Get to Know: Kelly and Evan Mimier of Forevergreen Farm
The Forevergreen Farm crew. Left to right: K’lee Garcia, Kelly Mimier, Evan Mimier.
Walking through Kelly and Evan Mimier’s front door in south Wellington feels no different than entering the quintessential suburban home: bright, cozy, spacious, welcoming. But a trip down their staircase invites you into another world, a small ecosystem of tiny edible flora radiating vivid greens, reds, and purples underneath the intense glow of LEDs.
This is home to Forevergreen Farm. Founded two years ago in the midst of a pandemic, the Mimier’s meticulous care, logistical intellect, and deep appreciation of relationships within the community have transformed a side hustle into one of Colorado’s most popular microgreen farms. Accompanied by K’lee Garcia, a Horticulture student at CSU, this small but mighty team of three supply homes and restaurants from “FoCo to BoCo” with these versatile, decadent, and delicious nutrient bombs.
This Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Austin Lammers: To start off, give me some backstory on how Forevergreen came to fruition.
Kelly Mimier: 10 years ago, when we moved into this house, we began micro-farming in our backyard using traditional farming methods. Our families are urban and we grew up in bigger cities, so we have no grandma that taught us how to grow tomatoes or anything like that – we did it ourselves with books, YouTube videos, etc. Every year grew and grew and grew, and for six years it was great. But then, for two consecutive years, we had this pellet hail that shredded everything in our backyard. We’d spend hundreds of dollars on these plants, and I’d watch from the living room as a 10-minute storm would come through and destroy everything that we've been working on for six months. We love incorporating everything that we grow into our diet – we grow enough tomatoes to have tomato sauce for the entire year – and though it’s a hobby, it’s part of our lifestyle, too. So after the second time, we were like ‘We have to learn how to do this indoors, even if we’re just growing seeds in the window, just to have something.’
That year, we started growing microgreens for ourselves and discovered that they're super nutrient-dense. For example, there are four to 100 times more nutrients in broccoli micro-grains than in traditionally farmed broccoli. Once we learned about the nutrition benefits, we put them on everything we ate – you can tell by our Instagram that all of our meals are covered in microgreens [laughs].
Over time we got our methods down, and we were like ‘we should do the farmers market on Saturday,’ not even intending to do anything beyond a side hustle. At the time, Evan was working construction and I was working at UC Health, so when we signed up we wondered if they’d even accept us among the others who’d been doing it much, much longer.
But they did! That was 2020 – the same year we founded our LLC – so COVID happened, but we rolled with the punches and developed a great customer base. It blew up so fast. I think it was a combination of people caring about their health during COVID and restaurants trying to get people back in. We were able to gradually scale to accommodate all the customers and it’s kept growing from there. Totally organic growth. Like, we did not envision ourselves quitting our jobs, which is what we did six months ago. That was not a part of the plan.
AL: Take me through those couple weeks before and after you quit your jobs. What were you guys feeling?
KM: I was working from home throughout the pandemic, which allowed us to do the Saturday market, to water everything in the morning, to get deliveries made in the afternoon, all that. When they told us everyone had to come back to the office, I was like ‘I can’t, I can’t do it.’ This thing had grown too big. So I quit in September, and shortly after that, the restaurants started bulking up again. Our plan was for Evan to keep working construction, but by October, we were like, ‘You gotta quit too! We need more time here!’
I'm still adjusting to it mentally because, you know, I'm the first female in my family to go to college. It was really difficult to give up my college education and career. I was working in medical education and before that, I was a teacher. So it was a big leap to leave all that to go work at a farmers market.
AL: Looks like the leap of faith paid off. How many trays are you dishing out per week?
KM: About 84 right now. And we anticipate this summer to be insane. We've already been told by some of our big buyers that this is the calm before the storm.
AL: From your microgreen varieties, do you have staples and seasonals?
KM: For home delivery folks, the mixed variety is super popular. It's bright and colorful and cruciferous: broccoli, cabbage, kale, and sometimes Kohlrabi. You're getting four different vegetables in the blend and a lot of different micronutrients. We always have that one. The radish and the peas are super popular. They're our bigger varieties. Amaranth is popular because people think it's so pretty, but it has a real earthy, beet-like taste, so we don't sell a ton of it because it's more of an acquired taste.
AL: How often do you experiment with different varieties?
