SantaFe.com

Lunch with Danny and Maria Rhodes is a simple but tasty affair: miso soup and heaps of intensely flavored oyster mushrooms on toasted Sage Bakehouse whole-wheat bread. We’re sitting at the dining table of their rented 19th century adobe house north of Española. Outside, past a stand of trees, the flat plain that Maria farms as Lady Bug Fields stretches east towards the Rio Grande. In the other direction, out of sight, are the shed and greenhouse that house Desert Fungi, Danny’s mushroom growing business. This is their seventh season at the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market, and fifth for their...

Monday, June 9, 2008
by Barry Fields and Jennifer Spelman (Photographer) • localflavor magazine

Thoreau would definitely love this place, I think as I sit with longtime Plants of the Southwest employee Susan Westbrook, each of us haloed by shafts of golden sun at our backs. Feeling like a warm, contented cat, I gaze around their spacious sales area, marveling at the simplicity. Nothing is extraneous in this nursery–there’s a modest selection of well-made gardening tools, wall displays of seeds and a collection of carefully-chosen resource books, most of them describing details about how to live la vida sustainable.

Back in the mid-seventies–1976, to be exact, a tumultuous year as...

Saturday, March 1, 2008
by Gail Snyder and Jennifer Spelman (Photographer) • localflavor magazine