{"id":25245,"date":"2024-10-20T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-20T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/farmers-market-los-miramontes-grows-lavender-and-more-in-cortez\/"},"modified":"2026-03-30T23:13:30","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T05:13:30","slug":"farmers-market-los-miramontes-grows-lavender-and-more-in-cortez","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/farmers-market-los-miramontes-grows-lavender-and-more-in-cortez\/","title":{"rendered":"Farmers Market: Los Miramontes grows lavender and more in Cortez"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Aisha
Aisha and Jeremy Bryant of Los Miramontes Lavender Farm sell lavender-based culinary, cleaning and beauty products at the Durango Farmers Market. (Nick Gonzales\/Durango Herald)<\/span>Nick Gonzales<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Los Miramontes Lavender Farm naturally revolves around the plant in its name, but produces a variety of culinary and cosmetic products.<\/p>\n

Jeremy Bryant said he and his wife, Aisha Bryant, used to grow herbs and vegetables when they lived in Aztec, and sold them at farmers markets along with beauty products made by his mother, Susanne Bryant.<\/p>\n

As the business expanded, the couple eventually relocated to Cortez in 2019 and began farming lavender in 2020.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a good cash crop that can survive in our area,\u201d he said. \u201cBasically, I just wanted to grow a crop that could survive and not have to replant it every year.\u201d<\/p>\n

These days, the farm\u2019s lavender products fall into three categories: culinary, cosmetics and cleaning supplies, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cLavender is a very good cleaner,\u201d Jeremy said. \u201cIt\u2019s where the name actually comes from \u2013 in Latin, \u2018lavare\u2019 is \u2018to clean.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

On the culinary lavender side, Los Miramontes sells various teas; honey made by Harris Bees, which usually has several hives on the Bryant farm; and black cherry and peach jams made with either the farm\u2019s own Elberta peaches or peaches from Palisade, he said.<\/p>\n

The Bryants also use the lavender to make spices and other flavor enhancers.<\/p>\n

\u201cLavender, when you use it for cooking, you don\u2019t want it necessarily to be the flavor, you want it to be an enhancer,\u201d Jeremy said. \u201cSo you would use it like you would use salt, where a little goes a long way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Los Miramontes\u2019 lavender-based flavor enhancers include organic salts and sugars, a simple syrup, a culinary-grade oil and a lavender lemon pepper.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe actually use real lemon rind, instead of citric acid, and we dehydrate our own bell peppers,\u201d Aisha said.<\/p>\n

The farm\u2019s website, losmiramonteslavenderfarm.com<\/a>, has recipes that use lavender, such as Mango Bacon Shrimp, Lavender Apple pie and cocktails and mocktails. Before he got into farming, Jeremy said his background was culinary.<\/p>\n

On the beauty product side of its business, Los Miramontes sells lotions, body butters, sugar scrubs, beard oils, mists, sprays, facial toners, milk baths, chapsticks, soaps, insect repellent and sunburn relief.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can have a full skin regimen out of our products if you truly wished,\u201d Jeremy said. \u201cAnd then you can come back with the lotion and body butter and moisturize the skin.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aisha said the farm\u2019s CBD products have been a good asset to the business.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur CBD is really high grade,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s really helped people with neuropathy and things that are really severe. We\u2019re really proud of our massage oil and lavender body butter CBDs.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to the plants, Los Miramontes raises chickens and alpacas. The Bryants sell the eggs of the former and hats knitted out of fiber from the latter, Jeremy said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe make everything ourselves,\u201d he said. \u201cWe do it all by hand. It\u2019s a slow, rough process, but we get through it.\u201d<\/p>\n

ngonzales@durangoherald.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

family produces culinary, beauty and cleaning products featuring the purple plant<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25246,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[21,1934,1587,438,28],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-25245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-cortez","tag-farmers-market","tag-farms","tag-food","tag-headlines"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25245","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=25245"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78855,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25245\/revisions\/78855"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25245"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=25245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}