Joel Coleman, owner and chef at Fire and Hops in Santa Fe, puts together a string of superlative-punctuated compliments to describe Christopher Bassett’s bounty from his Freshies of New Mexico farm.
“Someone else does mushrooms, but I like Chris’ better,” Coleman said. “His peaches are by far the best. The same with the blackberries and the sun gold tomatoes.”
When you arrive at the Velarde farm, owned by Chris and his wife Taylor, you encounter the most bucolic scene, one that is almost magical. The Rio Grande flows along the dirt road that borders the property to the south. Beavers and ducks, among other wildlife, make the river their home. Located near the gate is a tree house with a marvelous view of the river. There are also living/sleeping quarters, a pump house with greenhouse for starting new plants and a storage area. All the buildings are surrounded by lush vegetation with an orchard sitting to the north.
It’s such an idyllic scene that one is easily tempted to think this can’t be more perfect, this is what the agricultural life is all about.
The Bassetts took over the orchard in 2008 from Walter and Betty Lee. At that time the Lees had the name of the farm as Cottonwood Lane, which references the dirt road bordering the river.
The orchard consisted of one acre of peaches and one of apples. Each acre holds about 350 trees.
“In the first year, in 2009, our first crop, we did it exactly as Walt did,” Bassett said. “After that we kinda reassessed it and tweaking it and making it our own.”
Leroy Trujillo is up on a tall ladder in one of the trees thinning peaches. It’s a bumper crop this year and they need to protect the branches from breaking, and increase the size of the fruit, by removing excess. Trujillo progresses through the orchard, leaving a swath of small, thin peaches in his wake on the orchard floor.
“We hand-thin the crop, so that each fruit can size up more and become a better peach,” Bassett said. “If you let them over-crop, you’ll end up with a bunch of peaches about the size of an apricot.”
This is Trujillo’s second pass thinning the fruit. Bassett said it takes about 200 man-hours to thin the orchard.
Beginnings
Bassett grew up in New Hampshire and worked on an apple orchard next to his parents’ home as a child. When he started college at age 18 he found he was more interested in the local organic farm than in his college studies.
“(At) Whitman College in Wallawalla, Wash. I was studying cross-cultural philosophy, religions and stuff,” Bassett said. “I lasted about five semesters there and just connected more with the local organic farm and just went out there and started learning in that environment, the nitty gritty of soil health and production.”
He worked on farms in Washington, Oregon, California and Colorado before settling in New Mexico.
His wife Taylor is an elementary school teacher and taught in the Española School District for two years.
They were renting a house and finally found the farm and purchased it.
Organic
The Lee’s had the farm certified organic and the Bassetts have maintained that certification.
“The organic program in New Mexico is part of the NMDA (New Mexico Department of Agriculture) and basically there’s a lot of record keeping about what we use for fertility, for pest control, for disease control,” Bassett explains. “Records need to be kept so that our certifiers can verify that we are keeping good records of what we apply and when we apply them.”
There are other stipulations as far as when you can add raw manure to a crop, things that could cross-contaminate for things such as food-borne illnesses. Pesticides are allowed, however, they must be approved for organic use.
Bassett said he does not control for the coddling moth (the notorious worm in the apple) which is the number one pest here. He uses products that have less residues and aren’t as lethal and more targeted to specific pests, rather than broad-spectrum pesticides.
Bassett said the reason the farm holds the organic certification is so wholesale markets can get a better price.
“Direct sales at Farmers Markets, it’s not as important, because I have a personal relationship with everybody,” he said. “They can ask me, ‘Do I use this?’ but like (when) the co-op puts them in their grocery store, I’m not there for people to ask, so it’s a way for people to know that we are conforming to the standards of organic practices.”
The farm sells most of its fruit locally. Bassett normally produces 10 tons of apples and 10 tons of peaches.
“We sell them all between Taos, Santa Fe, and then if we have a real glut, we’ll sell them in Albuquerque,” Bassett said. “We work with the Montanita CDC (Co-op Distribution Center) and we also work with Monte at Skarsgard CSA down in Albuquerque and those are both great venues.”
As far as flavor, Bassett said you can be an organic grower and still have poorly tasting fruit.
