’d be great if something like that would happen, but I have my doubts that it will. I had a lot of, employers that were very concerned after the election. They called me. What’s going to happen, you know, are we going to have a hard time getting our guys? And I said. I said, I do not believe so. Because when Trump was in office, during Covid, and it’s interesting, but a lot of people don’t know that that is the only visa that you could enter into the country at that time. That was the only visa that he, you know, made an exception. That H-2A visas were the only visas that somebody could get in when everything was closed down, when the borders were closed. And, I mean, it had to be, because if we didn’t have workers, we wouldn’t have food.

Lisa: No. Food would just be rotting the fields and yeah.

Kim: So I just always felt confident that, you know, it’s. He’s not gonna. He actually uses the H-2A contract. I think he has a vineyard up in northern New York.

Lisa: Yeah. So the essential nature of it should be well understood by everybody.

Kim: Right. Right.

Lisa: Yeah. Interesting. I’m curious about just you personally, like, what brought you to Palisade and what keeps you here or has kept you here.

Kim: Well, my husband brought me here. I did not plan on that. I just happened to meet him through my best friend that had moved here. And I came up and I told her, the last thing I want to do is meet somebody. I lived in Golden. I don’t want to meet somebody 225 miles from me. And next thing you knew, that’s how I came here. And, like I said, I was in government contracting for environmental firms pretty much my whole career. And back then, this was 30 years ago, we had our vice president of the company that I worked for was really computer literate. And he’s like, oh, I think you could work, you know, and I could get you hooked up into our computers. I mean, nobody knew about this. I was, ans this was still dial up, let me remind you. And, it worked out. And I would go spend. I could work remotely here. I worked remote before that was even a thing. I never even told anybody that I dealt with that I was working from my house. Cause they would think that’s crazy. And I would work here three weeks and then I’d go back down to Golden and spend one week in the office there. And I did that for, quite a few years. And then I, started working for another environmental firm that I’m kind of a very small part owner of. And that firm is all remote. Everybody’s remote and that. So that’s kind of how I ended up here.

Lisa: So you might have been one of the first remote workers.

Kim: I pretty much think I am. Because when Covid happened, first of all, our company, the company I worked for, we were all remote. And, it didn’t even change anything for us. We didn’t miss a beat because it was like. Well, it was just like normal.

Lisa: My husband and I were both remote too. Before at the time, it was like. Well, everybody was struggling with it and we’re like, we already adapted to this.

Kim: Yeah, it’s. Yeah. So, yeah, I think definitely when I did it 30 years ago, I’m sure I was like one of the only people that was working remote. Having to upload things on dial up was a challenge.

Lisa: Yeah. So what has changed in Palisade in the past 30 years since you’ve been here?

Kim: Oh my gosh. Here it’s changed a lot. We used to laugh because we used to say that Palisade, you know, rolled up the sidewalks at five, six o’clock at night because there was nothing. I mean, there just was nothing down here. I mean, we had no restaurants per se. Where 357 is, there was a cafe there. And there was actually a cafe, down where the Mexican place is now. And that was just a breakfast cafe. And then over at 357, a couple different owners went through that, but they weren’t ever open very long. And the grocery store, the front used to face this way and it was real tiny. And I used to say you’d have to go in there and blow the dust off of the cans if you wanted to go in there. Now, it’s great. I mean, they carry so much good stuff now. I go in there a lot, so. So, yeah, it’s definitely for the better. I know a lot of people complain about people moving here and stuff, but it’s like you can’t. I feel like a town, to stay viable, you have to grow. You have to grow somehow. Now I think Palisade’s done a good job at limiting and managing that growth. But I still think you have to grow to survive. Because my dad came from a small town and I’ve seen those effects are just not good.

Lisa: No, no. Like change is inevitable. I grew up in a really small town too and it’s gone the opposite way.

Kim: oh really?

Lisa: The elementary school closed and now, it’s just like, well, this is done for.

Kim: It like that’s how the town that my dad grew up in in southeastern Colorado, it’s just almost like a ghost town. The only thing that keeps it going is it’s a county seat. So the courthouse is there. But when I was down there last, all the main, street windows were boarded up. You know, there’s people there, but there’s just not. There’s no new businesses or industry. So I think, I think Palisade’s done a good job.

Lisa: Yeah. It’s a struggle but I think what’s helpful is they’re thoughtful about it. They really do seem to be.

Kim: Yeah.

Lisa: Just debating how to keep what people want in place and balance everything.

Kim: Right. Which is a challenge. Yeah, it’s a challenge. It’s funny because I do hear some people complain about people moving in, but I’m like, well, you got it. You came here. It’s funny. I’m like, it’s okay when you moved here. I don’t hear that as much from people that have been around here forever, but it’s been great. I think everything that’s here now is awesome. I mean you can. We don’t go into town, we used to call it into town, into Grand Junction, you know, to eat as much because we can just go here.

Lisa: Yeah.

Kim: And we have choices. That’s good. And then just all the activities now are great. Yeah, yeah. It’s been good.

Lisa: Thank you so much for you speaking to me. I think this is really helpful and definitely a critical piece just to understand better how everything fits together and works here.

Kim: Right, right.

Lisa: So I appreciate that.

Kim: It’s a big. I mean they’re a big impact on the community and I mean everybody just relies on them so much. You know, I know a lot of farmers, they get so excited when their workers are coming. Their workers are going to be here. Yeah. So, yeah, it’s part of the community for sure.

Lisa: Yep. Absolutely. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Kim.

Kim: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.

Lisa: Of course.

Kim: I just. I know there’s just a lot of people like I said I listen to your podcast all the time, and, when they first come, I’m always telling people, did you know there’s a Palisade podcast? Because there’s so many businesses that I did not even know of. I mean, that you’ve interviewed. And I’m like, oh, I didn’t know that was here. I didn’t know that person does that here, you know, so it was interesting. I’ve been here 30 years and I didn’t know of some of these, so it’s. Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve learned a lot. And I think that’s same thing with H-2A. I don’t think a lot of people. People understand, the whole process that’s involved with it.

Lisa: Yeah, absolutely. Because if you don’t look closely, if you’re not kind of around and seeing what’s happening, it would be easy to miss.

Kim: Yeah, absolutely.

Lisa: I so appreciated hearing from Kim that she had more context that would help better explain the H-2A program’s importance to Palisade. If you ever hear anything on the podcast that you think I didn’t get quite right, or an important detail I missed, or if you just have a good, related story to tell, let me know! You can always reach me at lisa(at)postcardsfrompalisade.com.

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

Thanks for listening. With love, from Palisade.

Go behind the scenes at Colorado’s largest wine producer, Carboy Winery. Barbie Graham, tasting room manager at Carboy Winery at Mount Garfield Estates in Palisade and sales and hospitality manager for the company globally, joins me to chat about how Carboy is making wine delicious, fun, and sustainable.

Barbie and I also chat about why she’d rather live in Colorado than California, how she was cured of wine snobbery and how she tries to pass that gift along, and about the variety of events Carboy hosts at their Mount Garfield Estates location.

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.

Today we’re going behind the scenes at Colorado’s largest wine producer, Carboy Winery. Carboy Winery has four locations, including (obviously) the best one, in Palisade. Barbie Graham, tasting room manager at Carboy Winery at Mount Garfield Estates in Palisade and sales and hospitality manager for the company globally, joins me to chat about how Carboy is making wine delicious, fun, and sustainable.

Barbie and I also chat about why she’d rather live and work in Colorado than California, how she was cured of wine snobbery and how she tries to pass along that gift to others, about the variety of events Carboy hosts at their Palisade location, and lots more.

I spoke with Barbie right before the May 24^th Bubbles and Blues kickoff of the Carboy Concert Series, so if you didn’t get to that show, you missed out, but there are still three more shows upcoming, one in June and two in October. You can find more info about those shows and buy tickets at https://www.carboywinery.com/event-calendar/happenings.

Stay tuned for a fun dive into a tank of Colorado wine on today’s Postcard from Palisade.

Lisa: Thank you again so much for coming in and speaking with me today.

Barbie: Of course. So my name is Barbie Graham. I am the tasting room manager at the Palisade location of Carboy winery. I’m also the sales and hospitality manager for the company globally.

Lisa: Oh, wow. Okay. So you do two jobs? At least.

Barbie: Yeah, at least two jobs. Yeah. We wear a lot of different hats in this industry in general, you know.

Lisa: Yeah. So tell me about your background. How did you get into the industry and what brought you to Carboy?

Barbie: So I’ve been working in food and beverage for over 20 years. I started out, like, working as a hostess in restaurants when I was like, 13, and then just kind of stuck with it. Got me through college, got me through graduate school, and then I ended up wanting to stay with it. I didn’t I initially thought I wanted to go into academia. And then after finishing school, realized that was not what I wanted to do. So then I started diving more into the wine side of things. Got my quartermaster sommelier certified sommelier, and then wset level three and was doing some stuff on the floor and up working as a buyer for some prominent wine programs. And then I managed Bin 707 Food Bar for several years. And then I moved back To California, which is where I’m from. And I was doing some consulting. And while I was out there, the Carboy team called me and asked me if I wanted to move back to Colorado and manage the Palisade location. I peripherally have known Tyzok, our lead winemaker, for a really long time. He also lived in California while I was out there and would come into places that I worked at. And then I met their whole investment team while I was working at Bin 707. They were scouting properties and they came in several times, and one of their investors kind of threw my name into the hat when they were looking for a new manager. And it was like, it was just divine timing. Like, it worked out perfectly. If they had called me a week earlier, I would have been so swamped with my consulting gig that I would not have answered. If they’d called me a week later, I would have already signed the contract for my next consulting project. And so it was just, like, the right timing. And I got out here in, like, two weeks from when they called me and just dove right in.

Lisa: Wow, that’s really cool. And. And, yeah, just the thing about, kind of timing and how it works out in your life is sometimes so interesting.

Barbie: Yeah, I didn’t really, it was definitely not in my plan to move back to Colorado at the time. I was really happy with what I was doing in California, and my ex, who I was with, wanted to stay in California, but it was just too good to be true. And when I came out here and I saw the production facility that they built at Palisade, that was really, like, pushed me to want to do it, because their sparkling wine production facility is an investment not just in Carboy, but, like, in the entire AVA, wine country out here. And I love this region. And I was like, oh, I want to be a part of this. This is, like, really cool what they’re doing, so I’m really glad I came back.

Lisa: You already touched on this a little bit already, but what makes Carboy Winery unique?

