Beauty Hangs out at Bayfield Gardens

Known as the Heart of the Pine River Valley, Bayfield, Colorado is an unlikely, but vital destination for summer gardeners. Locally owned Bayfield Gardens is the preeminent place to buy the ginormous hanging baskets you see gracing establishments along Main Street, in Durango, Farmington, and as far away as Santa Fe. But there's a catch. You have to reserve the flower baskets a year in advance. You're watching the Local News Network, brought to you by The Payroll Department and Serious Texas Bar-b-q. I'm Connor Shreve. For those lucky enough to have ordered custom baskets last fall, the wait is finally over.

Well, we start them in middle of March, and then we hold them until the first week of June if the customer wants us to, so that in this climate, in this area, it's really beneficial to be able to have somebody growing 'em for that extended period of time, so when you get them, you're past the frost, and you have a basket that's ready to go, and it looks beautiful. We also use only high-quality premium plants, and we also have some other secrets to our recipes that make them really nice and high quality.

Along with the hanging baskets and color bowls, Bayfield Gardens offers chubby vegetable plants, and a varied and beautiful selection of annuals and perennials. To better serve the walk-in buyer, Bayfield Garden opened later this year, to extend their selling season well into June.

This year we did expand to our greenhouse, just a little bit on the lower houses, specifically, so not the main area where the customers are at, but we have two greenhouses that are just for pre-order custom, and also for additional production. We expanded those a little bit in order to be able to produce more. We also have maxed out capacity in our main area. We opened up two weeks later, we opened up the 13th of April, opposed to the 1st of April, in an effort to have better inventory later on in the season, 'cause we're aware that customers are having to buy, take stuff in and out, because there's still frost. So we wanted to have better inventory into May, even early June, and to make it easier for the customer to buy something, plant it immediately, and have better success.

Zephaniah Lee took over the well-established business last year with his wife Tabetha. They have had some big shoes to fill.

So all over the area, Pagosa, Durango, Cortez, definitely Bayfield, Ignacio. We also get a lot of people from New Mexico, all the way, Albuquerque, Farmington, come up here just for this. We had a couple the other day come from Santa Fe. They make it a date, and they spend the night in Durango, and then they come here. So, we get people from all over.

But back to those superstar three-tiered flower baskets that tourists gush over every summer. There's a chance you could have your very own next summer.

We do have a pre-order custom program, and so there's some people who have large custom orders, and then there's also a lot of customers who have a pre-order, which we have baskets, and also containers, different sizes, that you can pre-order. We do that in late September, early October, and that would be for the following year. Right now, we do have a waiting list for that, but we take down everybody's information, we contact them in October, or again, late September, and we confirm, and if we have availability, we put on people who are on the waiting list.

Bayside closes when they sell out of plants, sometime in mid-June, so don't be late to the party. Learn more about this and other stories at durangolocal.news. Thanks for watching this edition of The Local News Network. I'm Connor Shreve.