Tomten Farm with Kris Holstrom

SeedBroadcasting from Telluride was made possible by our partnership with Telluride Institute (TI) and Southwest Institute for ResiLience (SWIRL)…along with the generosity of Telluride MountainFilm, who included our seedy broadcasting in the weekend festivities.

Kris Holstrom of SWIRL is a local agroecologist, educator, and brilliant community organizer. She was instrumental in connecting us to local growers and opportunities at and around Telluride!

We met up with her at the MountainFilm Ice Cream Social and Telluride Farmers Market where she was facilitating compost as the on-site waste-flow engineer, as well as overseeing her farm stand at the market. She stopped by to visit briefly amidst the snow, ice cream, veggies, and waste cycles and shared a seed story with us. Then she invited us out to her farm on “the mesa” above Telluride.

Main Street, Telluride with waste barrels, SeedBroadcast, gluten-free ice cream, and the soon-to-come snow.

Kris calls this Tomten Farm and it is guarded by its namesake, a gnome-like creature of legend who watches over farmers’ homes and children. It is located just west of Telluride at 9000 feet low… making it well classified as a high-altitude experiment is regenerative agriculture, permaculture, education, and creative community life.

Here is Kris's Seed Story:



During our tour of the farm, we sloshed around in a shroud of patchy fog and distant snow-capped mountains. The recent snow covered all the new garden plantings, but cane fruit, hops, alliums, asparagus, and trees were beginning to leaf out and flower.

Tomten Farm is a demonstration and education site based on regenerative agriculture principles in action. The mission is to explore and put into play dynamic feedback loops where all ecologic participants (plants, soils, animals, humans, weather, sun, etc) relate through energy flows to create a resilient web of life for people and the other than human.

This farm is fully experimental and powered by seasonal interns who contact Kris through National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service. Interns not only help out on the farm, they are also included in all educational programming and they can lead their own alternative architecture and permaculture experiments and projects. Housing for interns include several gers and a community kitchen.

Grow Dome

Even though the winters are snowy and cold, the farm grows four-season with a climate battery greenhouse, grow dome, and greenhouse on the south face of Kris’s passive solar, photovoltaic driven home. These structures provide a moderated climate, passive cooling and heating, and collecting/storing harvested rainwater, while retaining humidity to off-set the desert atmosphere of the Rocky Mountains.

The large climate battery greenhouse was designed in concept from Jerome Osentowski at the Colorado Rocky Mountain Permaculture Insititute. It has permanent beds laid out in large curvilinear forms making space for intercropped diversity of annual and perennial food, medicine, and beneficial botanicals. Verticality is also structured into this design as a multi-story garden with grapes and nasturtiums climbing up the beams, a fig tree and rosemary bush and under-cropped herbs and tender greens. Using 3-dimensional space to sculpt a garden, increases yields, biodiversity, and connects us to the elementals of land from below the soil surface to the clouds.

As we wrapped up our farm tour, Kris added, “You know, after my Seed Story audio recording with you earlier, I realized that one of the most important seeds on the farm are the interns. The interns are the seeds around here, and they all germinate differently.”

Thank you Kris for sharing your seed story and farm with us!

SeedBroadcast at Telluride MountainFilm, part 2

SeedBroadcasting at the Palm in Telluride

One of the  many diverse and thought provoking films presented at this years MountainFilm was "Seeds of Time". This film, by Sandy McLeod http://seedsoftimemovie.com/ , follows the scientist Cary Fowler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cary_Fowler  in his passion to protect the the future of our food. The genteic diversity of our crops is vanishing and Cary, as a crop diversity pioneer, travels the world educating the public and set out to build, Skalbard, the worlds first global seed vault  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault. This seed vault is set in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago about 810 miles from the North Pole and holds 825,000 seeds from different crop varieties.  "Seeds of Time" follows Cary as he moves through his passionate journey to save the diversity of our seeds through education, the history of seed saving, ted talks, global meetings and seed banks.
 Cary was in Telluride to talk about this film and to hold discussions with youth as part of Pinhead Smithsonian Affiliate Institute http://www.pinheadinstitute.org and Kidz Kino. SeedBroadcast was invited to join this event where we met with many curious kids and a curious Cary Fowler.

Curious about seeds

Talking with Cary Fowler

SeedBroadcast asked Cary what his thoughts were on all the small farmers and seed-lovers that are diligently saving a diversity of seeds and growing them out year after year rather than stockpiling them in a seed vault, listen to his answer here:

Keep on the look out for our next blog from Telluride on the high-altitude Tomten Farm.

SeedBroadcast at the Telluride MountainFilm Fesival

Memorial Day weekend in Telluride is a time of change. One does not know if it is spring or winter from one moment to the next. It is that in between time of regrowth and renewal.  It is also the time of the Telluride MountainFilm Festival http://www.mountainfilm.org/. 
Mountain Film started in 1979 and is one of America's longest-running film festivals that is dedicated to educating, inspiring and motivating audiences about issues that matter. SeedBroadcast was invited by the Telluride Institute http://www.tellurideinstitute.org/ and the Southwest Institute for Resilience https://www.facebook.com/SouthwestInstituteforResilience to have a presence at this years festival in conjunction with the film Seeds of Time, http://seedsoftimemovie.com/.

Setting up on Main Street for the Farmers Market and Ice Cream Social

Our first stop was to set up on Main Street for the Farmers Market and the Ice Cream Social. This is a free, well-anticipated community event put on by the Film Festival. The market was bustling with a variety of greens, home-made baked goods, and high altitude produce. It was the first market of the season and the local farmers were eager to sell their produce and talk about their farms and farming practices.

