Growing for 37 Seasons in Northern Colorado

2012 Dates: Saturdays, May 19 to October 27

Time: 8 a.m. to noon

Location: 200 W. Oak Street, Old Town Fort Collins

More info: http://www.larimercountyfarmersmarket.org/

Thursday, July 28, 2011

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!

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