Pepe and Veronica Diaz’s dream realized is a quarter-acre plot of land that sits at one of the busiest intersections in Boulder. Here, they grow vegetables and raise chickens. This was their first year operating the Diaz Farm at Jay Road and 28th Street, and the harvest was stellar in quality and production.
In fact, this was their first year even working on a farm. But Pepe says he’s always had a basic desire to grow things.
“You know since I was a kid, I liked growing stuff, and I liked plants. I didn’t realize what it would lead to eventually, but it was always in me. I enjoyed seeing plants grow, and I always had plants throughout my life,” Pepe says.
Pepe moved from Mexico to Los Angeles with his mother when he was 11. His parents had divorced, and his father, a supervisor for a government subsidized grocery store chain, stayed in Mexico.
Pepe graduated from high school and hopped jobs for several years, working everywhere from oil rigs to construction sites. He eventually found work at a factory in Corona, California, working minimum wage. It also happened to be the factory at which Veronica had recently gotten a job. At 21, she had just moved from Mexico to Los Angeles to live with her sister.
Pepe hated the job, and they weren’t paying him enough so he just stopped showing up one day. It was a transition period for him, and he was sure he had opportunities elsewhere. But the factory called back a few days later and offered him more money. He took the job and soon thereafter met Veronica.
“I went back, and we started talking and had lunch, and we fell in love,” Pepe says.
A few years later, the Diaz’s bought a 2-acre lot in Riverside, an urban area in the Inland Empire just east of Orange County, California. This would be their first attempt at urban farming.
“My dream was to grow some vegetables but not to sell anything, just for our family. I bought a tractor and everything,” Pepe says.
But the permitting process in Riverside was tedious and bureaucratic, and the housing boom in California was in full swing. With property values skyrocketing, Pepe and Veronica sold the lot and took home a solid chunk of cash for their dream deferred.
“So no farming happened there,” Pepe says. “I sold the tractor, I sold everything. We never broke ground.”
The odd jobs continued, and Pepe made another pile of cash by opening up a carpentry business, selling cabinets to feed the ravenous demand from contractors in southern California in the mid-2000s. When the housing bubble burst, Pepe briefly took a job at an engineering firm before the Diaz’s, now with four children, decided to make the move to Boulder County.
They had visited Colorado on vacation several times and made friends in the area. Their first home was in Longmont in 2011, before Pepe’s brother (who followed the family out to Colorado) recommended a small plot of land in Boulder zoned for both residence and agriculture. Last April, they moved into that space.
“When we moved here we did have this thought, you know, we gotta find a nice piece of property to do some farming,” Pepe says. “We didn’t think that we would do it to actually sell to the community. We started with this little fenced area and those sheds were already there, so we turned one of them into a coop, and we bought 30 chickens.”
Again, neither Pepe nor Veronica had any experience working on farms, but they set out to grow vegetables on a quarter-acre of the land, in addition to the coop of chickens. Pepe says he read two books, took a little bit of money from friends and family and got advice from Michael Brownlee, the Boulder-based founder of Local Food Shift.
In one short year, crops were growing and hens were laying eggs. By July 2015, they had too much produce for their own good.
“We were extremely successful with our cucumbers and tomatoes, so we had all these cucumbers, and we hadn’t even opened our store yet. So we had too much produce, way more than we knew what to do with,” Pepe says. “By the time we [could build a storefront], we had wheelbarrows full of cucumbers and a bunch of kale and nobody knew about us. This was just producing tons of vegetables here.”
At the beginning, there were sometimes only one or two customers a day. So the Diaz’s put up colorful signs at the corner of the busy intersection, and the traffic became a blessing. People from the neighborhood started stopping by as the full harvest of the Diaz farm came to fruition.
By September this year, they were plucking kale, chard, tomatoes, cucumbers, arugula, onions, peppers, zucchinis, summer squash, basil, tomatillos, carrots and radishes. The immediate success of the harvest wasn’t particularly shocking to Pepe or Veronica, but the quality of the produce certainly was.
“We were blown away,” Pepe says. “Those tomatoes, we snack on them. When we’re harvesting them, the ones that dont look too good, we’re snacking on them, so by like 10 [a.m.], we’re already full. We are blown away with what we are producing.”
The produce, sold in baskets in the farm store — a redesigned garage — is beautiful. Of particular note is the arugula, which is bigger than your hand and has no signs of browning or decay. It’s sold in small bags, and it has a flavor and texture unlike anything sold in stores. It is both peppery and buttery, with an ideal bitterness, and it’s slightly thicker than the pre-packaged or shipped-in stuff. It is so flavorful that it needs no dressing or olive oil, and on a sandwich or in a stir-fry, it is a force.
But not resting on the success of their harvest, they also sell bread and empanadas that they bake in a small kitchen they assembled on the other side of the farm store. The empanadas are filled with various fruits, and dusted with sugar and cinnamon. The bread loaves are big, beautiful crusty round loaves, blackened perfectly and dense and chewy on the inside. Pepe says people have been coming back specifically for the bread, and they sell about four loaves a day. They also sell about 40-60 empanadas.
And, of course, this was the first year Pepe and Veronica learned to bake.
“I went through probably 20 loaves before I started to get it right,” Pepe says. “A lot of the first loaves went to the chickens.”
The Diaz Farm will likely triple in size next year, Pepe says. The coop of hens, of which the majority are still too young at the moment to produce eggs, will likely triple in production as well. Veronica plans to make more pastries, and Pepe wants to bake more breads. They’ve also built tents in the yard to grow salad mixes hydroponically throughout the winter.
When asked to quantify how much produce the farm is capable of, Pepe doesn’t think in dollars. He says the goal is to be able to provide enough food for 100 families every season. That is what motivates him and Veronica to grow.
“We truly believe that people need to have access to organic food that is local that was harvested the same day or the day before,” Pepe says. “It’s literally on your table within hours of being harvested, and we think that’s a beautiful thing. We have kids that walk in here, and we have these super sweet carrots and kids try them, and it’s like candy to them. You don’t get that at the supermarket. It is clean, delicious, organic.”
The immediate and resounding success was fortuitous for the Diaz Farm, but you get the sense from Pepe and Veronica that it wasn’t really going to turn out any other way.
