Buena Vida Farm was Established in 1993 by MaryLou and Stephen Smith in Windsor Colorado

About Buena Vida Farm

The heart
MaryLou and Stephen Smith are the heart behind Buena Vida Farm. MaryLou likes to weed, Stephen likes to irrigate and both of them like to watch plants grow green. They get lots of help from Colorado State University students, low-income single moms, and Spanish speaking friends from Mexico, Bolivia, and Ecuador (which gives MaryLou the additional benefit of practicing her Spanish learned growing up in New Mexico. )

The homestead
In fact, New Mexico is at the root of this farm. Both Stephen and MaryLou are proud to be fifth generation New Mexicans—progeny of great grandmothers who homesteaded as widows in eastern New Mexico in the early 1900’s. Each of them widows with children, each migrating from Texas, Lora Hutcherson Miller and Josephine Lattimore Haynes worked their homesteads 20 years apart and 60 miles apart.

Stephen and MaryLou, with teenagers Matthew and Laurel, lived in the Buena Vida Farm barn for nine months in 1995 while their house was being born, uh, built. The house and barn were designed with help from Santa Fe design/builder Ron Smith, inspired by the rural New Mexico territorial houses MaryLou and Stephen grew up admiring, and featured in the book American Adobes: Rural Houses of Northern New Mexico by Beverley Spears. Anglos migrating to New Mexico about the time the railroad came to the west added pitched metal roofs and french provincial windows to the flat-roofed adobe casas inhabited by Spanish land grant owners. These multi-cultural architectural roots complement MaryLou’s love of multi-cultural children’s books, including her own, Grandmother’s Adobe Dollhouse, published in 1984 by New Mexico Magazine, now having sold 35,000 copies. (Stephen’s mother is the grandmother, and the architect of the dollhouse upon which the book is based.)

The food
If you ever hear about a contest for making a scumptious meal out of leftovers, give MaryLou a call. She could win the blue ribbon, probably for taste, and definitely for presentation. But ask her to cook from scratch using the finest ingredients and she scratches her head, unsure where to begin. Suppers at Buena Vida Farm are mostly a melange of vegetables grown in the summer garden (blanched and frozen for winter) and game harvested in the fall by Stephen. The antelope, deer, elk, and occasional pheasant and turkey are “hunt-with- dignity" Stephen’s contribution to a healthy family diet. The cast-iron skillets stacked on the rangetop are required equipment.

The art
The big truck garden irrigated by impulse sprinklers on each corner, specified by irrigation engineer Stephen , is a work of art on its own. But its “Three Sisters" scarecrows attract rather than detract crows (more likely magpies—MaryLou’s favorite bird) and folk art lovers. Freshly dressed each year with bright new scraps of fabric, the three sisters represent the corn, squash and beans which are said to have long sustained native peoples of North America.

Inside the house, much of the art is from the hands of son Matthew—a website artist who lives in South Carolina with his food and fabric artist wife Amy and their toddler sons—cardboard architects Brighton and Levi. Some of Matthew’s “found art" includes a dozen huge light bulbs hanging from the ceiling in MaryLou’s “writing atelier." Matthew salvaged them from the CSU intramural field the summer he worked for grounds maintenance. The twenty-five bucks a bulb MaryLou paid entrepreneurial Matthew helped finance his Habitat for Humanity trip to Kenya.

The best art on the place, though, was captured on film around 2000—the year Matthew the artist, bored of mowing the native grasses between the house and gate, began to carve out a design in the grass reminiscent of crop circles. Unfortunately—or fortunately as it turned out—the mower broke down mid-mowing. MaryLou and Stephen did not notice the art until it was captured a week later by a free-lance photographer taking aerial photos of the area farms in hopes of getting the owners to purchase his photos. Matthew’s “crop circles" mowing did not earn him any art awards at CSU, but it has brought smiles to many faces. Notice the broken down mower on the trailer on the other side of the barn, ready to be taken for service.

The farm
What kind of enterprise is Buena Vida Farm? Is it a real farm? A “lifestyle" venture?

We like to call it a breakeven kind of place where those who work it breakout of any traditional mode. No, it doesn’t put bread and butter on the table, at least not in the short-run, but it does pay out plenty of green to the folks we hire to help us run the place. “See those weeds, Maria Virginia? Just think of them as dollars!" In fact, MaryLou’s friend, Maria Virginia picked enough of those weeds the summer of 2007 that she is paying for college back in Otavalo, Ecuador—something that was financially out of her reach before. (Her very young son Yanni cried one Easter when they came for dinner and it was too early in the season to go out and pull weeds. “Work, mommy, work!" he cried.)