Newly arrived interns working at the Tomten Farm Stand.

As we were setting up we had the pleasure of talking with John Gascoyne from Fort Collins who shared the following seed story:


As the market came to a close several of the local farmers came to visit us.  The first was Kris Holstrom, who until recently, ran the Southwest Institute for Resilience and was responsible for all the recycling activities for the Film Festival. She also runs the high-altitude (9,000ft), solar powered "morganic" Tomten Farm on the mesa near Telluride https://www.facebook.com/tomten.farm.3.   We took the time to visit her so keep checking the blog as there will be a post soon about this remarkable woman and her farm.
One of her new interns shared the following story with us:


Another local farm is the Indian Ridge Farm and Bakery in Norwood http://indianridgefarm.org/. This 100 acre farm in the high San Juan Mountains is run by Barclay Daranyi and her husband Tony.

We had been warned that at every Ice Cream Social it rained and sure enough as soon as the ice cream arrived so did the rain and snow. Suddenly we became very popular!

Huddled in the Mobile Seed Story Broadcasting Station we gathered more stories:


Our first day of SeedBroadcasting in Telluride was full of interesting encounters, with the weather, the film crowd and the local farmers...... to be continued.......

Mancos Seed Library.

Mobile Seed Story Broadcasting Station at the Mancos Public Library.

A few weeks ago SeedBroadcast received this email  "We would LOVE to host you in the southwest Colorado. I help organize a Seed Library in Mancos and am connected with Seed Savers in Durango and Cortez as well. We just hosted a series of seed saving workshops and a seed swap in Mancos with great support from our community. Please let me know if you all can stop through our area! We would love to have you!!"   How could we refuse this invitation?  So on the evening of May 21st we rolled in to Mancos for the beginning of the SeedBroadcast Rocky Mountain tour.

Seed Library area

The Mancos Seed Library https://www.facebook.com/MancosSeedLibrary  was started three years ago by Margaret (Midge) Kirk. At that time Midge was the librarian at the small town library and a friend mentioned an NPR program she had heard about the sprouting of seed libraries around the nation.  Midge jumped at the opportunity and quickly took on learning as much as she could to put this into action. It started small and eventually Midge moved on from her position at the library.  It is now run by two young dedicated women, Gretchen Groenke and Ingrid Lincoln.  Gretchen is a Promtora de Salud, Community Health Organizer, (it was Gretchen who sent the email) and Ingrid is a seed lover who was inspired by working with a seed company a few years back.  They have revitalized the seed library with their passionate commitment, donations of local seeds and by holding a series of workshops to educate the community on the importance of local seed saving practices. The workshops have filled to capacity which indicates a growing interest in seed saving in the Mancos community.



 The Mancos area has always been an agricultural area and provided food and timber for the mining camps.  The population has been changing and growing with the influx of young families moving to the area to investigate and experiment in the growing organic food. At an altitude of 7,000 ft it is a short growing season and the gardeners and farmers we met mentioned searching for high altitude strains of seeds.  Ingrid saves and is growing out a variety of bean called the Rio Zape  http://coloradoplateauhorticulture.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/phasoleus-vulgaris-3-delving-into-the-mystery-of-the-rio-zape-bean-and-the-cave-of-los-muertos-chiquitos/

Mancos Public Library bee hive with bear protection!

In these times of change it is inspiring to be in the presence of such dedicated, thoughtful, caring young people who are living their dreams to protect our planet.  Thank you all for hosting us in Mancos and for leading the way to new future.

Please take a little time and listen to their seeds stories 

and if you are in the area support the Seed Library!

SeedBroadcasting from Ridgway Seed Library

SeedBroadcast heard the local dig that there was a new Seed Library open in Ridgway, Colorado. During our Rocky Mountain Tour we took this as a sign to reach out and make a stop at the Ridgway Public Library to celebrate the newly opened Seed Library.

On Route along the San Juan Skyway with snow packed peaks in the background.

The Ridgway Seed Library was initiated by Kristen Moberg, Driector of Rigdway Public Library. She became excited about the idea when she heard about seed libraries and thought this would add an important program to serve the local community.

Kirsten gathered and organized information about seed libraries, ordered books and journals on seed saving, and put together a very simple system for the actual seed library. The seeds are currently in small 10” x 10” box and include a few donations of vegetable seeds from Botanical Interest and a very interesting stone fruit, Hermosa Golden Spotted Apricot from Durango.

The check out system is very simple: a big 3-ring binder with membership forms that patrons fill out with their information and note the seeds they are “borrowing.” On this form there is also notation space for the grower to include information about how the seed variety grew, what type of soil, pests, etc.

This form of record keeping could be great way to share information about these varieties as they adapt to local econiches and help the whole community build a viable living seed collection. This is a huge conversation among the high-altitude growers: what will grow here and how can gardeners and farmers produce food for the whole region.

While SeedBroadcast was visiting the library, the local community garden coordinator along with community gardeners stopped by to see the Mobile Seed Story Broadcasting Station and talk seeds.

Chris Lance the Ridgway community garden coordinator showing us the “To Do List and General Communication” binder.

The Ridgway Community Garden hopes to continue promoting and growing community and rental plots. While we were visiting conversations emerged about developing partnerships with the seed library and developing educational programming to enable seed to seed gardens in Ridgway.

Ridgway was lush and green with many marvelous dandelions feeding the bees and accumulating minerals for the topsoil. While we were there we met Danny Powers, head of the city parks maintenance. He was proud to tell us that they have been running their parks organically, with no herbicides or pesticides, for quite some time….and trying to demonstrate this for neighboring communities.