KM: We'll look at our seed providers, which are out of Colorado and Utah, and we'll go over everything. Not every seed works in our system. We’ve tried flax, but it didn’t work. We grow amaranth because beets are so challenging. So we’ll buy small things just to try. Like I’m trying Chia micro grains next because they’re high in Omega-3s, which are important in the diet. We’re always rotating, but it's really based on demand. People will say, ‘Oh, I had this green at a restaurant and I want to try it again.’ And we're like, ‘Well, that sounds like a great idea. Let's try it!’
AL: What's your delivery ratio between home delivery and restaurants?
KM: It's changed so much because restaurants recently reopened and people are dining out more. At one point, it was 50/50. But I would say it's now leaning more towards restaurants. Evan goes out and visits a lot of kitchens and has a lot of connections in the restaurant industry here, so that segment’s growing for us right now.
AL: What’s your radius for deliveries?
KM: The I-25 corridor and then over to Boulder. We say ‘Wellington to Westminster,’ but because not everyone knows where Wellington is, we’ve shortened it to ‘FoCo to BoCo’. We’ve looked at expanding closer to Denver, but our biggest hesitation is losing the personal touch from Evan making deliveries. We could hire a bunch of folks to drive delivery trucks and drop stuff off, but we take pride in our relationships with the chefs and our customers. We want to be the ones showing up with holiday cards. We could try to reach Denver – we go down like every week for Rockies games – but we’d rather grow in our space and stay in our lane.
AL: How do you go from learning to micro-farm via YouTube to having your greens featured in prominent local restaurants like Little?
Evan Mimier: To piggyback off what you were saying earlier about consumers appreciating local products – the same is true for chefs and restaurant owners. They’ll pay more for a consistent, high-quality local product compared to commercial microgreens off the Shamrock truck that are inconsistent in quality. We do business with several chefs that tell me that they want to buy everything in their restaurant locally, but it's not available like that, especially because of seasonality. It’s the farm-to-table concept. It’s advertising local products. It’s the story behind where their food is coming from. That matters to them.
AL: Since your introduction two years ago, have you seen changes in our local food scene?
EM: As far as restaurants go, it's booming, it's rich, and it’s growing. People desire good food and a good experience. Fort Collins’ food scene has really elevated. Boulder’s was already great and is continuing to blossom. The restaurant community is tight-knit, and while they all may be buddies, they’re still in competition with each other and are looking for an edge, figuring out how to have a nicer plate.
These chefs are artists. They take pride in not just the deliciousness of their meals, but the beauty in the presentation. We have a lot of respect for everybody in the kitchens and what they’re doing to create these pieces of art on their plates, because it’s part of the experience. It’s very dynamic. It’s very fluid. Nothing ever stays the same.
KM: It’s funny having the two channels because the chefs are using it for such a different purpose than our home subscribers, who are putting it on mac n’ cheese for their four-year-old. Evan will get photos of these crazy, mouthwatering dishes from the chefs. Then I’ll get a text: ‘hey, we got a delivery pizza and put microgreens on it – two thumbs up!’
AL: As far as space goes, are you staying put for the time being or seeking something larger?
KM: Wellington has a few commercial spaces we’ve explored, but that creates extra HVAC requirements, more energy use, a new water bill, etc. You can think about this from an economic or an energy standpoint. Economically, we could pay two water bills or just pay one. Environmentally, we have lights here anyway that we use pretty efficiently, all powered by solar.
I feel like people have a hard time understanding our desire to keep it here. ‘Don't you want to be like some big, 400,000-acre farm? Don't you want to scale up that way?’ We don’t want to limit our reach, but it's just about keeping it green. If we can do it all here, then why take it elsewhere?
K’lee Garcia: You’d be counting extra energy, water usage, and driving to another facility versus just walking down your stairs. And if something happens, you’re right here at home base to fix it.
KM: Right. It’s about efficiency at the end of the day. This space is heated for comfortability because it’s a home. So it's always, 65 to 80 degrees because people live here, you know what I mean? To just go and heat some random building wouldn’t be as efficient.
EM: Also, running an operation at that size becomes a job. There’s no real connection to what you're doing or the people in your community. You're just working a job. I would just be seeding and harvesting and doing whatever and pushing it out the door. That’s just a job. And I don't want another job.
AL: Anything else you’d like to add or expand on?
KM: A lot of people think that farming requires some massive 100-foot-long greenhouse, but really people can and should do so much with the space that they have. Even if you’re renting, you can grow lots of different stuff in the space that you have, and this is just an example of how urban farming decreases your environmental footprint while producing something you can enjoy.
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