An Agrarian Ideal
Ute City Photo/Robbie George
Divide Creek Farm is a lush and sudden eyeful as you drive up onto its corner of a sprawling green bench with wide-angle views. It’s also a genuine surprise. There was a time not long ago when sustainable farms were still generally regarded as vestiges of the “back to the land” movement of the late 1960s and early ’70s. And those, however erroneously, were always thought of as basically hippie communes: co-mingled collections of cabins, shacks, teepees, livestock, gardens and dreamy-eyed children. And oddly, most of those elements are present at Divide Creek Farm, but not in the way you might imagine.
The farm is located in the heart of high-yield agricultural country around Silt, Colorado, about 90 minutes from Aspen. The area has been colonized by former Roaring Fork Valley residents for years and subdivided into upscale ranchettes in places, but it’s still dominated by old-line mom-and-pop spreads. Longtime traditional farmers literally surround Robbie and Clara George’s elegantly carbon-neutral 80 acres at Divide Creek, and many are very interested in what the Georges are doing.
A big part of what they’re doing is sharing what they’re learning about creating a state-of-the-art sustainable farm, perfectly matched to its surroundings, impressively functional and so smartly handsome as to seem like something generated by a Mother Earth News computer for Town & Country magazine.
This is not to say that Divide Creek Farm is just a stylized toy, with its wine barrel sauna, outhouse-looking generator building, climbing wall, children’s playground area and prospective covered bridge. It’s very much a working farm. But Robbie does note that, “We want to make it something we enjoy being around with our kids and make it fun, as well as self-supporting and low-impact.”
Robbie and Clara are personally involved in envisioning, building and operating every detail of their dream, and they come by their inspired immersion in the project honestly and completely, with no ex-urbanite illusions.
Robbie was born and raised in the Roaring Fork Valley. His father, Bob George, was a well-known local realtor and thinker. His parents bought the farm site in 1997 and built a home and small greenhouse on it with Robbie’s help. After both of his parents died in the past several years and his and Clara’s son Bode was born with initial lung problems, they decided to move down to Divide Creek. The elevation of 6,200 feet was better for Bode as a baby and highly favorable for growing things.
Clara’s father, Eliot Coleman of Maine, is one of America’s foremost organic gardening gurus and the author of multiple books on the subject. He delivered the keynote address at last summer’s Snowmass Wellness Experience along with his wife and Clara’s stepmother, Barbara Damrosch, who also writes books and newspaper columns on gardening.
With Robbie and Clara’s backgrounds, the Divide Creek property became the perfect place for an artisanal model of self-sustaining agriculture. “He’s the one with all the vision and I’m the detail-oriented one, so we make a great team,” smiles Clara.
“We just want to make this place pay for our lives here,” says Robbie. “That’s part of Clara’s father’s philosophy. We don’t have to make a big business out of it. Just support our family and our community.”
The centerpiece of the farm may well be its location, broadly exposed to the sun and displaying 360-degree panoramas of rolling pastures, hills and mountains. The main house has the look of a perfectly renovated homestead cabin, but with the kind of understated über-craftsmanship that makes it clear this was a recent, and very thoughtful, creation. At 2,800 square feet, it includes the flow-together ground-floor living, dining and kitchen areas along with two smallish game and kids’ rooms, plus a finished basement and a roomy loft holding the bedrooms.
| Roaring Fork Valley native Steve Fitzgerald built the original home with immaculately rustic-looking applied log siding and rough hewn beams from K&K Lumber in Silt. Pine floors and beautiful, recycled cabin-grade oak cabinetry are set off by brushed stucco walls and high ceilings. Old guns adorn the fireplace area, and a refurbished, antique, nickel-plated wood cook stove from the old mining town of Marble presides over the sunny kitchen. |
“We popped out the front of the house when we moved in so it would have this entry area,” Robbie mentions, indicating the atrium-like glassed-in porch, outside the door of which lie numerous of the family’s rubber irrigation boots. It’s been a wet spring. “All of this,” Robbie points out, looking around at the numerous buildings and installations, “is owner-designed and built. It’s a labor of love, and we’re very fortunate to be able to do it and hopefully use it as a teaching opportunity.”
