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Always in season

Inaugural Winter Farmers Market offers local, cold-season produce

On Wednesday afternoons during the winter, the Smiley Building on East Third Avenue is popping with colorful produce and other locally grown and raised goods.

“It’s so important to access local food, so after the farmers market ended in October, we decided to organize in a community-based space,” said Margaret Riedel, who owns Wild Mesa Farm in Lewis and oversees the winter market operation.

The traditional Durango Farmers Market held on West 9th Street runs from mid-May through October. To keep local food access afloat in the cold season – and capitalize on Southwest Colorado’s growing climate – the Winter Farmers Market was initiated in November.

Five regional farms – Wild Mesa, Fields to Plate, Adobe House Farm, the Herdshare Program and Rohwers Farm – contribute to the cooperative, which offers grass-fed beef, pork, goat, lamb, Alaskan seafood, goat cheese, eggs and a range of vegetables from 3 to 6 p.m. every Wednesday through March.

“Local food just brings a certain amount of excitement to people’s faces,” said James Plate, co-owner of Fields to Plate Produce in Hesperus. “More than alcohol.”

Plate, who began Fields to Plate with fellow Fort Lewis College graduate Max Fields, leased the farmland through the school’s incubator program, and the upstart is now finishing its third season.

“I grew up with my partner in Denver, in the heart of the hustle and bustle, and seeing the food security around that was frustrating – not knowing where the food comes from and not having access to places to produce,” Plate said.

That sentiment is held closely by fellow vendors, including mother and daughter Judy and Heidi Rohwers, who own Rohwers Farm. The two have sold their winter vegetables – mainly thick, hearty greens grown in greenhouses – in the Smiley building for the past three years. This is the first winter they’ve had company.

“We do this for our customers,” Heidi Rohwers said. “It’s so hard to find local veggies in the winter.”

Winter can drive people indoors, often to unhealthy and processed comfort food, and one might be more likely to think of summer as the season to eat local.

“It’s why this is a great outlet,” Fields said. “Having a winter market keeps local food in people’s heads year-round.”

The bulk of many farms’ winter product – and the best sellers on Wednesdays – are biennial root vegetables, the iconic wintertime crop.

“Root vegetables are primarily what we focus on with winter production,” Plate said. “The roots work really well with our growing climate – it’s a short growing season of 90 days on average, so it’s limited what we can grow.”

Growing winter crops creates more stability, he said, and a focus on roots can extend production by five months. Right now, Fields and Plate are pulling from their root cellar, which was stocked with 13,500 pounds when full in November. It sells all its vegetables at $4 a pound to save plastic, and so customers can mix and match.

In the cafe area inside the Smiley Building, crates are bursting with orange and purple varieties of carrots, Chiogga beets with their trademark candy cane striping on the inside, traditional red beets, gnarled shallots and inky black radishes with a pearly white interior.

Lines of coolers are filled with Wild Mesa grass-fed beef, pork from Hungarian Mangalitsa hogs, chickens and sockeye salmon Riedel gets from friends in Alaska.

The Smiley Building’s motley collection of tenants, and the school, means a steady trickle of all sorts of customers from within the building and without.

“I can’t get through the winter without it,” said Linda Illsley, a loyal customer who took a break from Snowdown conviviality – albeit clad in a leopard-print coat and spiked mullet – to pick up some beef bones and carrots. “Nutritionally, local food has more density instead of cardboard food that’s been sitting for weeks. And financially, it makes sense, because money stays in the community.”

jpace@durangoherald.com

How to participate

Anyone interested in selling products at the Winter Farmers Market can email Margaret Schupp at wildmesafarm@gmail.com.



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