He left the city for the foothills. He brought thousands of tomatoes with him.
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PINE, Colo. — A squat wooden sign at the end of Mangy Moose Trail neatly communicates the two halves of Tracy Weil.
The top reads “Pine Art Lodge.” Below, “Heirloom Tomato Farms.”
Weil, 58, with a salt and pepper horseshoe mustache and boyish grin, stands at the center of this creative compound in the Jefferson County foothills. He wears faded Carhartt overalls and an Arapahoe Basin trucker hat. To his left is a 1,000 square foot greenhouse with some 7,000 tomato seedlings inside. To his right, a garage-cum-artists studio whose metal exterior he painted in a style he describes as “Dr. Seuss meets van Gogh.”
“I knew I wanted to be an artist, but when I was younger I wasn’t really into the gardening thing at all,” said Weil, an artist, co-founder of the RiNo Arts District and one of the largest producers of organic tomatoes in the state.
“You just never know, right?”
Weil has cultivated heirloom tomato seeds for more than 20 years, but his market dramatically expanded during the days of COVID-19 quarantine, when many Americans turned to gardening as both a supply chain fail-safe and mood-stabilizing hobby.
Today, Weil’s Heirloom Tomato Farms empire continues to grow.
In the days leading up to spring, Weil finished transforming the old barn on his property into a two-story greenhouse. The structure, trimmed with corten steel well on its way to a rusty patina, is mostly windows with two broad garage doors.
More than 7,000 tomato seedlings are treated to a spa day inside — classical music plays over a bluetooth speaker in the misty, humid greenhouse. Weil uses a DIY pulley-system elevator to move trays of tomatoes between floors.
He hosted his final plant sale of the season May 31, marking the end of a months-long process that includes online and in-person sales, as well as selling tomato plants for $7 from his custom delivery truck, Dester (named after one of his favorite varieties).
Weil’s greenhouse in Pine is a notable upgrade from where he first started growing tomatoes with his business partner, Carolyne Janssen.
The two friends met nearly 20 years ago when Weil, who grew up in Aurora and moved to Denver after attending Fort Lewis College, worked as a server at City Spirit, a now-closed eclectic cafe and bookstore in Denver’s LoDo neighborhood.
Carolyn worked at the Auraria Media Center and had access to the campus’ science building.
“One of the things that Tracy and I shared was the love of tomatoes,” said Janssen, who lives in Capitol Hill. “And so we would get varieties that weren't sold anywhere and I could start them in the greenhouse there … because they weren't using it for anything else.”
The duo lost access to the science building’s greenhouse when Janssen left her job, but their operation continued thanks to savvy real estate investments and some plain luck.
Janssen noted casually at the end of our interview that prior to meeting Weil, she lived on a commune in West Virginia for “a bunch of years.” It was there that she met a man named Mike Sparrow, who Janssen’s husband refers to as her “commune boyfriend.” Janssen left the commune and moved back to Colorado, where her family has been for seven generations. Sparrow moved back to North Carolina.
“Unfortunately, he developed brain cancer and he died. And I got this letter in the mail saying that I had been named in his will,” Janssen said.
Sparrow left Janssen stock in a North Carolina energy company, money she used to turn her garage into a proper greenhouse, which is now named after Sparrow. She starts her seedlings in the greenhouse before transplanting them onto what she calls her “hellstrip,” the patch of soil between her sidewalk and the street.
Weil, meanwhile, had in 2000 purchased a run-down property overlooking the Platte in RiNo for about $150,000.
“There was a garage and a bunch of junk cars and the only thing growing there was like goatheads, and I looked at it and I said, ‘Tracy, this is a sh-thole,’” Janssen said.
The gamble paid off. Weil turned the half-acre property into his home and artist studio, and installed greenhouses for his budding tomato business. In 2022, he sold the lot to developer Bernard Hurley for a whopping $5.8 million.
Speaking to the press, Weil criticized the rapid development in Five Points and RiNo, even if he benefited financially.
“You just can’t purchase the spirit of a place, especially if you knock down most of the original structures that encompassed much of the character,” Weil told Colorado Community Media when the paper reported on the sale of his property.
Weil used the profit to purchase his place in Pine, a location he settled on because it was far from the near-constant development in the Denver metro.
“No one deserves that more than Tracy is all I can say,” Janssen said. “I mean, he's the nicest guy.”
Weil’s family were North Dakota wheat farmers. “I was always that city boy,” he said.
Weil co-founded the RiNo Arts District in 2005, operating on an $8,000 budget. Today, the RiNo Business Improvement District has a 2025 budget of $3.5 million.
As his art and advocacy work in RiNo expanded, so too did his agricultural interests. Weil acknowledged that there is something of an “imaginary line” between investing heavily in a hobby and a full-fledged commercial operation.
Heirloom Tomato Farms has grown exponentially since the early days of Weil’s partnership with Janssen, when the friends would transplant seedlings from the Auraria greenhouse on Cesar Chavez’s birthday. But Weil said their tomato-selling goals haven’t changed.
“It was really to pay our property tax. That was kind of the goal every year. And as property taxes kept going up, we had to make more plants,” Weil said with a big laugh.
Humans have been growing tomatoes for centuries, but the fruit’s popularity in Colorado, where Weil closely monitors heat, hail and surprise freezes in the spring, is relatively new.
Tomatoes are native to what is now South America; the name tomato is derived from the Nahuatl “tomatl.” Spanish colonizers brought the seeds to Europe, where they were incorporated into regional cuisine and became a mainstay in Italian and Mediterranean kitchens.
Tomatoes did not gain widespread popularity in the United States until the 19th century because many believed the plant was poisonous. But thanks in part to tomato lobbying by John Cook Bennett, a quack doctor who ran a medical diploma mill and touted the fruit as something of a cure-all, tomatoes became an American favorite. Campbell’s was selling condensed tomato soup by 1869.
Half a century later, home tomato gardening was celebrated as a form of civic duty. During World War I, the U.S. created the National War Garden Commission, which resulted in millions of “victory gardens” on public and private land that grew crops to send to Europe, which was running out of food. These wartime gardens were also widespread during World War II.
Weil brought up victory gardens when discussing the surge in sales he experienced during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“That’s kind of why we started doing the online [sales],” he said. “We couldn’t really do stuff in person, so we went completely online that first year. And that was hard. I got a thousand orders.”
Google search trends and public health data show that interest in gardening peaked as COVID-19 infections peaked. A team of researchers at the University of California, Davis, detailed the mental and physical benefits of gardening during COVID-19.
“People found new connections in the garden,” said Lucy Diekmann, an urban agriculture and food systems advisor who helped write the report. “It became a shared hobby as opposed to an individual one.”
But the same researchers learned that people struggled to find seeds or plants available for sale. Weil, meanwhile, had secured a PPP loan to hire staff to manage his online orders.
“It was like a boom, almost,” he said. “But now everybody wants to order online.” This year, his online preorders sold out in one hour.
Weil has a catalogue of thousands of seeds that he has sourced from specialty online retailers, as well as growers in places including Ukraine and Russia. He searches for seeds that do well in Colorado and recommends the ananas noir, or “black pineapple” variety.
“I’m still trying to convince people of the black ones. People are big red fans. They love the reds,” he said.
Weil usually only has to buy seeds once; after he successfully grows a plant, he’ll have more seeds than he knows what to do with. And because of that, he’s been able to avoid some of the supply chain issues brought on by pandemics, trade wars and international conflicts.
“It’s been a journey, but I think I’ve gotten to the place where I’m happy,” he said. “I think I’ve always been happy, though. I’m a happy kind of guy.”
Type of story: News
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
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