More than farming
Growing the crops isn’t the only issue with small farms. They also have to deal with the business, marketing side. Bassett said he has great relationships with about a dozen restaurants in Santa Fe.
“You always form a relationship with the chef first and a lot of the restaurants we sell to are chef-owners,” Bassett said. “Once you establish a relationship with the chef you’ll be directed to deal with the sous-chef or whoever is in charge of produce buying.”
Bassett can offer chefs a product every week. He said superior quality, reliability, and consistency go a long way.
“I have a couple tiers of restaurants that I work with,” he said. “There are the ones that are my number one supporters and clients, that as soon as I get mushrooms, they want them.”
And they want a lot, 20 pounds a week, every week until Bassett doesn’t have the produce the chef wants.
Another tier of chefs wants some items that will be specials, not a regular item on the menu. They’ll tell Bassett to call them when he has extra.
“This is nice for me,” Bassett said. “Depending on supply, I have another four to five other chefs to call.”
Marketing is a huge part of his responsibilities. The Bassetts have farm hands to help run the farm, but he does all the marketing.
“My wife helps and does the farmers markets,” he said. “I do all the other sales.”
It’s a very personal relationship with restaurant clients. They are buying from the grower. It’s one of his favorite parts of the business, representing his products at farmers markets and to our chefs.
“I feel good about what I produce,” Bassett said. “I feel proud. And they appreciate it.”
Chefs say
Coleman, of Fire and Hops, drives Bassett’s point home.
“The main thing I get from him is mushrooms,” Coleman said. “I’m going through 15 to 20 pounds a week, recently. Throughout the year he’s got a lot of other stuff available, likes apples, blackberries, peaches… all of which are pretty amazing, those sun gold tomatoes. Those are all things I get from him.”
Coleman lauds the higher quality of Bassett’s produce than other sources. The peaches have more flavor
Coleman said for the peaches, it’s just flavor.
“You bite into them and it’s obvious right away,” he said.
Joseph Wrede, chef and owner of Joseph’s, in Santa Fe, said Bassett is a great farmer who supplies Wrede with oyster mushrooms, peaches and apples.
“The quality of his products is very good and I’m also impressed that’s he’s found an off-season crop with the oyster mushrooms,” Wrede said. “Mushrooms in particular, are usually featured in my menus. I like cooking mushrooms.”
Wrede uses the mushrooms in a madeira, a kind of sweet, fortified wine sauce.
“Basically a hunter sauce, without the tomatoes,” he said. “It’s normally made with wild mushrooms but in this case we are using dried porcini mushrooms and then add his fresh oyster mushrooms, sautéing it with garlic, onions, thyme and deglazing with madeira and adding a veal demi.”
Steward
Petro-chemical conventional farming is a direct offshoot farm the war industry, Bassett said. There are many chemical compounds used in biological warfare that some farmers are mounting on their land.
“That’s not how I steward the land,” Bassett said.
He’s looking for low impact on the land. He points out a pond with fish, turtles and large bullfrogs.
“You know if we were spraying Diazinon those are dead,” he said. “Those are indicator species. Is it a live system? Is it life producing? That’s very important to us.”
Gordon Tooley, of Truchas, uses pheromone traps that disrupt the coddling moths’ mating cycle. Bassett said they’ve used the technique in the past but his orchard is a little small for that.
“We’re only one acre here and mating disruption is recommended for 40 acres or less,” he said. “So, you create a buffer of disrupted area. I still use pheromone traps to trap the initial flight of the adults so I know when they’re flying and when they’re laying eggs.”
Bassett uses that information and monitors the temperature to know when the moths’ eggs are hatching. He applies a pesticide at that time.
“It’s a much narrower spectrum of effective(ness),” he said. “I don’t just spray randomly. It’s very directed.”
Orchard management
Bassett agrees with Tooley on orchard management. Tooley stresses it’s important to keep bare ground covered.
“This orchard was planted in, I think it was New Zealand dwarf white clover,” Bassett said. “It’s a low-growing white clover. The grasses have moved in over time.”
Covering the soil with woody mulch is another tactic about which Bassett agrees with Tooley. The chips allow more oxygen into the soil.