Barbie: I mean, it’s, for me, there’s so many things that make it unique. I think one of the things that really drew me towards it is I love this area. I love the Grand Valley. I love Grand Junction, I love Palisade. And same with. When I was at Bin 707 working for Josh Niernberg, he really had like a lot of vision of what he sees this whole area moving towards and kind of changing the cultural landscape. And I feel like Carboy embraces that on a statewide level of trying to like, Colorado’s like a beer state. I feel like Carboy’s trying to make people see it as a wine state. And that’s something I really appreciate, especially coming from, I was born and raised in Santa Barbara, California, and I lived in the Bay Area for a long time before I came out here. And I’ve seen firsthand how much wine country and food and beverage can shape the culture of a place and create like long lasting, sustainable economy and jobs. And it’s tourism, but it’s, it’s different than just like coming through and taking a picture. It’s like people want to stay for multiple days. They want to come and hang out. And it’s craft, you know, and wine in general is like art, science, craft, farming, agriculture, all these things combined. I think Carboy, they just, they have a really unique business methodology as well as investment in the area out here. So they started as negotiants and were purchasing grapes. And their Littleton location was the first location. They were restaurateurs, which also kind of speaks to me because I come from the restaurant background. And then they expanded to Breckenridge and Denver. And then were looking to purchase vines in Palisade. And I remember working at Bin 707. You know, I already knew a lot of the winemakers out here, a lot of people growing grapes out here through our wine program there. And people were like a little afraid of Carboy coming to town. They were like, oh, they’re the big boys. They’re gonna buy all the grapes. We’re not gonna be able to like, you know, we’re not gonna able to have a hold on it. Which is kind of ironic because comparative to like a California winery, we’re very, very micro or tiny.

Lisa: For Colorado, though, it’s big.

Barbie: For Colorado, we are the biggest winery in Colorado. You kind of have to have some gumption to like, be the big boys and to be the ones that are like, we’re gonna be the biggest and we’re also gonna be the best. We’re not trying to be watered down product or something that’s like not high quality. Like, the goal is to be the first wine that people taste that’s a Colorado wine, so that when people try it, it’s really good. And that motivates them to come out to wine country, go to all the other wineries, spend their money at places that don’t have the same ability to market and the same diversified business perspective that Carboy has. And I think that’s really cool. And then when I saw, like I said, when I saw the production facility, that really just blew my mind because I had been to that Mount Garfield Estates location when it was Mount Garfield Winery. And you know, they didn’t have the patio, they didn’t have the vines, they didn’t have the production facility. It was very minimal compared to what it is now. So just seeing the investment was already I was like, wow, this is. They’re really like putting their money where their mouth is. But the production facility is the biggest Charmat sparkling wine production facility in the US, outside of California, which is awesome. And it really speaks to our terrior out here. Like, we know we can reliably grow a lot of new world cultivars, right? Hybrid grapes, modern varieties. And modern variety grapes tend to produce high acidity, very perfumey wine, which may not be stellar if you’re going for a single varietal still wine. It could be. We do some like that that are really good, but it’s excellent for sparkling wine base because the way the sparkling wine is made, you want that initial fermentation to be like in the 10 to 11% alcohol range and high acidity because you’re adding in another fermentation to that. And perfumyness works really well in bubbly wine. So it’s like speaking to what does well here and what grows well here. And I think that for me is really cool because I think one of the things that’s challenging about the wine industry is that it is so bound by tradition that it can often be exclusivist. And to be in a place in a region where we can afford to be experimental. Right. We’re not Napa, where everyone’s like, where’s my 16% Cabernet Sauvignon? Like, we can produce whatever wine we want. And people are just so shocked to find out that we have wine here, that they’re willing to give it a try. And so to then say, okay, how can we do this in a way that works with the environment that we have? It’s very a unique AVA. We have very different benefits and challenges to places like California as far as, like, how we grow grapes. And to say, okay, like, how can we fit our production into what works out here? Let’s build a sparkling wine facility. Like, I was just. My mind was blown. And then to do that, we also have a bottling line where we. You have to have a specific type of line to counter pressure the bottles when you have bubbles already in the wine. And the facility is big enough to where we can produce sparkling wine for other people, we can make way more wine than we can sell. Which affords us the opportunity to help our friends and neighbors here who do not have the capital to invest in building a facility like that. And that’s amazing. Like, if people want to do high quality sparkling wine, we can do that for them. And we can charge them less than you would be able to buy bulk bottles from California, which is, I think a lot of people think of wine, like, if it has your label on it, that means you made it. That is far from the case. Most people are purchasing wine that’s already made and putting their label on it for things like bubbly. But we can do it with their fruit, which is, I don’t know which just so cool. Like, it’s so awesome. And then also, I think wine is a wasteful industry. And it’s also an industry of indulgence. Right. Like, it’s not the kind of thing. Nobody needs wine. I mean, I need wine, my soul needs wine.

Lisa: We can live without it. Like maybe we wouldn’t enjoy life without it, but you can be alive.

Barbie: Yeah. And, like, the, you know, the climate has changed a lot since I got into the industry, and a lot of new challenges are presented by that. And I think Carboy is, like, really walking the talk when it comes to sustainability and when it comes to, like, how can we make wine in a way that benefits and doesn’t detract from all the things everybody in Colorado cares about. Right. We love the outdoors. We love wild spaces. We want to keep the water sources going. Like we have all these things that we care about that if you’re in an industry that’s waste based, it’s kind of challenging. And so, you know, they’re 1% for the Planet members. They are members of Zero Food Print, which takes 1% added to every tasting room check and donates it to this nonprofit that supplies compost to farms. So we’ve like helped hundreds of farms get compost. Even some of our other partner wineries in Colorado get compost. We have a project with Protect our Rivers doing a wine for them, which they do a lot of cleanup, especially on the South Platte near our Littleton location. And then we have a lot of sustainability measures in the vineyard. We have cover crop that imparts nitrogen phosphorus in the soil. It keeps the soil a lot cooler and retains the water in it. We have micro spray irrigation. So we only water the vines for like five hours every like two to three weeks.

Lisa: Oh, wow.

Barbie: Isn’t that mind blowing?

Lisa: That is mind blowing.

Barbie: Yeah.

Lisa: I thought you were gonna say five hours every day.

Barbie: Yeah, that’s what I mean. From like at my house, I much I have to irrigate. It’s like crazy that that’s how little we have to water. And I mean that is, you know, you do want grapes to be like a little stressed. Like you want them to have to reach their vines way down to pull up all those mineral content from the soil. But it’s just really impressive to me how little they have to do. And we are not organically certified but we use organic inputs in the field, which is awesome. And then we also have like our tap wine program. So most of the carbon footprint from wine, like more than 50% of the carbon footprint from wine is from the manufacturing and shipping of bottles. The glass weighs as much as the wine inside of it. And you can’t like sanitize, like reuse glass. You can do that for liquor and beer, but for some reason in wine that’s against the law. Some crazy glass lobbyists must have really pushed for that. So we have a tap wine program. All of our locations have glycol chilled Brite tanks. We feed them with argon so that it prevents them from getting oxidized. And then we ship the wine in totes out to each location so we don’t have to manufacture and ship all these bottles. So we’ve saved over a million bottles from production by doing that. And we have growler programs. You can like fill your growler up and bring the growler back and it’s like, I don’t know, it’s really cool. I’ve never, I’ve never been to any other winery that does something like that.

Lisa: No.

Barbie: Yeah, it’s really cool to be a part of it.

Lisa: And I remember back when Carboy started in the Front Range, you know, about 10ish years ago or so.

Barbie: Yeah, almost nine years ago. Yeah, 2016.

Lisa: Nine years ago. And it was really revolutionary to have a high quality wine served on tap out of a keg.

Barbie: Yeah.

Lisa: You know, a refillable keg. that was just. And to be able to buy wine in a refillable growler. That was such a new concept at the time and everybody was talking about it. And I think now it’s maybe become a little bit more. It’s been long enough and you’ve proven the success of that method and the fact that you can have high quality wine like that. Maybe it’s less, maybe it’s less revolutionary or wild now. But do you still deal with any like wine snobbery from people about, you know, if you’re pouring them a wine out of the tap versus a bottle?

Barbie: Yes.

Lisa: Do you still get that and then how do you deal with that?

Barbie: We definitely do. There will always like wine is a. It invites snobs. You know, it rewards snobbery. And I think also part of wine is status. And so people want the status of a 750 milliliter bottle with a real cork in it. And so part of it is talking about. I was just share, like you know, one of the reasons we did this is because Craig Jones, he like got growlers wine off tap in Italy. He was like, oh this is so cool. Like he’s our main investor and he’s amazing. He does so much for the company. And so that was something that he brought back. And so it is not an American-born idea or a value based product born idea. It is a craft high quality product idea. And then I always, always just take people back and show them what the wine lives in when it’s on tap. Because I think a lot of people are expecting like a sixtel keg like you, you know like you’d see like your house.

Lisa: Yeah, a dirty old keg.

Barbie: But we have like 225 gallon Brite tanks and they’re chilled with glycol and fed with argon, which means you know, if you open a bottle of wine, whether you’re at your house or in a restaurant or in a tasting room, and you just put the cork in that and then put it in the fridge or leave it on the counter, two, three days go by, that wine’s gonna be oxidized. It’s not gonna taste the same as it did when you opened it. Off the tap, other than the little amount that’s in the line, which is exposed to oxygen, which we just pour off at the beginning of each shift, so that we just pour it and dump it, everything is completely untouched. So the wine at the top of that tank is gonna taste the same as the wine at the bottom of that tank. And then when you talk about the sustainability impact of it, most people, you know, all of us, we are so detached from the products that we enjoy. Like, we just don’t know what goes into it. And when you, when you start to realize, like oh, wait, the glass weighs the same as, if not more than the wine inside of it. And we’re putting stuff on trucks and shipping it, like, that’s a massive carbon impact. And if we’re gonna be able to continue to drink wine, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now, we all collectively in the industry and as consumers have to start making shifts to wine that is more sustainable, because the more carbon the atmosphere, the hotter the atmosphere gets. The hotter the atmosphere gets, the more challenging it is to grow wine. And we really see that in this area, it is so hot here, we have much less annual precipitation and much higher temperatures than we did like 20 years ago. And so, you know, when you’re sitting outside and it’s 105 degrees, you’re like, see, it’s hot out. Don’t you want to help the planet?

Lisa: Exactly.

Barbie: And then also just letting people taste. I always think, especially in Colorado, you really have to let your palate speak. Because I know as a wine buyer for some high profile wine programs in California, I probably would not have taken a tasting of Colorado wine or of new world cultivars. I would’ve been like, I don’t wanna taste hybrids and I’m not trying anything in Colorado. Because I was a wine snob and because I was in this culture that has a very limited perspective of, like, where good wine comes from. And that’s typical of, you know, the premier wine regions in the United States and the world over. But when you actually taste it, you’re like, oh, this is really good. Then you’re like, yeah, believe it or not, like, this is Traminette. You’ve never heard of it, right? You’re like, why is this so good? Like’s you really. I think that’s like the fun of modern wine and of regional wine and of accessibility in wine. Like getting wine out of this, like, you know, old white person category that it’s always been in and like opening it up, I mean, like, it doesn’t have to be super expensive. It doesn’t have to be like some fancy pinkie up thing. You can drink it out of any glass that you want to drink it out of. And just like, if it tastes good, drink it. Like, if you like it, drink it. But it is a challenge.

Lisa: So you’re a recovered wine snob?

Barbie: I’m totally a recovered wine snob, yes.

Lisa: That’s awesome. That kind of leads into, I think one of the interviews, one of the things that you said was that Carboy’s mission is to open wine up to the widest audience that you could or that you can.

Barbie: Yes, absolutely.

Lisa: So how do you do that? How do you make it appealing to more than just the old wine snobs?

