Pleasant View farm<\/a>, and on any given Saturday, her selection includes about 25 different kinds of hot peppers.<\/p>\n\u201cI love hot peppers, and I get carried away in the winter going through the catalogs,\u201d Rohwer explained.<\/p>\n
For the indecisive, she puts together variety packs of peppers based on their Scoville scale rating. The ghost and scorpion pepper in the spiciest variety pack, perhaps aptly known as the daredevil pack, are rated between 900,000 and 1.5 million on the Scoville scale. As a comparison, a jalape\u00f1o is between 5,000 and 10,000 on the scale.<\/p>\n
The heat of the peppers varies annually, and this year\u2019s harvest has been unpredictable, with some peppers coming in mild and others tending to be more spicy. \u201cThe peppers are all over the place,\u201d Rohwer said.<\/p>\n
For the last few weekends of the farmers market and during the winter market at the Smiley Building, she brings in smoked hot peppers. Smoking cools down peppers\u2019 heat and keeps them on the market when they would otherwise be unavailable from local growers.<\/p>\n
For those looking for a more mild and sweeter taste, she also offers unusual bell peppers, such as purple and chocolate.<\/p>\n
In addition to peppers, Rohwer\u2019s fall offerings include a wide variety of squash, corn, onions, sweet potatoes and other fall vegetables.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople get excited about the unique varieties,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Rohwer has been in agriculture her entire career, but in 2005, she decided she wanted to work for herself. Her mom, Judy, joined her in the endeavor.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe started off small,\u201d Rohwer said. \u201cI sold beats and carrots off the tailgate of our truck down at the Cortez market.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2008, the two officially launched their business, and since then, Heidi\u2019s sister, Angela, has joined them.<\/p>\n
The family had always planted a half-acre garden on their property in Pleasant View, but after forming a business, they put in high tunnels and unheated greenhouses to raise cold-weather crops, such as lettuce, in the winter. In the summer, they\u2019ve experimented with tropical crops like jicama.<\/p>\n
They also plowed under seven acres of hay and added it to their garden patch, planting apple trees, berries, a vineyard and asparagus.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was kind of intimidating,\u201d Rohwer said.<\/p>\n
The apple trees are just now getting old enough to produce, and she looks forward to adding them to her offerings. They also raise lambs, pigs and chickens.<\/p>\n
After nine years in business, Rohwer still finds a sense of accomplishment and fun in bringing a complete harvest to market.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou might not make a killing or extremely good money, but you really eat really well,\u201d she said with a laugh.<\/p>\n
mshinn@durangoherald.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Variety truly the spice of life for Rohwer\u2019s Farm of Pleasant View<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":103186,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5843],"tags":[21,1934,438,13],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-103185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-living","tag-cortez","tag-farmers-market","tag-food","tag-frontpage-lead"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103185\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103185"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=103185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}