“What happens with the sod, the grass that grows up along the root zones, it’s so thick that oxygen can’t get down,” Bassett said. “It creates a kind of a barrier. (We) chip all our prunings and bring that all back into the orchard. You just top mulch it, top dress it and the bacteria, the fungus in the soil, decomposes it and that’s why you can’t see any of it. We’ve put out truckloads of it.”
Another method of maintaining the orchard floor is using woody perennials. Bassett points to some purple flowers growing amid the rows of trees.
“We also did some intercropping with some comfrey, sages and different things,” he said. “They add fertility to the soil just by growing in the orchard. It kind of goes along with the whole philosophy we were talking about, trying to introduce more woody perennials and less grass into the orchard.”
Bassett walks down a row in the apple section of the orchard. Four years ago he and Tooley grafted new varieties onto some of the apple trees to make them more marketable.
“Originally this orchard was planted in gala honey crisp in a variety called golden supreme, which was a type of golden delicious,” Bassett says as he approaches a tree. “And the golden supreme, while they’re a nice apple, they don’t have that same cult following as the honey crisp.”
The variety is a phenomenal apple, Bassett said. It’s crisp, sweet, tart, all qualities wanted in an apple.
To maintain those qualities, Bassett took out about 100 golden supreme trees.
“We cut them down at hip height in March, right before they budded out, and then grafted on honey crisp twigs onto the tops,” he said. “We did about three rows, each row 30-33 trees, so we got about 100 trees grafted. We still have some golden supreme, about 50 trees, but we took our honey crisp supply up to 200-250 trees.”
The trees are dwarfs and are spaced six feet apart, with the rows being spaced 15 feet apart.
Frost fight
The Bassetts are in their eighth year with this orchard. Growing fruit in Northern New Mexico is not a sure bet. He said of the eight years, this is the third full crop.
“In 2011 and 2013 we had zero crop in the peaches, 100 percent loss,” Bassett said. “The other three years of crop we’ve had 20 to 50 percent of our crop.”
Apples bloom a little later so tend to not get frost bit. He’s seen a consistency in that crop annually. The peaches bloom earlier, so they’re exposed to more freezing temps.
Although the Lees installed equipment to help battle freezing, it’s still a fact in Northern New Mexico agriculture and something that has to be dealt with.
Lee’s frost protection system is simple. It’s a giant fan.
“Walt built a frost protection system in the orchard,” Bassett said. “It includes a 40 foot tower with a propeller on top of it.”
The wind machine works on the basic premise that cold air sinks. As the cold air settles, it flows down the canyon, like the river. The fan creates a convection current, pulls warmer air down from the atmosphere 40 feet above ground. It recycles that same air.
“If you turn the fan on at 32 degrees and cold air 24 degrees is moving in, it buffers the air in the orchard,” Basset said.
There will be a 10 percent loss of the crop at 28 degrees, Bassett said. At full bloom, the flowers are open, they’re more susceptible to frost. They are more hardy before they open.
“Once they’re full open you have about 90 percent loss at 24 degrees,” Bassett said. “So those four degrees, your crop is either saved or lost.”
Another tool in the battle with frost is a ground sprinkler system. It falls to a basic law of physics that as water freezes it releases heat into the air. When an alarm goes off, telling Bassett it’s 32 degrees, he jumps into action.
“I get up. I start the pump and I start pumping 50-degree water into the orchard,” he said. “That water freezes and as the water changes from liquid to solid, at a molecular level heat is released.”
So Bassett is laying down a sheet of ice on the orchard floor, not the trees. The sprinklers create a continuous full-on ice sheet over the entire orchard floor, about one inch thick (in an all night session).
The two systems together seem to be the real trick in saving the crop,” Bassett said.
Wrede, of Joseph’s, said he’s watched documentaries on incredible peach and apple growers, who really have to live and die by their one crop, but Bassett seems like a very down to earth and easygoing guy.
“He obviously has a fair amount of discipline and knowledge to be able to consistently produce good quality,” Wrede said. “We’ve been buying oyster mushrooms on a steady basis. There are other producers, but we love his fruit.”
Wrede said Bassett’s peaches are, “New Mexico peaches, man. They are for real.”
Wrede grills peaches and serves them in an arugula salad.