Barbie: I mean, I think first of all, the level of hospitality that you get when you walk into our tasting room. Like, you know, in my experience in wine, there’s a lot of places you go in and everyone kind of fits that same generic category. You walk into our taste room and like, people have tattoos. We’ve got different colors of hair, we’ve got piercings, we’ve got like, this is not a place where you have to fit a certain mold to work with us. And it’s also just being really welcoming and recognizing that, especially out here in Palisade, and this is different at every location because our locations are all in different neighborhoods. We have different demographics that go in. But in Palisade, this is a wine region where a lot of people, we are the first winery that people have ever been to before. Like, they’re coming out here on a bachelorette trip and they’re 22 and they’ve never had wine. And like, I had someone say, oh, I don’t really ever drink wine. And I was like, oh, what do you like to drink? She was like, well, I love champagne. And I was like, well, you might not know this, but like, champagne’s actually wine, like, it’s like, that’s a lot of the level of people that we’re interacting with. And so just being like super nonjudgmental and like, you don’t have to know anything about wine to enjoy it. And recognizing that no one walks into a brewery and is like, oh my god, I really wish I knew more about beer. Like, that’s literally how people feel when they walk into a winery. They already feel like, ashamed of their lack of knowledge before they even get up to the counter. And so just being super recognizing of that. I mean, like, no, like this is a place where you can just taste whatever you want, enjoy yourself. And then I think also creating experiences besides just wine. Right? Because if you’re like, okay, I’m gonna go listen to a band, or I’m gonna go do a paint and sip class, or I’m gonna go to yoga, like, then you can get in without that feeling of like, oh, I’m gonna be you know asked what I taste in this wine. Like I’m gonna be judged for my knowledge or lack thereof. It’s like, if you’re going for a full experience, then it makes a little easier. Like there’s not as much of a barrier of entry. Or you can just drink a wine slushie.

Lisa: Yeah, right.

Barbie: There’s always that.

Lisa: Yeah. Like the events are not all centered around wine. It’s wine is sort of the side benefit of doing this thing.

Barbie: And that’s like, I think especially that was the other thing, other than being so impressed with the production facility when I came out here, that really stood out to me is just the space at the Palisade location is, I mean, it’s first of all it’s stunningly gorgeous. Like, it’s hard to even conceive of a more beautiful space to show up to work. It’s like gorgeous views and just, it’s just stunning. And then also this space, it’s like, it’s a venue, you know. And when I first started with the company, they were really new to this location. They were just over their second year there. Or no, just over their first year. April 2022 they opened. So they were like a year and a couple months into being Carboy at that location. And. And you know, they’d been turning on the open sign and welcoming people in. But they hadn’t really been putting the space to full use. And I mean, I walked out and I saw the back and I was like, okay, this is a venue at a winery, not a winery with a venue. Like, it is primarily a space to go experience things while you’re drinking wine as opposed to primarily a space where you’re drinking wine. Like it’s got more potential for so many things that are not wine related, that bring in people from all walks of life and then by doing that, break down the barriers of who thinks they fit in in a winery.

Lisa: I love that. So just going back to winemaking really quick before we jump over to events. So, and I think this is a positive thing. But to me, the number of wines that Carboy makes is almost overwhelming

Barbie: it is!

Lisa: because there are so many different varieties and there’s so many sparkling wines. And it’s like such a treat to me. To number one, everybody is always so friendly when we show up and the space is amazing. It’s like one of my favorite places to hang out. Especially on Sunday afternoons.

Barbie: Yeah, I know. You’re part of Sunday crew.

Lisa: Yeah, but with that number of wines, I mean there are so many. What tend to stand out as some of the fan favorites or like which ones tend to rise to be more popular?

Barbie: It really depends on the season. You know, wine is seasonal, but our on-season is summertime, April to November. And so definitely sparkling wine is our top seller. Sparkling, the Grand Brut Rose, which I know you’ve had before, the Blanc de Blanc, those are like far and away the biggest sellers. I think a big part of that is that it is hot. People want something easy and fun and relaxing. And I think also maybe because I love bubbles, so I always force people to try the bubbles.

Lisa: and they’re so good!

Barbie: They’re so good. And then also, some of the things that we’re more known for that are not sparkling, I would say Cabernet Franc. Cabernet Franc is one of the better known varietals in the valley in general. So people tend to ask for that and seek it out. We also do really well in whites with our Riesling, is very popular. Our Blan.CO white blend, which is blend of all Colorado fruit. Sauvignon Blanc always sells. Sauvignon Blanc is nationwide the most selling white wine, most consumed white wine, so that sells. And then things that have had some accolades. So our Teroldego won Governor’s cup two times. So people often ask for that. And then we have some standouts for New World cultivars, modern variety grapes. Our Chambourcin is really popular, which is one of the New World cultivars. And that’s a red dry, single varietal, hybrid grape, which is unusual and surprising for me to like how popular it is. But that’s the wine, as soon as we get on the shelf, people come in and they’re like, I’m gonna buy a case. And then, like, two months later, it’s gone. And I mean, it really does change. It also depends on what our staff likes. We are very privileged to have a lot of wine training and a lot of people in the company that have, you know, letters after their name regarding wine, which is awesome. Kellen Brewer, who does all the training education for the company, comes out several times a year and does sensory trainings with our team. You know, I have a lot of background in tasting and training on wines, so we get to really dive deep into, like, what our team likes and then help push the things that we know we enjoy for people to try. And the beauty of wine over other types of beverage is like, you can just taste as many as you want. It’s like going to, like, a gelato store. You know, I don’t even care if you buy a glass. You should just taste it. Like, tasting wine is one of the rare pleasures in life. Taste all the wine. And so it really lets people kind of experiment and, like, see what they like. And it is an overwhelming amount. But that’s also one of the privileges of being in Colorado. You know, you go wine tasting in Willamette Valley, you’re gonna, every place you go, you’re gonna taste like six Pinot Noirs, which is fine. I love Pinot Noir. But that’s just how it is. You go to Napa, you’re like Cabernet, Chardonnay.

Lisa: Chardonnay.

Barbie: You know, you’re not gonna get anything else other than that. And out here, one of the cool things about Colorado wine country is we have tons and tons of different fruit. In the 16 acre plot that we have at the Mount Garfield Estate location, we have Albarino, Teroldego, Syrah, Cab Franc, Traminette, some others I’m sure that I can’t remember right now. And then we have like another 16 acres that’s all new world cultivars. I mean, we probably have, you know, more than 15 types of grapes that we just our fruit that we grow. And so it is. It definitely, sparkling wine dominates. I think that’s also bachelorette party syndrome. We are a bachelorette party mecca. And who doesn’t want sparkling rose when you’re celebrating your friend getting married?

Lisa: Absolutely.

Barbie: But I think, yeah, we’re the bubbles people.

Lisa: And also what helps with that too, I think, is producing it the way that you do in the Charmat method. It helps it be more affordable.

Barbie: Absolutely.

Lisa: I think. I mean, I am all for champagne, champagne style produced wines, aging in the bottle and whatever, but they’re so much more expensive.

Barbie: Yeah.

Lisa: And so it is a treat to see you can get a really good, really great tasting, like, quality bottle of bubbles for not that much money.

Barbie: Yeah, $34, you get a bottle of bubbles. Other places you go, they’re nineteen dollar a glass for methode champenoise. You know, it’s a huge price difference. And it also, for me, I do love champagne, but I definitely drink more Charmat method wine. Whether it’s Carboy wine or Prosecco, it tends to be like, a little bit crisper, a little bit lighter, a little bit less yeasty, which for my palate and for my susceptibility to headaches, works better for my body. And it’s, you know, comparative to doing forced carbonation, which there are other people out here that do that. It’s not, forced carbonation is not a bad thing, but the bubbles are a lot bigger and you really have to commit to finishing that bottle. Like, if you don’t finish the bottle, it’s gonna be flat like a can of Coke.

Lisa: it’ll be a still wine.

Barbie: Yeah, exactly. But Charmat, it’s like you can put the little cap thing on it and put it in the fridge and it’ll be good for a few days. And, you know, I think, yeah, I think the affordability part of it is definitely a big thing. And just ease of drinking. Like, we finally, in wine, not just at Carboy, but in general in wine culture have gotten out of the Suckling era of really big, really chewy tannic reds. You know, it used to be that wine reviewers and wine writers and wine judges led the palette of America. And now we’re in this era, which is really pushed by the younger drinking generation, which is not typical in wine. Wine is typically driven by older drinkers. Most people don’t even get into wine until they’re, like, in their 30s. But people now are looking for something that just genuinely tastes good. And it’s like, fun on the palate. And I think, you know, the rise of sparkling water and like, you’re drinking a La Croix right now.

Lisa: always!

Barbie: Who doesn’t drink bubbly water you know? And, like, I think beer drinkers transitioning into wine, lean into sparkling wine. And sparkling wine, wine nationwide is in contraction. Sparkling wine is the only category of wine that’s still in a growth phase. And I think that just speaks to, like, what people are enjoying right now.

Lisa: Yeah.

Barbie: You know.

Lisa: Yeah, absolutely. This is sort of a random question, but, is there anything behind. So when Carboy did purchase the Mount Garfield Estate, I know they kept the name Carboy Winery at Mount Garfield Estate. Was there anything behind keeping that name and honoring it instead of just retiring it and calling it Carboy Winery Palisade?

Barbie: Yeah. I love that you asked that because, people ask it and also get confused about it all the time because of Google Maps and like the branding of it. So Mount Garfield Estate is the name of the vineyards. So they’re, in wine, generally speaking, vineyards, they usually have their own name. And the better fruit you can cultivate, the higher price point you can then sell that fruit for and charge for your wine. You know, there’s this phrase people like to say, if you want to make a little bit of money and wine, invest a lot. Farming grapes is a money losing industry, especially here in Colorado. if you’re looking at places like Napa, a ton of grapes goes for around $10,000 to $12,000. If you’re looking at places like the Grand Valley AVA, ton of grapes goes for maybe $1,500 to $2,000. So we literally are not able to recoup the amount of money that we put into growing the grapes by selling them.

Lisa: like a ton, how much would a ton be, like, acreage wise?

Barbie: I wish I could answer that question better. That would be a James question. Yeah, I don’t, I don’t farm the grapes. I do everything in the front. James, James does all the back stuff. But, it’s. I mean, I think we are probably getting two to three tons an acre. That would be a guess.

Lisa: Okay.

Barbie: Yeah.

Lisa: So, yeah, that’s not a lot of money.