Though Robbie has never been fond of big yards, they’ve enlarged theirs to connect the house to the greenhouses and gardens, which are surrounded by a high, deer-proof fence. The original greenhouse, which is used mainly for propagating, and a small home garden with raised beds are closest at hand. Next is a little, silo-ish building that’s actually the entrance to their extremely slick root cellar with temperature-controlled ventilation, gravel floor and insulated, tin-lined concrete walls. “It’s where we’ll store our produce, especially over the winter,” says Clara.
Next up is a semi-whimsical arrangement of cedar sauna, outdoor shower and wood-fired hot tub, and just beyond those is a burgeoning orchard for apples, pears, cherries, apricots and plums. The highlights of the commercial garden area are two Rolling Thunder greenhouses designed by Clara’s father and built in conjunction with Rimol Greenhouses of New Hampshire. “These are the only ones in the country so far, besides my father’s own,” says Clara.
Resembling low-slung, opaque, 48-foot-long Quonset huts, what makes them unique is that they are each set on two 150-foot rails. “The idea with greenhouses around here is to extend your growing season by a month or two on either end, bringing down the climate zones by adding protection,” explains Robbie. The rails allow three separate gardens to be serviced with each movable greenhouse, starting with the plants that need the most help in the early spring, and finishing with those that require protection deep into the fall. Each unit is two inflated layers thick and equipped with overhead watering systems. The result is misty, loamy smelling hot-houses with the ability to grow everything from tomatoes, lettuce and chard to sweet potatoes, zucchini and artichokes, some of them very rare in this region.
The property’s other prominent structure is a wonderful barn-like “community building” near the house, purpose built by Robbie and his friend, ex-Aspenite Teran Hughes, now a Silt neighbor who owns a specialty green-building company called Sundog Construction. The building’s exterior is sided with recycled barn wood in a striking sunburst pattern on one side and decorated with a crescent moon and star on another. It houses a walk-in cooler, a stainless-steel kitchen area for washing vegetables (and eventually making cheese), a shower and self-composting toilet for their workers, a small office loft and a big, high-ceilinged garage bay.
The latter is where they’ll pull in (and plug in) a resurrected silver Airstream trailer being fitted with old fashioned cold-plate technology to serve as a rolling refrigerator for delivering produce to the farmers’ market in Basalt, near Aspen. The building’s floor is acid-etched concrete, and the walls are cleverly wainscoted with corrugated tin so it can all be hosed down when necessary. The walk-in cooler, instead of being powered by an energy consumptive freon compressor, is serviced by an air conditioning unit controlled by a Cool-bot device that effortlessly drops it down below 40 degrees.
Scattered around the edges of the five-acre building compound are 28 kilowatts of solar panels installed by High Noon Solar of Grand Junction that sell power back into the grid most months and render the farm carbon-neutral for five people. On the rest of the land, they’re raising hay, chickens and grass-fed cattle in a series of 12 rotating pastures that aren’t fertilized or treated with pesticides. “Grass feeding puts carbon back into the soil, whereas grain feeding takes it out,” notes Robbie.
When you turn into the farm and cross Divide Creek, the first thing you encounter is a teepee housing one of the Georges’ interns. More than half a dozen other buildings include several what might be called shacks if they weren’t so tasteful (a copper-cupola-ed chicken coop, for example). The livestock and gardens are all clean and well-tended, and the dreamy-eyed children aren’t Robbie and Clara, but their boys, Bode and Hayden. In sum, Divide Creek Farm is the age-old agrarian dream, artistically reinvented, seriously updated for the 21st century and guided by a motto on a living room wall reading, “Live Well, Laugh Often, Love Much.”