Magic mushrooms
Losing 100 percent of those peach crops in 2011 and 2013, had Bassett’s mind churning. The only thing that saved them was the mushrooms, which are predominantly an inside crop.
So they started thinking about a method to reduce risk of losing revenue for an entire year. The mushrooms were one avenue to take, the other a new project, high tunnel orchard.
Bassett enters a greenhouse with bags, some white, some brown, hanging everywhere. Some of the bags have oyster mushrooms peeking out of their sides.
“This is the mushroom laboratory area,” Bassett said. “I call it a laboratory because it’s so much different from farming in the ground.”
Basset does succession plantings. They plant every week, the same amount every week, which translates into a steady production and harvest throughout the summer.
“We harvested recently in here,” he said. “We harvest every day. It’s pretty amazing!”
A sprinkler comes on in the greenhouse. It sprays a fine mist to keep the humidity high, which mushrooms love. The spray changes locations in the greenhouse and lasts a short time.
“This is our ‘mini- Oregon’ over here,” Bassett said. “It stays about 70 degrees, 80 percent humidity.”
The room is organized to provide rack space for two months of weekly plantings. They make 72 bags a week.
The white part inside the bag is the organism or the mycelia. Mycelia is the mass of branched, tubular filaments or hyphae. Fungal colonies composed of mycelia are found in and on soil and many other substrates, consuming the carbon, grown on sawdust.
Some of the bags are more brown, with less white. They’re more recently planted. The organism hasn’t colonized them.
“So we have one more week’s worth of inoculations (plantings) to hang on this rack,” Bassett says pointing. “The week after that we will start taking out the oldest bags and adding the new ones in their place.”
More mushrooms
In the orchard is the secondary mushroom production. Bassett points to some raised soil among the fruit trees.
“This is inoculated mushroom substrate,” Bassett said. “So after we do the initial growing of the mushrooms in the mushroom green house, the bags get cut open and mulched out on the ground in the orchard.”
Out In the orchard they re-grow, to become one. Bassett says it sounds very Sci-Fi.
“And then in the spring and fall we get major production out of these beds,” he said. “The floor of the orchard is literally carpeted with mushrooms. This type of mushroom we have is very vigorous and can out-compete most other organisms, so we don’t need the same type of sterile environment that other types of mushroom cultivation needs.”
The bags of mushrooms are mixed into the soil of the orchard. Bassett then moves the bags out of the way and rolls over the soil with the tractor. Then the Sci-Fi begins.
“The organism reconnects,” he said. “Its consciousness becomes one. They are all individual bags here and then it all reconnects.”
Mushrooms have a profound consciousness, Bassett said. He doesn’t classify them as plants or animals.
“They’re something else,” he said. “A whole separate kingdom of life. And they do reconnect.”
Then they start consuming the carbon. Bassett said every time they’re disturbed, it reinvigorates them. And when they feel the right temperature fluctuations between day and night, the right moisture, possibly gravitational pull from the moon, then they’ll just grow mushrooms in that secondary production, in a major way, like a carpet.
“This system here we’re forcing them weekly, they constantly feel the bounds of their container and then they decide to start putting mushrooms out,” he said. “Whereas, in the outdoor production, it’s a little more random.”
Mushrooms demand a relentless harvest schedule. The 24-hour harvest cycle dictates they’re harvested or they’ll over mature and become overgrown, worthless. They lose their texture and firmness.
Every day from April through November the mushrooms must be harvested, processed and shipped.
“That’s the biggest challenge of maintaining the quality and keeping the quality to offer to our buyers,” Bassett said.
High tunnel
The mushrooms have helped the Bassetts keep the farm. The February 2011 cold snap was so cold, most fruit trees didn’t even bloom.
“That was the year we built our first high tunnel and that diversity has been a nice buffer, you know, in keeping us on the farm,” Bassett said.
A 10-minute drive away sits six acres the Bassetts acquired In August 2015. He located the high tunnel orchard here and that project is underway.
“So we’ve been doing research about planting trees undercover,” Bassett said. “It used to be an old apple orchard,”
On about one acre of the parcel sits a large greenhouse structure. Bassett said the structure covers about 45,000 square feet.
“We just weren’t happy with losing the crop two out of seven years,” Basset said. “We did some research. There are other universities that are doing the initial research for these types of projects.”