Barbie: No. Oh, no. We vineyards are never in the black, ever, out here. I don’t know of anyone that is. And that’s one of the reasons that like, after that bad freeze in 2020, people just didn’t replant grapes. They planted peaches. Peaches are the cash crop out here. You just can’t really make money on grapes. You just can’t recoup the amount that it takes to grow it. And so one of the ways that, down the road because, everything in wine is like very future oriented. Right. Like you plant vines and you’re not gonna be able to get a viable harvest off those vines for three years. And then if you’re making a red, it’s gonna go in a barrel for a couple years and then in the bottle for another couple years. So you’re looking like six, seven years down the road minimum, until you’re gonna see a return on that farming. As far as selling grapes goes though, vineyards that have well known names, I think, like a good example would be like, Emeritus Vineyards in California, they are a really well known Pinot Noir place. People will pay for grapes that are from vineyards that are known to have quality fruit. So maintaining. Yeah. The name of your vineyard, like at Mount Garfield Estates. If we do, let us pray, get to a point where we know that we are reliably getting really good fruit off of those vines every year. And we, like everyone else in the Grand Valley, both use our own grapes for production. We buy grapes from our neighbors and we sell grapes to our neighbors. The Grand Valley produces 85% of the grapes grown in Colorado. And that, I mean, there’s like 200 something wineries in Colorado and only 30 in the Grand Valley. So we are exporting a lot of our grapes to other Colorado wineries in general in this AVA. And so having a vineyard name that has really good fruit is a part of it. And paying homage not just to the winery that was there before us, but to Mount Garfield. Trying to link together the standout things that make the Grand Valley AVA special. Because when you are in a regional wine country, like people in wine, wine professionals, we don’t exist to them. Right. Like, they don’t know that we exist. And people come out here and I remember when I first moved out here, people were like, Mount Garfield. And I was kind of like, is that a mountain? Doesn’t look like it, kind of looks like a bump, you know, not really like a mountain. But its like claiming these things and being like, you know, when you’re sitting on the patio at Carboy, you are staring at Mount Garfield and like, paying honor to like, this is our AVA. This is what we have to offer. It is not well known. It is niche, it is regional, it is small, it is barely existent. And yet we are really proud of it. And we’re doing things that are really awesome and different and we want people to know: we’re like, you’re at Mount Garfield Estates. And yes, it’s Carboy. And all of our locations also have different identities. We like to put ‘at Mount Garfield Estate’ so that people know we are in the vines. We are where the grapes are grown. I was at this training put on by CAVE, our local nonprofit recently, where they were talking about, consumer recognition. I think I think they said, I’m pretty sure these are the numbers. Palisade peaches have 75% consumer recognition in Colorado. People know peaches come from Palisade. Colorado wine, less than 40%. So people are not even, that live in the state, are not aware that we are growing wine here. And so, like, the more that we can, like, lean into that and when people go to the Carboy website, a lot of people go to Carboy in Denver and Littleton. They don’t even know they’re at a winery. Right. They think it’s like a wine bar or part of the restaurant. So our Littleton location has Angelo’s Taverna, which is an Italian restaurant, at it. And all the time people come to the tasting room and I’m like, have you been to Carboy before? No. Oh. And I tell them where it is. Oh, we’re like right next to Breckenridge Brewery on South Santa Fe in Littleton. Oh, we go to Angelo’s once a week. I’m like, you know where you get wine when you’re waiting for your table? That’s Carboy. Right next to that is a gigantic production facility and barreling room where we make all of our still wine. People don’t even know it exists. And so trying to like, link together each location with its sort of brand identity. We have the Gold Pan Saloon is which we own, which is connected to the Carboy in Breckenridge. We have Apres, which is like a fun, like kind of public market, community hub type of space at our Denver location, right next to Trader Joe’s in Governors Park. And then we have Mount Garfield Estates in Palisade. They’re all very different. I think we’re the best because this is where we grow and make the wine.

Lisa: Absolutely. It feels the most. I mean, it feels the most like you would picture: I’m going to a winery and that’s what you would picture.

Barbie: Yeah, exactly. You’re like in the vines.

Lisa: I don’t know if this is still something that y’all do, but the grey water recycling here. Is that something that still happens?

Barbie: Yeah, yeah, we recycle all of our grey water.

Lisa: That’s awesome.

Barbie: Yeah, it is awesome. It’s great. I mean, it’s something that, you know, when you live in a place with less than 10 inches of precipitation a year, like, you have to do everything you can. So recycle our grey water. We’re currently in the grant writing phase of getting a grant for solar. Our goal is to cover the top of our production facility with solar panels so that we’ll be able to have grey water and solar and just basically be as as little usage, energy use as possible.

Lisa: Yeah.

Barbie: And then our Littleton location, I think it is silver rated for green buildings for Denver, like their green ratings. so yeah, we’ we’re trying to do all the little things that we can.

Lisa: Switching over to events and all the different events Carboy hosts, we’ve touched on a little bit.

Barbie: Yes.

Lisa: But there’s a lot.

Barbie: There’s a lot.

Lisa: And I love that. I always love that. But, yeah, you have regular music, food trucks, the weekly Friday events, the Sunday yoga class that you teach. Is there like a staff favorite event that y’all host that you all really enjoy having?

Barbie: I mean, I’ll speak for myself. I don’t know. I feel like the staff, as long as it’s busy, they’re pretty happy. I think for as far as our, like, monthly events go, I love the Pen and the Glass open mic, which is a spoken word open mic that’s in collaboration with Western Colorado Writers Forum. They’re an amazing group that puts on all types of events for writers locally. And I have an MFA in poetry and I like, wanted to have more outlets for people to showcase their work. And we get like, between 20 and 40 people out, like, just being super vulnerable, reading their stuff, getting up there and sharing their work. I love that event. I think as far as our annual events go, the concert series are amazing. And I also love our wellness and wine fair. I feel like wine is, wine is obviously not a health drink. Right? Like, we all know that. But comparative to things like liquor or beer, wine tends to be something that people drink when they’re gonna have, like, a few drinks. Like, people aren’t gonna be like, yeah, let’s go get wasted. Let’s pop a bottle of chardonnay. You know, like, those are just. It’s just like, a different type of drinking. And, I feel like they kind of feed into each other in that way. And so for wellness and wine, we have, like, 24 vendors that are local vendors and fitness, wellness, and personal services that come out. And we do demo classes like yoga, barre, and Pilates, meditation, and just. I like the events where we get to, like, showcase the kind of cultural offerings that we have here and, like, add something that doesn’t exist in Palisade to the roster. Which is also why the concert series is so cool, because, you know, there’s a lot of people here, a lot of wineries here, I should say, that are doing somewhat of what we’re doing on our weekends, where we’re, like, featuring local food trucks. We’ve got our local neighbors and friends playing music, and that’s amazing. And we want our local community to be able to be showcased. Like, we have live music every Saturday, food trucks every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. And then also, there’s just not a lot of ways to showcase artists that are not our local friends and neighbors. Like, especially in Palisade. In Junction, you know, we have Los Colonias, we have Mesa Theater.

Lisa: Right.

Barbie: Palisade, there’s just really not any venues out here for stuff like that.

Lisa: Right, there’s not a big enough venue with, like, really great sound quality.

Barbie: Yeah. Except for now, there’s Carboy. And we, you know, we would not have been able to do any of, all of these events. These are all 100% homegrown. Like, we literally just went to our team, and we were like, what can we collectively do and offer? Like, I’m like, I’m a yoga teacher. I love poetry. Like, let’s do these things. Clint Richards is our production manager, and he was like, well, like, I love music. Like, let’s put on some shows. And so he invested a lot of money into an amazing sound system and uses all of these connections that he has nationwide with all these artists to bring in people that you would otherwise just not see in the Grand Valley. And it’s really cool to get some of these bigger artists into Palisade, especially at like a boutique outdoor venue that’s like not. I mean I love Mesa Theater, don’t get me wrong. But we are not Mesa Theater.

Lisa: It’s a different vibe.

Barbie: It’s a different vibe. It’s a very different vibe. And it’s so cool to be like under the stars in the vines and getting to see like world class acts. People that have, you know, toured nationally and internationally at this cool little venue where there’s like not. You’re not gonna be shoulder to shoulder, jammed in with people. Like we cap it at like 180 tickets, which is in the amount of space that we have plenty of room to like set down a blanket, get up and dance, hang out, have it feel relaxed and get to see amazing shows with great sound quality. It’s like something that, you know, when we were talking about like what can we do with this? James and Clint and I were all like, god, wouldn’t this be cool if we could do this? Kind of like we just kind of selfishly are making things that we want to attend. And just hoping that other people want to come too. And it’s been really successful and like, you know, we’ve seen not just with Carboy, but in general Palisade wine country grow more into this like let’s offer something more than just wine. Which is amazing. And since I first moved to the Grand Valley in 2016, we are world away from where we were then, you know, now there’s like something to actually do. There’s stuff to go experience and like, the more I’m a big believer in just like arts and culture being a driver of regional identity. And I think that being able to offer that and to like and we couldn’t do alone. I just want to say that like we have amazing sponsors that partner with us to do this stuff. And without those sponsors, there’s no way that we could do this. We just simply can afford the quality of artists and the quality of sound that it takes by charging ticket prices. We would just have to be charging more.

Lisa: Exactly. Keeping the ticket prices reasonable. So people can actually afford them.

Barbie: Yeah, we want our general admission to be under $50 and our VIP to be under $100. And if we’re gonna do that, we need help to do it from the community. And so it’s been amazing to see just, like, the outpouring of support from people that also want to see these things offered in the community and, like, want to show up and partake in it. It’s. It’s been really heartwarming and it’s just cool to see the growth and then to, like, see how much the artists enjoy it and how much the crowd enjoys it. It’s super rewarding.

Lisa: That’s so cool. I’m a big proponent of making your own fun. And that’s, like, another thing here. Like, it’s related to. You’re talking about with wine you can kind of we have this lack of expectations so we can do whatever we want sort of like, with events and things here too. It’s like, if you want to do something, you probably can figure out how to do it.

Barbie: Absolutely. Yeah.

Lisa: People are probably gonna be supportive.

Barbie: Yeah, that’s what’s been so cool. Like, with the open mic thing with Western Colorado Writers Forum, I literally just, like, emailed Melody Jones, who’s the president, and was like, hey, I wanna do this? And like, three days later it was on the calendar. And she comes out every time and, like, facilitates and hosts. It’s amazing, you know, and like, our paint and sip person, she’s like a local school teacher who’s like, oh I’ll come once a month and teach a paint and sip class. And, like, we do hat making with Sarah Moon of Bloom and Brim. And like, she’s our neighbor, you know? And like, that’s what’s so cool about Palisade in general is like, everything is literally like, our community. Like, what do we genuinely actually have to offer? And it’s so different than big corporate kind of like, I don’t know, there’s, in the higher, higher input markets, like in California, you know, a lot of those wineries are owned by big corporations, and you just don’t have as much leeway to do things that are quite as personal as the way that we are able to do them out here. Like, when I came into the company, I was like, yeah, want to teach yoga. It was like. James was like, okay, go for it. You know, there was no. There was literally no pushback on any of this stuff. We were just like, I think we should try to do this. And it’s like, okay, well, if you’re willing to, like, put in the elbow grease and we can find people in the community that are willing to support us, we can make it happen. And, like, it’s cool to see at the other wineries too, because, you know, people are like, oh, you guys are doing so much. Like, how can we do it? I’m like, well, you don’t want to do what we’re doing because you don’t have Clint to do the sound. You know, like, you don’t have me who has like got a background in poetry and is a yoga teacher. Like, you want to talk to your team, see what they have to offer and offer something unique that is genuine and authentic. And is like really what you like, bringing your own skill sets to the table. And that’s what creates regional identity. That’s what makes it so that when you stop and you actually get off the highway and drive through town here, you get to see what the people are actually like that live here. You know, it’s not like we’re not doing this to like, oh, we just wanna make money. What other events can we do just to get people in the door? We’re doing this because it’s like, no, this is what we love. Like, we wanna share what we love with other people. And over a glass of wine. It’s the best way to do it.

