Articles About Shambhala Mountain Center
Salads and Solace at 8,000 Feet
Denver Post - June 18, 2004
By TED ROSE
Imagine serving 54,000 helpings of salad from your organic garden. Now imagine that your garden is just the size of a tennis court and sits at 8,000 feet.
For many years, Shambhala Mountain Center was simply a summertime tent city where a few hundred Buddhists gathered to meditate on this wild 600-acre parcel about an hour from Fort Collins.
Then, about five years ago, the center began an improbable project to cultivate the inaccessible land, to make it available to Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike, interested in learning about meditation and yoga. Shambhala Mountain built a few permanent structures, including an elaborate Buddhist shrine called a stupa, and offered a variety of programs to the public year-round.
That project is a success - more than 10,000 people visit each year - and the center has a new set of goals, including its ambitious horticultural one. The center wants to provide its residential community and thousands of visitors this summer with salad fixings grown in its high-altitude, organic garden.
"We can have a frost every month of the year," says a sighing Jim Tolstrup, Shambhala Mountain's land steward, its chief gardener and the man responsible for filling all those salad bowls.
Tolstrup's arrival at Shambhala Mountain three years ago heralded the beginning of the center's serious gardening effort. He brought decades of horticultural experience, including a stint as the chief gardener for the senior President Bush's estate in Kennebunkport, Maine.
But the rough environment has the final say in how and what Shambhala Mountain's garden will grow.
Tolstrup and his crew of eight seasonal volunteers use the heart of the summer growing season to plant vegetables that would typically be thought of as early-spring or winter crops in more temperate climates.
This month, the Shambhala Mountain garden is lined with kale, lettuce, spinach and chard.
Even these hardy crops need help in this harsh environment, so Tolstrup employs a variety of effective, low-tech solutions. The crops are draped with plastic row covers, preserving moisture and warmth during the cold mountain nights and providing shade during the hot days.
With limited water supplies, Shambhala Mountain uses drip lines for irrigation. "It's a lot easier for us than it was for the pioneers a hundred years ago," says Tolstrup.
The mission to produce salad is complicated by the center's superceding commitment to leave most of its land undeveloped. As a result, Shambhala Mountain's garden is compact and intense. Tolstrup has managed to squeeze about 46,000 plants in 21 varieties - about double what he planted last year - into the space.
A greenhouse next to the garden plot is home to tomatoes, basil and squash in the summer and a variety of herbs in the winter.
Tolstrup says the gardens try to grow crops that would be more expensive to purchase. "We've realized that growing a pound of potatoes has a different value than growing a pound of basil," says Tolstrup.
From a monetary perspective, however, the center would fare better by continuing to purchase vegetables from corporate vendors, says Shambhala Mountain's head chef, Marcella Friel, but that would miss the larger calculation.
"This organic garden creates immense value," says Friel. "The closer the relationship between the supplier and the consumer, the more food-secure you are. The food is more nutritional."
Tolstrup agrees. "We pick the food at 8 in the morning and eat it at noon," he says. "I think this food is medicine in this world where vegetables we normally eat have been picked weeks or months ago."
The garden is as much a teaching facility as a functional production facility.
One woman who worked at the center brought her brother down to the garden on a visit. "She pulled this big carrot out of the ground, and the brother was stunned," says Tolstrup. "He couldn't believe the carrot came out of the ground. More and more we have no direct connection to being fed from the earth with the sun and the elements. Hopefully, this garden can help provide that."
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