In Michigan growers are putting sweet cherry trees under cover so they keep off the rain. If cherries get rained on right before they’re harvested, they tend to crack. Bassett is using the same structure for frost protection, so it’s a little different.
The structure is a high tunnel, consisting of five bays. Each bay is 31 feet wide. The whole structure is 155 feet wide and 300 feet long. That’s the length of a football field, but wider than a football field.
Each bay holds 300 trees. In the center row, which is the highest part of the dome in each bay, they use a super slender axis training system.
The system dictates the trees be planted two feet apart, which means they will have very high trees that have essentially no branches. The fruit will grow and be harvested close to the high growing trunk (See right side of photo, above).
“We did that because we have 16-foot ceilings in the center of the tunnels,” Bassett said. “So, we’re making a long, narrow, tall hedge,” Bassett explains. “The apricots are the most vigorous. They’ve been in the ground the longest.”
He points to a shoot and says it will get pruned to about four to five inches this winter. The fruit load will be on that spur.
“It will get tied up to the wire,” he said. “The wood that grew this summer will be fruit bearing next year.”
Eat your vegetables
To add to his workload and the farm’s bounty, Bassett planted a row of annuals: tomatoes, cucumbers and melons. The plants will produce about 1,500 pounds of melons, 300 pounds cucumbers, 1,200 pounds tomatoes.
“We’ve got 600 apricot trees, 600 sweet cherry trees, 200 plums, 100 nectarines planted in the first year,” he said.
The plants between the rows of trees will go to the same buyers through direct retail sales. They consist of thin-skinned seedless cucumbers (Persian), sun gold tomatoes and cherry tomatoes. They harvest all the crops two to three times a week.
“We wait for them to mature to their ultimate ripeness, harvest it,” Bassett said. “It decreases its ability to store, but that’s not what we’re into. We’re not trying to store anything. We are trying to get it to people right away.”
They didn’t plant any of the perennial stock in the high tunnels that they have at the original farm. Bassett said they’re looking for diversity and stability.
“We’re hoping to get them 10 out of 10 years,” Bassett said.
The most difficult part of agriculture is the continual dependence the plants and trees have on Bassett, his family and staff. The farm never takes a day off.
“You know if it’s Sunday morning, I’m still getting up to go switch the heater somewhere or check in on some trees that were having trouble earlier in the week that I maybe did something to,” he said. “There’s never really a down time.”
The Bassetts have had to learn to leave the farm and be able to rest. Also as the children get older, it’s more important to have quality family time, than keep the farm running smoothly.
Despite his thoughts on more family time and more down time, Basset said they’d like to plant a new peach orchard in the newly acquired six acres. The original orchard is aging and in another five years it would be nice to have the frost protection this new project affords the trees and plants.
“It would be all indoor,” Bassett said. “We are moving to put all our stone fruit under cover, to secure a crop every year.”
Like people In every profession, Bassett has second thoughts about being a farmer.
When they lost the crop in 2013 in bloom or 2011 when the cold snap eliminated any bloom, Bassett said it was heart-breaking.
“You always wonder is the grass greener on the other side sorta thing,” he said. “In the end we just decided, in farming you’re always gonna have adversity, no matter where you go. We could move to Hawaii and start a farm there and it would be too wet, too many different fruit flies we couldn’t even grow fruit.”
Although the farm offers a variety of items, Bassett says it’s important to be known for something in particular.
“I think I’ve found that it is really important is to find your niche and commit to it,” Bassett said. “You know, like… I’m the peach guy.”
Bassett celebrates the independence of being his own boss, working his own projects and being creative in those projects.
“I really enjoy that and was drawn to that,” he said. “But more so, it’s the flavor in the fruit that just drives me to do what I do. I strive for fully-ripened, tree-ripened, vine-ripened fruits.”
He said while the farm does grow vegetables with leaves and roots, it’s much more than that. He’s bringing that all to market.
“You can’t buy vine-ripened fruit at the store,” Bassett said. “Everybody knows that from their childhood.”
Bassett is after that locked in memory of eating your first real, tree-ripened peach. This is what life is, he said.
“Peach juice dripping down your beard, getting sticky,” Bassett said. “That’s why I decided to become a fruit grower.”