Lisa: As residents here, we just get to benefit from that. So it’s great.

Barbie: Yeah.

Lisa: So going back to the concert series though. So this weekend is the kickoff, the first event.

Barbie: First event.

Lisa: Can you talk a little bit about the four concerts in the series and what’s upcoming after this weekend?

Barbie: Yeah. So this weekend is Bubbles and Blues. It is our annual event celebrating all things sparkling wine and blues music. We are so excited. We have Omar Coleman coming out from Chicago, Lightning Malcolm coming from Mississippi. And that’s our kickoff. And then we have Midsummer Music Fest is June 21^st, the Saturday or the third Saturday in June. And that’s our like Summer Solstice celebration. So we have three bands, we have two food trucks, we have tiny tattoos, we have tarot card reading, we have like, it’s like a full-on festival, which we’re super excited about. And it’s just like the fact that it’s on summer solstice to like be in the vines at a music festival, just really celebrating summer. You know, summer is what we thrive on out here in Palisade. And we all just live for summer and nothing happens here in the winter. So we’re really excited about that one. And then Harvest Harmonies is October 4^th, the first Saturday in October. And that’s definitely our celebration of harvest. And it’s always like a little bit folksy kind of music. We have an Irish musician coming out to play for that one, which just gonna be really cool. And that one is also so nice because it’s a little bit cooler. Things cool down a little bit in October, and we’re really looking forward to that. And then the last concert of this season is our Rave to the Grave, it is our costumes mandatory 21 and up Halloween party. The place to be for Halloween in the Grand Valley. That was something that Clint and I were both like, you know, coming from California and moving out here. There’s really not like an adult Halloween thing out here anywhere. And I love Halloween. It’s like my favorite thing ever. And I think just like being outside and like, you know, in this like kind of agricultural area also like, speaks to that Halloween vibe, you know. So we’re really excited about that. And then the whole concert series, all four concerts are sponsors of D51 foundation, which is our local nonprofit that supports education and learning here in District 51. So a portion of every ticket sold goes to D51 Foundation. And then we’re gonna be doing like a raffle and like a little extra bonus stuff at the Rave to the Grave also because like I said, we can’t afford to do this stuff on our own. And at the same time, we’re not. You don’t get rich in this industry. That’s not our goal. We are trying to support the community and bring as many like minded people into that goal as possible and see like, how far we can spread the good. You know, like, if you’re the person that’s sitting there enjoying the concert and drinking wine, like, that’s a win for us. If you’re the artist who’s getting paid to, you know, pay rent with your rock, that’s awesome for us. If you’re our employees who are able to like have a sustainable job in the Grand Valley, which, you know, 20 years ago was not a thing, like, that’s a win. And then if we can like pay that forward to support education for, you know, the next generation, it’s like we’re trying to hit on every level here so that you can like have an amazing concert, go out and enjoy it, and then also feel like you’re doing something good for the community. And that’s whether you live here or not. You know, you get to be like, hey, it’s summer solstice, I want to go get a tiny tattoo and shake my booty to some amazing music. And also I’m helping the world, you know?

Lisa: Yeah, it’s a win, win all around.

Barbie: Yeah, it’s a win, win all around. Exactly. I just hope that people recognize that, like, we’re doing all of this for more than just us, you know, I think that’s the most important thing to me. And what I love about working at Carboy is like, this is a benefit. And I think most of the other wineries are doing stuff like this too, where, like, it’s. This is a different wine country than Napa. We will never be rich, famous, $3,500 a bottle wine country. And that’s a good thing because we want to be authentic, real people working at our passion place. And I think that’s what’s so cool and unique about Palisade and what’s cool about Carboy. Is like, we are authentically doing what we love and we hope other people love it too.

Lisa: I love that. So then in closing, I just want to ask, what’s your favorite post-shift drink? What’s your go-to?

Barbie: Oh man. I am a bubbles girl through and through. Right now it’s probably the native fizz rose, which is pet nat rose, it’s amazing. Yeah. And my go to that, I usually the bottle that I bring home is the grand blanc de blanc. If I’m gonna bring a bottle home with me, I just love sparkling wine. It’s really hard for me to turn it down. That or whatever’s left at the end of the bottle. So, you know, I can take one for the team and drink that last four ounces of anything that’s left in the bottle.

Lisa: It’s the best. Thank you so much for being here.

Barbie: Thank you for having me.

Lisa: This was really just really fun for me to learn about one of my favorite places.

Barbie: I love that. Well, thank you so much for having me and thank you for being a sponsor for the concerts. Like I said, we couldn’t do this without you guys, so we’re so grateful for your support.

Lisa: Yeah. Thank you.

Barbie: Thank you.

Lisa: So as I mentioned, Barbie and I chatted right before the May 24^th Bubbles and Blues kickoff of the Carboy Concert Series. It was fantastic.

Regular podcast listeners will remember that Carboy’s stage is one of the former migrant farmworker cabins that used to dot Riverbend Park. JoAnn Rasmussen talked about these cabins in episode 39 – check that one out if you haven’t already to learn all about Palisade’s migrant and seasonal farmworkers of the past.

But back to the concert series – the podcast is a sponsor of the series because I, like Barbie, believe that arts and culture are a driver of regional identity, and a region that embraces and provides a wide perspective of art, music, ideas, food, and on and on, that’s what I want to see here too. So if you missed last weekend’s concert, check out one of the upcoming shows. Tickets are available at https://www.carboywinery.com/event-calendar/happenings.

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

With love, from Palisade.

What is it about Palisade that makes people love living here so much? Dr. Carisa Authier joins me to discuss.

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 it about Palisade that makes people love it so much? I’ve wondered this often, and then one day I was introduced to Dr. Carisa Authier, a Palisade resident who wrote a whole dissertation on this very topic. The town in question for her original paper was Sedona, AZ, but after Carisa and her husband first came to Palisade, she found that many of the same concepts applied to what would soon become their new hometown.

Carisa talks about what those things are that make Palisade so appealing and how Palisade can avoid becoming another Sedona. She talks about her unique approach to mental health as a psychology consultant here in Palisade. And I get to ask her the random question I’ve been wanting to ask a psychologist for so long! All that and more, on today’s Postcard From Palisade.

Lisa: Thank you so much for coming in and talking to me today.

Carisa: Thank you. I’m happy to be here. My name is Carisa Authier. It’s been so long since I’ve introduced myself, like, so I’m like, what do I want to say? So like my first thought was, to talk about how long I’ve lived in Palisade or like, should I introduce myself professionally? Yeah. No, it’s funny. It shouldn’t be a hard question. Because since I’ve been here, like, I’ve shown up as just a person. You know, I think about like, I hate being identified with what I do. I like being identified with who I am, as a person. So. And sometimes it’s hard. It’s hard to know what to pick. It makes me think of a group I was in years ago where we would say, okay, who are you professionally, personally and spiritually? You know, or you know, what are you passionate about in life versus like, okay, how do you make money

Lisa: I like that.

Carisa: You know, Because I feel like, like what you do is so limited. And so I think about since I’ve been here, you know, I think the way I’ve introduced myself has just been like, hi, my name is Carisa and we just moved to Palisade and we love it.

Lisa: I love that. You know, one of the things I actually was thinking about is, one of my cousins is a psychiatrist. And he would tell me he hates to introduce himself as a psychiatrist because as soon as he says that he can see people shut down and immediately form assumptions about him. And, I was also. I don’t know if, you know, Wendy Videlock, she is a poet. She said she also hates to introduce herself as a poet because it’s like a similar thing. She says, oh, I’m a poet. And immediately people have assumptions about what a poet is or, you know, what a psychologist is or psychiatrist is. So that was actually one of the things I wrote down that I was curious about, if you like to kind of lead with what you do or not, so, that’s interesting.

Carisa: Oh, yeah. And it’s interesting to hear that, because I hate saying that I’m a psychologist, because people. And it’s because people have a very definite reaction. And so, you know, people immediately become different. You know, they feel like, oh, that I can read their minds or that they can. You know, they suddenly feel vulnerable in a way, so they get immediately closed off. And so, like, when I would go to parties, you know, people are like, what do you do? And I learned this the hard way by telling them and then watching that dynamic. Or, you know, sometimes people would share what their fear was with me, and I’m like, look, I’m off the clock, first of all. Like, I don’t want to work that hard. And, you know, think about every little thing you say. I’m here to have fun. I’m here as a person.

Lisa: Yeah.

Carisa: And so. But it’s interesting talking about this now. You know, before I became a psychologist, I was actually a chemist. So I’ve had a number of different careers, and, becoming a psychologist was kind of the latest one. But so starting out as a chemist, when I was. At the time, I lived in Georgia. And so this is when I was in my 20s, we were all single, and I would go out to bars with friends of mine, and I had friends that were wedding planners or would work at different corporate things. But I could watch talking to guys, and they would talk to my friends, and they’d say, what do you do? And I’d say, I was a chemist. And their eyes would glaze over, or they suddenly were not interested in me, and they would only be interested in my friends. And so then I started playing with it, and I used to make up things that I was. It was like, I’m a flight attendant or, you know, I’m a secretary, just to get people to talk to me. Because there was something about me saying I was a chemist, that was too intimidating, at least for the men I was running into in the Deep South.

Lisa: That’s fascinating. That’s so cool. And, yeah, I mean, it’s definitely something where I’ve never. I never liked to talk about what I did. Anyway, before we go off on too far of a digression, I think that’s really interesting. And just to clarify for anybody listening, though, you can’t read minds, right?

Carisa: That’s right. No, I don’t read minds.

Lisa: OK. Alright. That’s cool. Just to stick on the topic of what you do for a little bit longer, I think it’s really interesting that you change careers midlife, because that’s really something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, too, and I think that’s really hard, especially going back and getting a doctorate is really hard. So what drove you to do that?

Carisa: Yeah, it was really hard. it was. You know, I feel like it was kind of a progression. So, like, I got a degree in chemistry to start off just because I was good in chemistry. There weren’t very many women in chemistry, so it was just practical. Like, you know, I grew up with a single mom who was always in kind of whatever job she could get. So that influenced me of, like, wanting to get a career that I could take care of myself and have more of a stable life. And so that was a practical decision. In my opinion, I was a mediocre chemist, but it did help get me a job. I mean, out of college I started working for Georgia Pacific a couple months after I graduated in their research and development department. And so I learned way more about building products than I ever thought I would know because I worked in this division where we made adhesives for plywood and engineered lumber. And then I went into kind of industrial. And so I was able to kind of move around, like, within that corporate setting.

I got tired of being in the lab, so then I went into sales, and I worked in their sales department. And that actually helped move me from the east coast back to the west coast where I was born. So that was probably the big draw there. I didn’t know anything about sales. I mean, they literally dropped me off in California with a company car and my sales list and said, okay, go at it. So that was a whole. So that was kind of my second career, but it kind of built off the chemistry. I started selling the products that I used to do research on.

