Way back in May, I told you a little about the gorgeous gardens at Zephyros Farm, gave you a bit of the background behind Daphne Yannakakis’ gardening skills, and showed you some photos by Karina Salinas Heredia, a farm intern from Ecuador.

For new readers: Zephyros is an organic, family-run farm in Paonia, Colorado, where I WWOOFed for two weeks this spring. So far, out of all the places I’ve visited, it’s been my favorite. Read all about it here: Zephyros Farm and Garden.

Just the other day, Karina sent me more photos from the farm—and so I’m passing them on to you. Spring and summer have been good to the gardens, apparently. Here’s how things have blossomed in the past few months.

Note: these are just my favorite shots. See all of Karina’s photos here.

Related posts:

1. Brilliant (organic) Blooms of Zephyros Garden
2. Flowers, Lambs, Worms & Dirt: A Kid's-Eye View of Organic Farming
3. Zephyros Farm and Garden

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: agritourism, Colorado, ecotourism, farm, flowers, gardening, nature, organic, Paonia, phenology, photography, summer, voluntourism, WWOOF

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What does this mean? It means that if you’re looking for work in Colorado, green is the way to go.

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Read the rest of SEI Eco-Campus: Hands-on training in alternative energy (413 words)

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Post tags: alternative, Colorado, education, energy, energy-efficient, environment, green building, Paonia, solar, sustainable, teaching, training, wind

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Catherine Gockley, owner of Fire Mountain Farm and Apiary, didn’t start out as a farmer. She didn’t even start out wanting to be a farmer. But once she sets her mind to things, they get done: having decided to become a grower later in life, she spent ten years learning and working to reach her goal. Fire Mountain is a beautiful example of an organic, chemical-free farm built on small acreage and with a reasonable budget— and Catherine made it all happen on her own gumption.

A bit of background: a trained geologist, Catherine worked as a backcountry ranger in Denali and Yosemite before deciding to become a grower. She found a couple of farms in the hills of California where she could work and live, picking up skills and experience from the landowners. She took a special interest in beekeeping, becoming an apiarist and even teaching chemical-free beekeeping workshops. And then she took the plunge, buying four acres of sloped, sunny property on the Pitcairn Mesa.

Catherine was my rideshare from Boulder to Paonia. I thought she was fabulous and fascinating, and I was intrigued by the idea of visiting a brand new organic farm. How do you get started setting up a small farm? Where do you begin, and where do you go from there? So I invited myself over to get a better look at Catherine’s method.

Fire Mountain Farm is small, but it’s the perfect size for Catherine: soon she’ll be able to support herself completely on this little piece of land. Here’s how she began.

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Read the rest of How To Start an Organic Farm – a visit to Fire Mountain (739 words)

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | 11 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: agritourism, chickens, Colorado, community, environment, farm, gardening, how-to, organic, Paonia, permaculture, rideshare, sustainable, travel, voluntourism, WWOOF

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Bread feeds the body, indeed, but flowers also feed the soul. – The Koran

It was planting season when I visited Zephyros Farm and Garden: snow melting off the mountains, grass high and green, and everything beginning to sprout. We spent most days preparing beds for tiny plants that would soon grow tall and fragrant. As we worked, Daphne buzzed around the farm, visiting every bed to check on her babies.

Smart as a whip and twice as fast, Daphne knows exactly what each plant needs— along with its proper Latin name, family history and variant. Under her care, scores of perennials grow tall and lush. When the time is right, she harvests the blooms, arranges them artfully, and sends them off to market.

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Read the rest of Brilliant (organic) Blooms of Zephyros Garden (218 words)

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Post tags: agritourism, Colorado, flowers, gardening, nature, organic, Paonia, photography, spring, voluntourism, WWOOF

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It started out innocently enough: it was a sunny Friday afternoon, and everybody at Zephyros was ready for a break from work. On Fridays, most of Paonia heads to Revolution Brewing. Daphne and all the interns (except Siwar, who was too young and therefore tasked with cooking dinner) hopped in the Subaru to go have a pint.

Like I said, it was a good day and spirits were high. The brewery’s yard was full of interesting people, and as we all laughed and chatted one beer turned into two.

But then the sun started setting: we’d stayed too long. We had to get back to the farm for evening chores. We motored back up the hill, arriving after dark, and powered through our work as quickly as possible. We hit one snag, however: the chickens had fallen asleep outside of their coop. Actually, under their coop.

Now, let’s talk about chickens for a second. Chickens, for your information, are stupid. Implacably idiotic, even. See video above.

Still, these particular stupid chickens had been hand-raised since they were two days old. Most of them were too young to start laying, but would be old enough soon; their (organic, cage-free, grain-fed) eggs would bring a lot of money at market. These stupid chickens were loved. They were important.

You may notice I’m talking about them in the past tense.

