Vendor Profile: Red Dog Expressions

By: Susan Perry, Master Gardener

The name Red Dog Expressions was inspired by a beloved golden retriever but that’s probably the only inspiration Kris Holthaus has ever needed. Instead, she’s both inspired and inspiring. A self-taught beekeeper, Kris has been a vendor at the Larimer County Farmers’ Market for “too long to remember”. Kris started beekeeping as a hobby in the late 1970s when she bought five hives to put on her 55-acre ranch near Salida. The bees joined cows, goats, horses, rabbits, pigs, chickens, and more on the ranch—even as Kris was teaching full time and coaching girls’ sports in the public school system. This energetic, self-taught cowgirl is also an avid (and excellent) golfer, photographer, gardener, and pottery-maker who graduated from CSU in 1974.

Once she mastered ranching, she decided it was time for a different adventure. Moving to Fort Collins in 1981 with a horse, some dogs, and seven hives, she opened a Western and wildlife art gallery. A few lucky customers even had the chance to buy honey from time to time. As time passed, Kris decided to retire from the art world and devote more time to beekeeping and her other interests, so in 1995 she began a new chapter that involved more intense focus on bees.

In 2000, Kris discovered the Northern Colorado Beekeepers association and got involved. It was about this time that she expanded her hives and started raising her own queens. Her queen rearing efforts have been largely trial and error based on daily observation of her bees. Her focus is to produce queens that will survive our Colorado winters, which often have extreme temperature variations; to select queens from strong hives that have produced a large honey crop in excess of their winter needs; and the hives must be gentle to work. As with her other beekeeping activities, Kris says, “I’m always trying to get the best from myself and the bees.” Her efforts have paid off in that last year Kris sold more than 100 queens to beekeepers coming from as far away as Walsenburg. But queen rearing takes a lot of resources from the hives, and because this spring and last were cool and wet, disrupting the queen mating cycle, Kris has limited her queen rearing to what she needs for her own hives for the foreseeable future and put more emphasis on honey production and sales.

What makes Kris and the bee products she sells unique is that most of what she sells is from her own bees. She also uses no pesticides, herbicides, miticides, antibiotics, or other chemicals. Kris monitors the activity in each hive daily and performs any required maintenance herself, so she can insure that the bees have the optimum conditions possible.

If you visit Kris at her booth at the Farmers’ Market, you can find creamed honey, comb honey, extracted honey, beeswax, beeswax lotion bars and soap, bee pollen, and bee-friendly plants for sale. In the next few years, look for Kris to start selling lavender honey, once her bees discover her newly planted lavender. Kris also brings an observation hive to the market, which she says is a “big hit with the kids.”

Kris sells an 8oz bottle of honey for $5, a pint for $9.50, and a quart of honey for $19. Creamed honey costs $6 a jar and comes in several flavors: lavender, cinnamon, raspberry, lemon, blueberry, and blackberry. You can find Kris at the Larimer County Farmers’ Market in Old Town on Saturdays and at the Harmony Road Farmers’ Market on Sundays.

Kris loves what she does, has her own honey in her coffee every morning, and says, “I learn something every day. I could do this all the time.” SWEEEEET! And let me tell you, I had a sample and so is the honey!

Vendor Profile: Koehn Gardens

By: Sarah Peacock, Master Gardener

Love Poem to Garlic by Mong-lan

stinking rose
the heady scent of you
tangy spicy
most underrated
year-round orb
bulbous root incandescent moon

Aaah… garlic. Are you one who triples the amount in every recipe, dices it into olive oil to smear on fresh bread and rubs it on your child’s foot to heal a cough? The smell of a sauté, the pungency of your pesto, and relative ease of growing make it ideal for the kitchen gardener.

If you are a longtime market patron you will remember Scott’s Garden, begun 27 years ago by Virgil Scott at the Taft Hill and 54G location. Last summer, Justin and Alisha Koehn signed on to help Virgil and what a crash course! Virgil turned the garden over to them that same year. Garlic is their “number one thing” with Scotty’s Red the feature in July. “It’s early ripening and one of the best flavors,” shares Justin as a customer arrives exclaiming, “Wow, it looks beautiful!”

Justin and Alisha both have full-time jobs outside of the farm, so they appreciate the calm between the storm of garlic’s fall planting and the summer harvest. Upcoming varieties feature: Bavarian Purple, Chestnut Red, Polish Gin and lots of softneck, or white, garlics which become beautiful braids for winter storage. In addition to garlic, on the 1.5 acre farm you’ll find onions, beets, carrots, parsnips, turnips and heirloom tomatoes. In fact, almost all the vegetables they grow are heirloom. Justin says they’ve been lucky so far this year with a nice Spring, but looking forward they plan to focus even more on the “stinking rose” and starting up with bees.

Years ago at a garlic festival I sampled garlic ice cream; sweetened with honey could make it a most intriguing local flavor!

Vendor Profile: Mountain's Edge Coffee

By: Susan Perry, Master Gardener

“This is our dream,” say Keith and Annette Howard. Like most dreams, it started as an idea, almost 20 years ago. Living in Bozeman, Montana in the early 1990s and working as an engineer and pediatric nurse, Keith and Annette met the owners of Rocky Mountain Roasting Company just as it first opened. As lifelong coffee aficionados, this up-close look didn’t deter them. Rather, it inspired them. But they had to let the idea perk …..

In 2005, Mountain’s Edge Coffee opened and by 2006, it was up and running with a roaster, commercial kitchen, and catalytic converter to insure that the roasting process was environmentally friendly. Located in downtown Berthoud, with a great view of Long’s Peak, Mountain’s Edge Coffee provides custom-roasted beans to grocery stores, restaurants, coffee houses, for home delivery, and to several local farmers’ markets. “We love the Larimer County Farmers’ Market. It unique in so many ways and we feel like we have already made new friends, “says Keith. “We enjoy going to Old Town Fort Collins every week with our coffee. We hope people stop by for a sample of hot, brewed coffee.”

“People try Mountain’s Edge Coffee and like it,” said Annette. It’s no wonder when you understand that they spent an entire year developing their unique custom-roasting recipes. “We spent a year asking everyone we knew to taste our roasts as we developed them.” “The flavor of each type of bean can be uniquely experienced and appreciated by getting the right combination of temperature, airflow and time during roasting,” explains Keith.

Keith and Annette import the finest green, unroasted beans from India, Sumatra, Columbia, Ethiopia, and Guatemala. Because the beans come from the Third World, part of the roasting process involves removing small stones and pebbles that accidentally mix with the beans as the farmers shovel the beans into bags. In addition to single origin and decaffeinated beans, Mountain’s Edge Coffee sells custom blends. Some beans taste better when blended before roasting, while others are better when blended after roasting. Mountain’s Edge Coffee offers 12 oz., 24 oz., and 3 pound bags of beans but will grind beans upon request.

“We roast our beans no more than three to four days in advance of delivery and bring about 80 pounds of beans to the farmers’ market, “chimes Annette. “We can roast 15 pounds of green beans at a time but it takes time because one of us is always watching it, adjusting air and temperature. But it’s a labor of love. We drink our own coffee and love what we’re doing.”

By slow-roasting small batches by hand and taking advantage of Colorado’s high altitude and low humidity, Keith and Annette can produce a more consistent flavored bean. “Our roaster is an old-fashioned Diedrich drum-style roaster, like those used in the Old West. We want to create coffee that embodies quality and craftsmanship.”

Find Mountain’s Edge Coffee on the Internet or better yet, stop by and say “Hi” at the Larimer County Farmers’ Market. Mountain’s Edge Coffee is located on the east side of the market, on the north edge.