And then, but I’m not a good salesman. And I realized when I was in that I made really good connections with my clients. But I started going in, I could tell if they were having a bad day or if they were tired. So instead of trying to sell them something, I was like, hey, when’s the last time you took a vacation? You know, when’s the last time you and your wife went out to dinner?

And so I started actually taking classes at night and working during the day, and I took psychology classes. It had been a love when I was in undergrad, but it wasn’t practical at the time. Like, I thought I could, you know, start working with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry as a woman, a lot easier than a bachelor’s degree in psychology, and make a living to support myself. So I started realizing that my classes, my psychology classes at night were much more fulfilling and satisfying than my sales job during the day. So that kind of began this kind of progression to kind of move eventually out of sales and apply to graduate programs, you know, after I took a number of classes at night and was like, yeah, no, this is. This is really my love.

And my husband was horrified when I told him. I was like, guess what? I’m go going to quit my job and go back to school. And he’s like, what? We had been married, I think, for a year. So, I mean, he was worried about it. I mean, it’s a huge expense to go back, and it’s a huge time commitment, and it means that he had to hold down the household. and because so much my time went into going back to school, but since then, I mean, it is really, like, that is my niche. I’m really good at what I do and I love it. It doesn’t feel like work. And now he can see, like, he’s like, wow. No, this was definitely the right move for you, you know, so it all came around.

Lisa: Yeah. And he seems like your number one cheerleader now.

Carisa: Yes, yes. He’s definitely a big cheerleader.

Lisa: That’s cool. So he mentioned when he reached out to me on Facebook about you being an interesting person to talk to, that you have a really unique approach to mental health and, and to psychology. So what is different about your approach and how would it be different to more like, a quote, unquote, traditional approach?

Carisa: So it’s interesting that you bring that up because since I’ve, you know, I worked as a licensed clinical psychologist when I was in Arizona, and then when I came to Colorado, I’ve reshifted kind of my whole platform to be more in line with how I think about the work instead of trying to fit what I do into that typical psychologist box. So here I’m not licensed as a psychologist. I’m actually a psychology consultant. I do more of what I call education rather than, okay, come to me and tell me your symptoms and let me diagnose you.

Like, psychology is very much framed after the medical model, which is all about listening to symptoms and getting rid of the symptoms. And my beef with psychology has been that they ignore context, in my opinion. So what I do is more than, instead of having a symptom and trying to get rid of it, I look at that as a part of yourself that wants to get to know you. And so I help people look at the messages that their body gives them as, like, look, this is like learning a whole new language. And this is the language of the psyche. And so when you feel quote, unquote depressed, I see this as a part of yourself that is incongruent with something in your life. It’s not something to get rid of. It’s something to be curious about and understand.

You know, and I saw this a lot in my practice where like, quote unquote anxiety or depression, to me were always instances where the person was doing something to please somebody outside of themselves that was not in alignment with what they wanted as a person. And so that was the way that their psyche was trying to get their attention. And so, you know, I look at everything that comes up as there’s a reason why this is coming up. You know, whether it’s anger or terror or sadness or. And so instead of, yeah, trying to get rid of it, it’s like, no, learn how to make space for it and want to get to know it.

And so, I mean, I guess now I tell people, like, I connect. I connect people to themselves, and I help people have a deeper relationship with themselves because the more somebody understands themselves and learns to like all of them, instead of trying to reject these pieces they don’t like, the better their life gets, the better their relationships get. You know, they can just move forward in a clearer way. So, yeah, I kind of scrap this, the medical model and say, no, I just want to help you have a deeper relationship with yourself.

Lisa: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. And, especially because, right. Like you said, sometimes there is no getting rid of the symptom. It’s not like I don’t know, a virus or something. Like it’s a lot of times there is no getting rid of it. It’s just part of who somebody is. So that’s interesting because that is a completely different approach to saying no, you have this thing that we need to cure. It’s like no, you have this thing that’s part of your person that you need to accept and love and like that’s really cool.

Carisa: Yeah.

Lisa: I like that. I can see how that would be much more like, I don’t know, humanistic, if that’s the right word, but just like empathetic way of working with people.

Carisa: I feel like there’s so much of life where we, we just kind of enhance these, these self criticisms. I mean I think I’ve learned that everybody has a critical voice and it works against them, you know. And so when somebody can develop self love and self compassion and they’re easier on themselves, they’re easier on everybody else too, you know. But we’re not really taught that.

Lisa: No, no. Like it’s a problem that needs to be fixed is like the way that it’s more commonly kind of looked at today which you can see coming at it from a different approach would absolutely caused a different result. So now you’re here. So what brought you and Marc to Palisade originally?

Carisa: It’s funny, we landed here by accident. I put accident and air quotes. We took off on a journey a couple of years ago. We have a little camper van and we set up our life and our schedule so that we could take three months to travel around in our camper van. And our intention was to actually make it up to Canada and look for little towns up there to maybe spend the summers in. So by that time we were clear that we wanted, we wanted to get out of Arizona at least in the summer because it’s just been so freaking hot there.

And so, so that was the plan. What actually happened is we got up close to the border, it was cold, it was rainy. It was going to be cold and rainy for another like two weeks. And we’re like, we’re in a van and this sucks and actually we can go wherever we want, you know. So we’re like okay, let’s abandon that plan and let’s go chase the sun. So we went south. We ended up joining Harvest Host because we ended up going to this vineyard in Oregon that we had been to when we were dating. So 22 years prior. My husband remembered how to get there. We get there. Turns out that the woman who runs the place now, it was her parents that had started it. When we were there 22 years ago, that was the first year that that tasting room had been built. Her father had since passed away. And so we showed up there and could share these stories and had kind of this immediate kinship. And so as we’re sitting there drinking wine, and we watch somebody drive through the property with a little teardrop camper, and we’re like, wow, can you camp here? And she’s like, well, you can do it through this program called Harvest Host. And she goes. And we have two spots, and one’s taken, but we have one open for tonight. And we’re like, sweet. How do we join Harvest Hosts so we could camp here?

So that’s how we joined Harvest Host. And so, you know, so we’re continuing to go south through Oregon and Nevada. And so we had come. We were planning to explore parts of Colorado that we were familiar with. So, like, Crested Butte, Ouray. We had never been to Palisade. We had driven through Grand Junction I think once. The way that the timing worked, it’s like we looked on Harvest Host to see if there’s anywhere we could stay. And so we stayed in Palisade through Harvest Host, and we were planning to stay one night, and then we were going to go on. So I think we stayed at Gubbini’s winery. So we did wine tasting with her and then we had a little electric motorcycle that we can both fit on. And so, you know, we set up camp, and then we went to tour around. And we ended up at Restoration and met Gary, and we were like, this place is really cool. I mean, we just instantly fell in love.

And so I think. I think the next day, we probably rented a room at Spoke and Vine because we were like, we need to stay another day. And it kind of went like that for. We hovered around this area for a month, actually, because every day we’d go out and we’d explore, and we’re like, this place just feels different. So one of the cool things about our trip was, like, we went up the western coast, so we went up through California and Oregon and Washington. And each time we would go to places, my husband and I would say, like, how does this place feel? And we were both pretty in sync of, like, well, this is fine, but there’s something missing, or this just doesn’t feel right. And even places where we’d camp and be like, oh, I don’t like it here, let’s get out of here. And it was the first time that we had judged places like that. And so then when we got here, and it was instantly, we were both like, oh, this feels different. And then we were like, we could live here. And it’s like, okay, if we’re, you know, but vacationing somewhere is different than living here. But we’re like, we actually have the time in our schedule. Like, if we’re serious about this, we should. We should try to stay for, like, a month and see how it is day to day.

And then after that, we met Anita Hicks at her farmstand, and then we met her son. After we met Anita, we came back the next day to talk to her again, and we were like, we actually think we’re gonna hang out here and do you happen to know anybody who is renting a place? The way it turned out, like, I think we stayed at Spoke and Vine for a week. I think we rented a hotel in Grand Junction for a week just to try that out. and then we stayed at Peachfork and did the camping program there. And so, you know, we did a couple different things. But.

And so while we were here, I started thinking about my dissertation, actually. And, you know, because I wrote about the psychology of place. And so I use this framework of, like, these four components to kind of assess a place. And so those components are sense of place, place attachment, community rootedness, and home. And so we started evaluating, like, okay, does this place meet those things? You know, so sense of place is that immediate felt sense. And we felt it when we’re here, like, immediately this feels different.

Place attachment. We didn’t have a lot of attachment. We had attachment to Colorado, but not to the Western Slope. We didn’t know anything about the Western Slope except that this place is so amazingly centrally located to all the places we love. You know, it’s amazing to be two hours away from Moab, two hours away from Ouray, and 90 minutes away from Glenwood Springs. But we felt, we felt this immediate sense of community. I mean, just like, when it was so easy to talk to every single person we ran into. And I remember when we were at Restoration, and Gary told us about when his friend first drove him through, and he was immediately like, okay, let me look for a place to get. Because it felt different.

You know, when we talked to Anita, and then, you know, Marc immediately hit it off with Ben, her son. And there was just something that I immediately liked about her and the fact that they were both like, well, yeah, you know, let me call, you know, a couple people I know and see, and here, let’s get your phone number. And we were like, really? You know, and then, you know, meeting Jeff and Jody, you know, at the Spoke and Vine, and then. And of course. And then going to their restaurant, Fidel’s, and we just, like, everybody was so friendly. Like, I was so struck by how friendly everybody was. And we had just, you know, been traveling up the coast. We had been to all these little towns, and, like, this place is different.

And then the sense of home, you know, it’s just like, well, where do you feel comfortable? And, you know, I feel like those other components help a place feel comfortable. So. Yeah. And so after a month, I was like, yeah, we gotta move here. So. And it’s interesting. I think I was. Well, I think when we were both here, we were like, yeah, yeah, yeah. My husband loves Arizona and has deep, much deeper ties to Arizona than I do. So we got back to Arizona, and he was like, I don’t know if I can move. And I was a little heartbroken, actually, because I was like, oh, I know. I’m ready to move. Like, I would have. I think we got home in August. So we were here at the end of June through July. So we were here during the hottest time, too. And everybody’s like, oh, it’s hot here. And we’re like, oh, yeah, no, this is nothing compared to what we. What we’re used to, right? So. And he’s like, well, maybe we could go there for part of the year and but keep a place here for part of the year. I knew, like, I was ready to leave, and I just had to help convince him.

So we, we came back out here in January, and I was like, okay, we were there during the hottest time. Let’s go there in the winter when it’s slow and see if we still love it, you know? So we came out here for a week in January. We went skiing up at Powderhorn and rented one of the little tiny houses up there. And, you know, we saw. I don’t think we saw Anita that trip, but we saw her son Ben. I think we ran in. We went to Fidel’s. So we saw Jeff and Jody. And so it was just like, it was fun to come back. And, like, people remembered us from, you know, when we were here this summer, and it still felt like, oh, yeah, wait, let’s go see these people. And it didn’t feel weird or, you know, it was just like, this is easy.