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Read the rest of The Great Chicken Massacre of '09 (477 words)

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: agritourism, animal, chickens, Colorado, farm, organic, Paonia, voluntourism, wildlife, WWOOF

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This is a story of different attitudes toward nature. We’ve all got our own way of looking at the natural world: some of us don’t understand it completely, some of us think we understand it all too well. Some work to preserve it, some work to eradicate it, and then there are the NARPs.

Utah Phillips coined the term: New Age Rural Professionals, “out there cruising the backroads… stereos blaring meditation music into the wilderness”. He talks about them in a song called Nevada City, California— Nevada City, as many of you know, being my home town. I grew up in NARP central, a land of rayon batik, yoga, and meditation, of Nag Champa and expensive homeopathic face creams. Earth-tone SUVs roam those hills, carrying well-meaning amateur spiritualists who truly believe that they can save the world (and achieve Nirvana) by purchasing handmade clothing imported from New Guinea. “Maybe my home costs thousands each month to heat,” their attitude proclaims, “but I recycle!”

Jane was one of these poor souls: a woman who’d come to Colorado from the East Coast with money to burn and a bevy of health issues. There in the bright yellow sun of the North Fork valley, she’d found Life Force (“and oh, Jessica,” she told me, “it saved my life.”)

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Read the rest of The Dandelion War, a Cautionary Gardening Tale (1,003 words)

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Post tags: Colorado, environment, flowers, gardening, Paonia, water

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photo by Karina Salinas Heredia

When I was in third grade or so, my class visited a local farm. I didn’t learn a lot that day, not exactly: mostly what I recall is the smell of hay&manure, and the big scary turkeys clucking at me through a fence. Still, it brought the idea of a farm out of the Old MacDonald fantasy realm, and into reality; thereafter, when I saw an Orzalli peach pie at the farmer’s market, I knew where it had come from.

Don and Daphne at Zephyros Farm have taken the farm visit a step further: more than just a tour, their educational visits give kids the chance to see earthworms up close, weed and plant, and cuddle any adorable quadriped that might happen to be grazing nearby.

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Read the rest of Flowers, Lambs, Worms & Dirt: A Kid's-Eye View of Organic Farming (212 words)

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Post tags: agritourism, animal, Colorado, community, education, environment, farm, organic, Paonia, photography, teaching, tourism, touristry, WWOOF

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My first night at Zephyros Farm, I set up my tent as usual, and went to bed early like a good farmworker. It was quiet and breezy as I drifted off to sleep… but sometime in the middle of the night it started raining.

Hey, rain, no problem! It’s good for the plants, and my tent was up to the challenge. I woke up long enough to notice the rain, and then went straight back to sleep. Until about 5am, which is when the rain that had collected on my tent turned to ice and started rolling down the rainfly.

See? That’s ice, bro

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Read the rest of Colorado Springtime: ICE RAIN (213 words)

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Post tags: adventure, camping, Colorado, environment, nature, outdoors, Paonia, photography, spring, water, weather

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Yes, that’s right: it’s time to talk about irrigation! WHOO exciting! IRRIGATION YEAH!

Okay, calm down all yous. It may not be the most fascinating topic, but it’s more interesting than you think. And it’s necessary: in places like Paonia, which gets less than 20 inches of rain a year, it’s next to impossible to farm without using irrigation. Zephyros Farm sits below Landsend Peak, which is covered in melting snow. But how does that runoff get to these fields, and what happens to it after that?

Well, I’ll tell you.

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Read the rest of Things I Learned: Flood Irrigation! (650 words)

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: agritourism, Colorado, education, farm, how-to, organic, Paonia, reuse, voluntourism, water, WWOOF

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I came to Paonia in a rideshare with a local farm owner, and all the way through the Rockies we talked geology, bees, organics, adventure, and air quality. The air in Paonia, she told me, was clear. But when we came over the rise and caught our first glimpse of the North Fork valley, what did we see? Why, a dusty dry haze in the sky.

As the day went on, the sky got darker; by early evening it was a thick, bruised purple in the west, and a mucky reddish-brown stretching up the valley. I ran into a couple of locals at the Trading Post, and they told me it wasn’t normal at all: this was the edge of a huge dust storm being kicked up in Utah and blowing all the way to the Rockies.

As the sun sank, the dust filled the air more and more, coating everything finely— including the mountains, whose snowpack turned reddish overnight. Meanwhile, the Gunnison River roared past, carrying tons of silt back down the hill. The grass and trees kept pushing out new green leaves, clear and fresh: the air and water turned the soil. It all made quite a bit of sense, in the exciting way that only major natural phenomena can.

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Read the rest of Dust Rampage: Moab Comes to Colorado! (132 words)

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: climate change, Colorado, environment, featured posts, nature, outdoors, Paonia, river, snow, spring, Utah, water, weather, wild west

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