Our Trees

The blue spruce
Moving from the plains of New Mexico to the Front Range of Colorado spurred Stephen and MaryLou to spend summer weekends backpacking in the nearby mountains. Is that where they grew to love the blue spruce native to Colorado? Soon after they purchased the land on which Buena Vida Farm thrives, Stephen developed a business plan for replacing the hay historically raised on the property with rows of drip irrigated blue spruce. He loves to tell the story of MaryLou’s doubts turning to smiles when he brought her the check from the sale of the first block of trees. She reputedly asked “How soon can we take out the rest of this hay?”

The irrigation
Stephen is an agricultural engineer with degrees from New Mexico State University and Colorado State University. In 1975 he founded Aqua Engineering and built a reputation for applying agricultural irrigation water conserving design and management concepts to urban landscapes. Though his work spans three decades and the world (with projects like EuroDisney in Paris and weather station interrogation software for the City of Athens, Greece) he is just about as proud of the irrigation at Buena Vida Farm as he is of that still growing resume of lifework. With the help of two muscled college students Caleb and Travis, he recently dug a pond and installed a pump and filter to provide a pressurized alternative for drip irrigating the farm with non-potable water from his shares in the Louden Ditch. On this small scale the savings over irrigating with potable water from the domestic water provider is minimal, and the cost of the installation considerable, but “Hey—it’s the right thing to do!” And when you are an agricultural engineer specializing in irrigation, that’s what counts.

Our Produce

The vegetables
The vegetables at Buena Vida Farm give honor to Naomi Wells Smith—Stephen’s other grandmother. When as newlyweds MaryLou and Stephen would visit her and his grandfather Charles Albert Smith at their small farm in Clovis, she cooked every vegetable known to Texas—where she and Charlie, as she called him, both grew up. She laid them out in a colorful palette of dishes under a shade tree for a picnic lunch. Yellow squash, sweet potatoes, round red beets, buttery collard greens, black-eyed peas, nothing but the best for her company.

Daughter Laurel introduced MaryLou to heirloom vegetable seeds when they stayed at a bed and breakfast in Seattle the year they took the Greyhound bus with minimalist Laurel’s few things in tow to start her in college. There they got hooked on Roger Yepsen’s book A Celebration of Heirloom Vegetables: Growing and Cooking Old Time Varieties. It was an expensive book, but the next year she bought herself a copy with the birthday check sent from Stephen’s parents—Rex and LaVerne Smith, themselves flower gardeners of a grand urban oasis in Roswell, New Mexico.

The pumpkins and squash
Rouge Vif d’Etampes: “This beautiful, trim pumpkin takes its name from a French town just south of Paris,” writes Yepsen. It made its way to North American in 1883, and according to heirloom experts it has a minor folklore role as the pumpkin that served Cinderella as a coach. Whether food for folktales or for soups and pies, this flat deeply grooved and deep rouge-orange pumpkin causes plenty a double-take when displayed on a Thanksgiving table or on the outdoor portales surrounding the the New Mexico territorial style homestead at Buena Vida Farm. MaryLou saw her first Jarrahdale—a dusty blue, deeply ribbed winter squash at Windsor’s fancy Chimney Park Bistro a few years ago. She and Stephen planted an experimental crop of Jarrahdales and Rouge Vif d’Etampe between a couple of rows of blue spruce—an experiment yielding more than 500 specimens which MaryLou enjoyed selling at the local farmers’ market. As folks bought, they carried the handsome fruits with them, perfect advertising which lead other shoppers to the end booth where the pumpkins providing their own natural merchandising. There were almost as many photographers as pumpkin buyers.

The weeds
MaryLou’s crazy leaning toward the weeding chores surely comes from the influence of her daddy—James Alton Mohon—who grew cotton and alfalfa (and in later years green chiles) east of Roswell where MaryLou grew up. Oddly, weeding was her bane as a kid; it kept her from reading as much as she wanted. If she didn’t hide well enough in the house in the summertime, her dad would find her and send her out to “chop those weeds!” (Fortunately she was often rescued by her school teacher mother Josephine Collier Mohon who kept her supplied with books from the public library.) Now MaryLou keeps a copy of Weeds of the West handy right alongside her wildflower identification books.

The flowers
The flowers at Buena Vida Farm (mostly natives) give honor to Alice Myrl Miller Saylor Wade Rose—Stephen’s grandmother who outlived three husbands before she died at 93. Gran’s thumb was green, but her fingers were yellow, orange, purple and pink from all the flowers she grew. One year she gave Stephen the Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt hand-stitched by her mother-in-law, his Grandmother Wade, not to be confused with his Grandmother Smith—a woman whose avid quilting and chicken neck-ringing did not stop when she lost an arm in a 1930’s buggy accident.

Buena Vida Farm Photos