And so after that week, you know, Marc was like, okay, let’s do it. And I’m like, awesome. So, you know, by then I had, closed my practice there. So I closed it at the end of May, and we started looking for a place to rent here, and things lined up to make it happen. And so now we’ve. We actually took ownership of the place that we’re in. We got the keys May 24^th. Although we did a lot of back and forth last summer to actually move. So we weren’t officially here till August 10^th. But so we’re coming up on almost a year, and it’s still. Every day we’re like, we get to live here!

Lisa: Yes it’s like a vacation every day. It is. That’s really interesting because, my husband and I had a very similar journey here. We had taken. We actually took two really long career breaks, which, you know, everybody thought we were completely nuts for doing. But we took a year when we were 30, and then we took a year and five months when we were 40, and, just drove around the US and camped and really were looking for that special place. And like you said, it’s amazing. We also drove all the way up the west coast and hit every 50 states. And between the two trips, the second trip was very focused on Colorado and Utah and California, Arizona. All my favorite stuff. But, like, you feel, sometimes immediately upon driving into a town, you get the feeling of the town, and it’s almost. It’s like. It’s so weird, but it’s almost, like, irrational. You just. I don’t know what it is. You drive in, you get a feeling. You’re like, I don’t like this place, or, I like this place.

Carisa: Yep.

Lisa: And it’s hard to kind of change that first impression, but there was really nowhere that we went that was like Palisade. And even including places we’ve lived all over the country, you know, a lot of places, you. Some places I’ve lived, like, everybody you talked to just wants to leave. They’re miserable. They hate it there, you know, they’re just unhappy. So I have never been in or lived in a place for this long, we’re coming up on three years, where everybody is like, every day they’re just like, happy. Like, what is in the water here? I don’t know but I like it. But it was a really similar thing where we had been traveling for 15 months, and we were going into the winter, and it was cold and it was start. I’m like, I don’t want to do another winter on the road. Like, let’s rent a place.

And I had to convince him to stay here because it’s quote unquote so warm, even though it was, winter. But as soon as we rented a place and we started meeting people, immediately they were so warm and welcoming. And it was such an embrace that. Especially from being full time on the road during Covid you know, we were very isolated a lot of the time, it was like, this is home. It just felt like home right away. And I think that’s so fascinating because, like, again, with your dissertation about Sedona, you know, I have to admit I didn’t read the whole thing, but I skimmed it. But a lot of the things that people were saying about what they found so compelling about Sedona, I feel like, are similar to what I’ve heard from people here, where it’s almost like you can’t explain it, but it’s a feeling you feel it’s a special place and it just speaks to you. And I’m just fascinated by that. Like, what do you think. What do you think is behind that kind of a feeling that people get, or is it unexplainable?

Carisa: Well, I mean, I think. I think there is something really special about people who choose to live in a town. So I think they take care of the town differently. I think they interact with people differently. One of the things that was interesting about doing my dissertation research is I, a lot of that I had to go through a lot of relocation research. And, you know, and I found out that people in the United States relocate more than people than anywhere else in the world. And the main reason people relocate is for a job. And so the job is the priority. How they make money is the priority. Where, like, the people in Palisade choose to live here. And I think and they figure out the job part second.

It was one of the things that struck me about Sedona, actually, and why I picked people who moved to Sedona in midlife because in midlife people are typically in the height of their careers and there is no industry, really, I mean, there’s a lot of tourism in Sedona, but it’s not like there’s industry that’s going to relocate people there. And so I was like, so what is that driving force? And so people either felt this felt sense, like as soon as they got there, kind of like we talked about of how we felt here, a lot of people like vacationed there with their family and so they moved there as soon as they can make it work out. Just because it was so beautiful or there’s something that struck them.

But the thing about Sedona that almost everybody talked about is that there wasn’t a sense of community there. And that’s even, even less now. Because the town has kind of gone towards tourism and Airbnbs and short term rentals and they’ve allowed big box places to come in, so like Whole Foods bought the local grocery store and Starbucks drove the local coffee shops out of business. And so like, when we left there, the feeling was much different than when we first got there. And it’s another reason why I love Palisade, because I feel like the government here is really committed to keeping that community feel, which means they’re really committed to that balance between community and not putting everything towards tourism because it’s super easy to do. Sorry, this is a long answer to that question, but there’s. When people move to a place just for a job, they don’t have the same attachment to it. They don’t have the same love for it. So you can drive through like some towns or some cities and they’re not well maintained or picked up or they just it feels different. Versus people who genuinely want to be there. It’s just a different energy.

Lisa: Yeah.

Carisa: You know, so it’s, it’s the difference between, okay, doing what I should do and when people tell me that, I’m always like, yeah, but what do you want to do? Because “shoulds” are old programming or something somebody else has told you to do, and you’re kind of doing it reluctantly or dragging your feet versus, but I want to do that. You know, that’s a different energy. And so I think the people in Palisade, or at least everybody I’ve talked to, like, wants to be here. And so you start from this different baseline. And I think it permeates everything.

Lisa: Also are not industries that would relocate people here for work. So, yeah, we all have to make it at work here in different ways. So speaking of town meetings, I know that you and Marc are also really involved in going to them. I usually just zoom in to them because I. I tell people I like to make dinner while I watch the meeting if I don’t have anything to say. But having that perspective of coming from a town that really became committed to tourist growth and was probably inarguably overrun by it. To here where I agree, I think they’re really carefully, thoughtfully debating about how do we grow but keep the community character. I think the town is doing a great job of that. And yeah, what’s your thought on that? What do you think they. Because growth is inevitable and so we’re always gonna have that tension of, you know, tourism is what keeps a lot of the businesses and people here employed. What do you think Palisade should definitely not do that Sedona did or. That’s not a very well structured question, but I think maybe you kind of see what I’m getting at!

Carisa: Yeah, no, I do.

Lisa: What’s the worst thing the Palisade could do that would ruin everything?

Carisa: Well, I guess one of the things that I’ve appreciated is that they have a cap on how many short term rentals they can do. And I think that’s huge because I watched Sedona not regulate that at all. And so then, you know, neighborhoods became like, became fractured because now it was a different person in this house every other, every few days. And so, you know, the people who had lived there for a long time complained of like, now there’s increased traffic or, you know, one of the things I noticed in Sedona was how much more trash there was. There was graffiti now on the red rocks. That never used to happen.

And I think part of that is just again, the temporariness of letting people come in for just a few days. And people would justify, like, well, now I can allow people who can’t afford hotels or families to stay in here. And I always think, well, first of all, just because you can, should you? And second of all, like, like you have to consider the whole picture and not just this one little slice. And so how is one action going to impact the whole. I used to be able to go on hikes in Sedona where I wouldn’t see another person or I’d see very few people. And there were certain hikes that only the locals knew about. All that’s gone. I mean, now if you’re not in a parking lot before 9am you’re not going to get a parking place. And you see dozens of people on the hikes. And like I said, now I see graffiti and trash that I never used to see. Because now it’s not people who live there because they love it and they want to care for it. It’s people who have no attachment to that place. And so their behavior and how they treat that place reflects that.

Lisa: They’re not going to see the impact of treating the place poorly. They’re just there for the weekend, somebody else will pick up their water bottle.

Carisa: Exactly.

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah, I see that. I mean, living in Fort Collins or living on the Front Range versus here, I think is similar where, you know, you can’t. Front Range has become so busy, like, you can’t hike a lot of the popular trails. And, it is just, it’s a different feel. And yeah, I like the slow pace here. I love that there are trails we can hike on that nobody really knows about or places we can go. It’s like very feels very secret still, so definitely hope it stays that way. But it’s such a hard balance.

Carisa: It totally is. You know, and it’s funny. Like, even, you know, I know USA Today is doing, you know, the top 20 farmers markets, and, like, right now they’re doing the top 20 roadside motels. And so, you know, and I had mixed feelings about voting for those because it’s like, yay! Like, I want to pump Palisade up and have it on the map. And I also am like. I also don’t want people to know about it because, you know, people, like, can love a place to death. So it’s. It’s definitely a balance, you know, I mean.

And I think, you know, one of the things I’ve been impressed about here, too, is I think there’s an awareness, especially during the winter, that, okay, there’s not as many tourists, and yet there’s all these local businesses that need to stay in business. And so I feel like at least the people I’ve talked to are really mindful of, like, yeah, let’s go out to dinner, or like, the monthly wine club so we can keep giving these businesses business during the winter and so that the community is kind of committed to supporting them because that benefits all of us. That’s part of the balance, I think, of, like. Yeah, no, as a community, we need to help sustain all the businesses here and not rely just on tourism. But we all need to help each other.

And I guess something else I’ve noticed that I love. Like in other places I’ve felt more competition between businesses. We’re here, I feel there’s a lot more collaboration. And so it’s kind of like, okay if we all, like, if we want everybody to do well, you know. And so like, for example, I go to Blondie Yoga’s class on Sundays because I’m so grateful actually that I can walk a block and, and go to yoga and that, you know, she has partnered with the Blue Pig so that it, it’s good for both of them. Or like ordinary fellow, you know, who does, you know, the historical society meetings or the, or the watercolor. It’s like I feel like so many of the businesses here are very community minded and so, and that they kind of stick together of like, okay, how can we do things that benefit all of us? Like, there’s more win-win mentality than, oh no, I’m, you know, I want my cut and I don’t care what happens to everybody else.

Lisa: Yes, very collaborative. And that’s something I’ve heard from pretty much everybody in every type of field that I have talked to for this podcast. From farmers to business owners to everybody. It’s like with a few exceptions, you know, which nobody wants to say any names, but most people are willing to go above and beyond to help their, they, you know, what other people would consider competitor. Even to the extent of, you know, lending them equipment and lending them supplies when they don’t have it. And that’s definitely a unique thing here too.

And you speak about the seasonality too. When I first moved here, I’m definitely a summer person. I love the summer and you know, I like the crowds of people. I think it’s a lot of fun. But somebody told me, oh, in a few years you’re going to love the winter more and you’re gonna like be sad when the season hits. And this year was the first year. I was kind of walking downtown the other day and it was really busy and I’m like, oh, I’m a little sad now. I didn’t think that would ever happen. Because like the local community and just the atmosphere over the winter and the quiet months and having Powderhorn and you know, cross country skiing, it’s like, that’s really fun. It’s really nice that we get to enjoy this place to ourselves. So it happened to me.

Carisa: Oh that’s so funny, because we’re still very much in the first year. So it’s like, you know, going to the Honeybee festival. And at first, like, when I first saw things about it, I was like, we thought we were gonna be out of town. And I was like, oh, that won’t be any big deal if we miss it. And I honestly thought some of it would be a little cheesy. And so then we went and, like, it was freaking adorable.

Lisa: It’s so cute!

Carisa: I was like, I’m so glad we’re here. And like, seeing all the little kids and all the dogs, especially dressed up as bees, I was like, okay, this is amazing. And. And then I felt like, oh, so that, like, this is what kicks off. Okay, now it’s festival season. Like, now the tourist season has started and, you know, but we’re like, hooray. Now we live here. We get to be a part of it.

