MOFFAT — The 13th annual San Luis Valley Seed Exchange at Joyful Journey April 1-2 drew farmers, gardeners, and an enthusiastic audience to discuss local food management and share seeds.
Between Villa Grove and Moffat on Highway 17, Joyful Journey opened the doors for vendors, presenters, and free of charge to the public. Staff also prepared food, leveraging Valley Roots Food Hub like they do year-round. Also, Tacos Martinez out of Alamosa served meals. On both days, people swarmed the seed swap in the main event center.
In the Green Yurt, TerraMedia out of Crestone filmed the speaker series on both days, including live Spanish translation. The recordings will be posted on the Crestone Energy Fair YouTube channel and the SLV Seed Exchange website www.slvse.org. The 34th Annual Crestone Energy Fair will take place Sept. 16-17.
Employed by the San Luis Valley Local Foods Coalition, Jae Sanders introduced speakers and gave the final talk called, “Proactive model for healthy food access in small, rural, and frontier communities.”
The Saguache County population in towns and unincorporated areas congregates in 11 separate regions. Throughout the county, only five grocery stores serve residents seven days a week. This adds the cost of gas to people’s food budgets. A loophole denies access to many grant-funding opportunities because Saguache County is considered a “Frontier Community,” a designation for sparsely populated areas.
Before Sanders guided the final discussion and Laura Parker from High Desert Seed + Garden in Montrose described seed stewardship, Tylor Berreth presented “Backyard Gardening with Mushrooms.”
Co-owner of Breads and Botanicals in Saguache with his wife Danielle, Berreth said he is expanding mushroom cultivation at their Saguache location.
When Sanders introduced Berreth, she said, “They are growing so many mushrooms, and there is such a demand for local mushrooms, that they are turning the whole shop into mushroom production. And they will be wholesaling through Valley Roots Food Hub where you can buy those mushrooms.”
Berreth prefaced his presentation by warning the audience about the flood of information, but he said, “hopefully, this will be so applicable that each of you will walk away with some knowledge about how you can literally inoculate your garden this year.”
Berreth said he likes to call himself a “citizen mycologist, and I’m a promoter of citizen science.” Throughout his talk, Berreth emphasized the balance between art and science with mushroom cultivation. He described a variety of experiments, ultimately concluding that fungi know what they are doing.
“This is a really cool style of farming,” Berreth said. “It can be done indoors or outdoors. It’s low-water usage, low-energy usage. Pretty passive, but the implications are massive.”
Berreth described bioremediation projects, building soil faster with fungal help, sequestering carbon, and producing biodiesel with mushrooms.
“I have a massive bioremediation project in mind,” Berreth said. “Before they start this new cell in the [Saguache County] landfill, I really want to inoculate the bottom of it with oyster mushrooms.”
To access all the presentations from the weekend, check the Crestone Energy Fair YouTube channel, as well as the SLV Seed Exchange website www.slvse.org.