Lisa: No, don’t get me wrong. I’m still excited. But it is. It’s interesting that you have a different. You have a completely different experience in the winter versus the summer here. It’s like six months of the year are very calm and six months are very energetic.

Carisa: Yeah, no, I love these little festivals and the things that the town does, I think are amazing.

Lisa: Yeah, I agree! So this is a very random question, but because I have a psychologist here. One of the things I’ve always wanted to ask a psychologist is, you know, there are different psychologists or psychiatrists who have, TV shows or podcasts or things like that where they actually, you work with people on the air, in public. And I’ve always been curious of someone in that profession, what do you think about that? Like, do you think it’s, exploit. Exp. I can never say that word! Exploitative? Or do you think it’s helpful because it opens up the field to more people?

Carisa: Well, that’s a good question. My first reaction is, I hate it. And, you know, but when you say it, you know, but it also opens the field up to more people. And there’s probably some truth in that. You know, it’s interesting. I went to, oh, now I can’t remember her name, but there’s a woman who wrote a book, You Should Talk to Someone. And I have that book and I appreciated that she kind of talked about, you know, she talked about her own therapy as a psychologist and what it’s like to work with people and then be in therapy herself. And I thought that that book was really helpful. And I saw her at a conference, and she also does a radio show with somebody else. And so I got to witness a taping of that show. And I was really turned off after that, because I felt like the interventions were different on a radio show because of the time.

And so, you know, and they make this disclaimer of, well, this is for entertainment and it’s not, you know, and I’m sure there’s all kinds of disclaimers to kind of protect them from liability. And. But the reality is, to me, it felt like it made light of complex problems and it tried to simplify things because now you’ve got to do it within this timeframe. And we talked about it as a room of psychologist afterwards of like, well, you know, you recommended this and you ignored all these other things. And they were like, well, you know, we only have so much time. And so the recommendation for that particular show was for a couple and for them to separate, you know, and so there were lots of us that were like, but what about this and what about this and what about this? You know, and there’s so many other people affected. And so, like, this is the message that we’re sending out of, oh, it’s just too hard, or these are patterns that aren’t gonna change, and so just leave him? And so, like, to me, that’s like a horrible message to be sending out to the public at large.

Like, I feel like there’s too much of that. There’s too much cancel culture. There’s too much, oh, this is too hard. Or there’s too much labeling. It’s kind of like why I wanted to get out of the field and I hate diagnoses and all that, because I think when you label somebody and then people start listening with an ear to kind of fit into that, and again, they ignore the context, they ignore the situation. And instead of helping people learn to communicate better and learn how to work through difficult situations, that particular episode, their recommendation was just to leave. So that left a really big impact in my mind. And so I’m like, this is not helpful. This is to me, it’s another form of reality TV. But it’s like, but what’s the purpose if we’re taking people’s hardships and using them for entertainment? Like, that’s such the wrong message.

Lisa: It’s the real relationship with real people. Other real people are gonna see that and, you know, think they can apply that same thing. Interesting. And I’m so. I’m fascinated that you’ve had. You’ve even had the experience to go there and see this sort of thing in action. Because that is so. It’s so interesting to me because you want to be drawn to, like, advice columnists or, you know, how do you solve how do other people’s problems get solved? How can I try to solve my own? But getting back to that whole thing of, like, these are real people who have real lives, and you’re kind of boiling it down to this little entertainment show.

Carisa: Yeah.

Lisa: Cool. I’m glad I have you as my captive audience to hear about that! What things in the field or that you do now in your practice do you find, and this might be repetitive, but do you find more helpful than that sort of a conversation? Or what do you find is the most helpful way of working with people?

Carisa: I’ve been thinking about this a lot, you know, since I feel like since the move to Colorado, I’ve just been kind of redefining myself because it’s you coming here and giving up my license. I was like, okay, what do I want to be? I have this blank slate. How do I want to do that? So I’ve been thinking about what things have been important to me all the way through. And I, to me, I think the biggest thing is presence, like teaching people how to be present. And, you know, when I. And I was pretty active in Arizona and I was part of the Arizona Psychological Association, and I, you know, I did a lot of things professionally in that regard. And people would always say, oh, well, what’s your specialty?

That was another question I hated. And I was like, humans, humans are my specialty. Like, no, I don’t focus on CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, or I don’t focus on depression, or I don’t. Because people are more complex than that. And if you’re only using one technique, like, I love learning, and I’ve learned all kinds of different techniques because I’ve learned that different things work for different people. And even the same person, a different situation is going to call for something else.

So going back to what I think is important as presence, like, if you’re truly a hundred percent present with someone, then and sometimes they don’t need anything except a present listener. I mean, I find in a lot of my sessions with people, I actually say very little. You know, my job is to kind of listen to them talk and explore things out loud. And sometimes I can, I’ll summarize what they say, you know, in a sentence, but it’s really just a reflection back to them. And they’ll be like, yes, that’s it. So I help them, I just give them the space for them to clarify for themselves what’s going on. I’m not using a technique. I’m just being present with them.

And that is so lacking in our world, even in psychology. You, you would think like, but that’s what you’re supposed to do, you know. But I think people get too focused on these empirically validated treatments and manualized treatments or, oh, well, do you specialize in EMDR or, you know, whatever the latest flavor is. And I’m like, just be present with people and normalize their experience. You know, we’re all human beings and we all go through these things. They aren’t things to be pathologized or labeled. Like, we just sometimes need we need to help people out, human to human, or tell them that they’re not alone or just give them space to like, feel what they’re feeling and help them feel that.

Lisa: I like that a lot. That’s really beautiful. That’s really beautiful. And especially just with all of the distractions and everything in daily life, like, it is really rare to sit down and talk to people and really listen to people. So, yeah, I like that a lot.

Carisa: Yeah. Again, it brings me back to when we first came through Palisade, and when we were at Anita’s fruit stand and Ben and my husband were talking about the camper van that we were in, and they were talking about all these things. And so I was just shopping and then I started talking to Anita, and she told me, she’s like, Palisade is about having an experience. She’s like, you know, if you just want to have a transaction, you know, and have somebody check you out and not talk to you, go somewhere else, like, you know, but I’m here to, like, talk to people and interact with people. And I’ve heard that in different ways through other people I’ve talked about. And that’s one of the things, I think, that makes Palisade special. And that’s one of the things that makes this feel like an experience, because there’s kind of an invitation to slow down and actually talk to the person that you’re interacting with and be present with them and take the time to, like, be in the moment instead of trying to get to the next thing.

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is probably the only place where I would go, well, I guess, because I know the people now, but, you know, even before I really knew people well, like, just go into a store and talk to people and not buy anything. So I’m like, I know I’m gonna come back and buy something later. But, yeah, I wouldn’t ever do that anywhere else. And that people are fine with that. They’re just like, oh, hey, how’s it going? Thanks for stopping by. Yeah. Interesting. I love that.

Carisa: When I think about who I am as a person, personally and professionally, is like, I want to help alleviate suffering in the world. And I think one of the ways that that happens, is through connection. And so. And I feel like, again, Palisade creates a perfect environment for that connection to happen and they inspire it through even, you know, people who just come here for a couple of days. The people who live here and own businesses here kind of invite people to slow down and to connect. And I feel like, as human beings, we all need each other and that that. And I think when we slow down and we have connection, then we’re worried less about material things, and then we get back in touch with what’s really important in life. And I think now, especially now, that’s a really helpful thing to remember and to promote.

Lisa: Absolutely. Yes. That is one of my passions, too, with this. With the, event list thing that I do with any, like, the bike group, I want to get people talking to each other. You know, I want to get people out of their bubbles and talking to each other and just it doesn’t even, you know, whatever they do, whatever they like to do, I don’t really care. It’s just like, get out and talk to people and, like, make some common ground. And it’s so important that people don’t just stay isolated at home watching TV, you know, or watching the news.

Carisa: Yeah, well, yeah, let’s get them away from their TVs.

Lisa: Right? For real.

Carisa: Because I feel like if you get out and you talk to somebody, I mean, it doesn’t take very long in talking to somebody to find something that you have in common, you know, but you have to look up from your phone and you have to get out of your house to do that. And, you know, it’s. It’s funny, when we came here a couple of years ago, and, you know, so then we, you know, we. We’d go out and talk to as many people as we could, and then we’re doing internet searches on Palisade. And so that’s when we came across Postcards from Palisade. And so we’re like, oh, my gosh, they have. There’s this cool thing. So we started listening to this podcast. You know, it was kind of this beacon to help us get back. And so it’s just. To me, it’s super cool that you started doing this and doing the event list and again, yeah, I feel like this is a place that kind of. Okay. And, like, what can I do to support and promote community? I mean, how freaking awesome is that?

Lisa: Just. I mean, and it’s like, I want to share what I love. And I really. I just really appreciate hearing from people who listen, especially when, you know, people like you and Marc who, you know, found it and learned about or used it as a way to learn about your new town. Like, I just love hearing that stuff. It makes me so happy. I’m like, that’s why I do this. It’s great.

Carisa: Well, thank you for doing it. I remember one of the first ones we listened to. I think you interviewed Rondo. So that’s been a. It’s probably been a couple years ago or maybe a year ago.

Lisa: I think maybe a year.

Carisa: And so we met Rondo, like, when we were. When we kind of hovered here for that first month, we went to one of the tourism advisory board meetings while we were here. It’s kind of what we do when we’re thinking about moving to a place. We go to the library. We try to go to, like, city or town council meetings just to kind of help get the feel, you know, of a place. And so then we talked to Rondo, and found out that, you know, he used to be a river runner. And of course, you know, we lived in Flagstaff for a while and Sedona. We’ve been. And we’ve rafted down the Grand Canyon so we’re just like, oh, that is so cool. And then when you did an interview him and we, like, we know him, we met him. So it kind of helped us feel connected. You know, and so, yeah, anyway, just another little plug. This has been a really fun podcast to listen to.

Lisa: I’m glad. And just to wrap up, I’m curious if you are accepting new clients, if people hear this and they, you know, want to reach out and talk to you, see if you’re a good fit to work with them, what’s the best way for people to reach out to you to get in touch?

Carisa: I still have a website that’s drcarisa.com, so d r c a r i s a dot com. So, that says a little bit about me. So it’ll give people a flavor. And then there’s and so my phone number is on there, but my phone number is also 928-215-1039. So if you go to the website, there’s a place where you can send an email automatically, you know, if that feels more comfortable. Or you can call and leave me a message. And usually I like to, you know, call people back and talk to them for like 20 or 30 minutes to kind of get a sense of what they’re looking for, you know, and then if it makes sense I’ll schedule a session and we’ll do a session together to see how that feels. And then we both decide together if it’s a good fit. And if it’s not, then, you know, I’ll help people find another avenue or somewhere to get them help.

Lisa: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me, and it’s really great to meet you. And I know we’re going to be running to each other around town.

Carisa: Oh, I hope so. Yeah, I know. I’m so happy to meet you, too. So thank you for this.

Lisa: Thank you.

Lisa: So what do you think – did we miss anything about why Palisade has such a draw? Or does this parallel your experience with our little town? If there’s anything we didn’t touch on, let me know at lisa(at)postcardsfrompalisade.com.

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

Thanks for listening. With love, 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.