Wood-fired pizza comes to Evergreen

Evergreen has a new pizza place — though soon it will be much more than that.

Campfire Evergreen in the former Da Kind Soups building on Meadow Drive serves food cooked with, as owner Jared Leonard puts it, live fire. Currently, the restaurant is serving pizzas on its outdoor patio that are ready in about 10 minutes.

Soon, it will add barbecue and rotisserie chicken.

This is the 10th restaurant for Leonard and his wife Amanda, who have lived in Evergreen for four years.

“This is where I live, and I wanted to do something that was a passion project,” he said. “When I saw this building, I knew it was perfect to manage the size restaurant I do.”

He envisions a children’s play area in the back and more as the restaurant continues to develop.

He explained that cooking with live fire adds a character to the food that you don’t get with other cooking methods. The restaurant will use local vegetables when in season.

Evergreen has given the new eatery a warm welcome, Leonard said.

Campfire was named one of the “10 new Denver-area restaurants to start your summer wanderlust” by the Denver Post.

The restaurant is open from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. See the menu and more details at www.campfireevergreen.com.

It’s easy to compost with Purple Bucket

If you think composting food scraps is smelly and messy, Purple Bucket Compost in Bailey has news for you: It’s neither of those.

The family-run business that started in February is offering composting options for residents and businesses along the 285 Corridor. If you’re willing to drive to one of the two drop-off composting locations, anyone in the foothills is welcome to get involved.

Corey and Amber McCool have a backyard farm at their home in Bailey where they compost, particularly to get rid of the straw in their barn. Corey got the idea to expand the composting into a business.

“I get an idea and tend to run with it,” Corey said. “We had the support from our neighbors, and before we knew it, it had legs.”

Amber said she was apprehensive about starting the business, thinking it would be smelly and messy, but she’s been pleasantly surprised.

“Before we knew it, our whole family started doing it,” she said. “Now I’m into it. It’s been good.”

Their children, Declan, 12, and Olivia, 9, are part of the business — washing buckets and stirring the compost piles.

Purple Bucket offers two options: a delivery service or a self-service option at its locations at Kings Emporium in Conifer and at the Bailey Feed Store. The McCools plan to provide customers with some of the compost once it has “cooked,” as Corey put it.

So far, the service has collected 2,200 pounds of compost that was kept out of a landfill, a main goal for the McCools.

The list of acceptable items is narrow to keep critters out of the compost piles and to make the compost odorless, and the McCools provide lists of accepted and not accepted items. For example, meat, animal waste, dairy, fat, seeds and more are not allowed.

The buckets have airtight seals to ensure odors don’t get out.

Why purple buckets?

“Every other color we looked at had been used to represent something already,” Corey said. “Red for biohazard, orange for Home Depot, green for recycling, etc. Purple was readily available and didn’t represent anything, and it’s eye-catching sitting curbside. Then we named (the business) accordingly so no one would have to ask, `What’s that compost company with the purple buckets called?’”

The Nature Link offers
art, nature programs

What do you do when you have degrees in both ceramics and biological sciences?

You open The Nature Link, a combination of nature programs, art programs and nature/art programs for children and adults.

Owner Dina Baker, who might be familiar to some because she had worked at the Evergreen Audubon Nature Center, has been t these types of programs, but now she has a location in Kings Valley that has a pottery studio, general art studio and a gallery. The space has been open officially for a week.

“There’s a lot going on here,” she explained. “It’s a blending of my love of nature and art. I’m basically like a giant 5-year-old and doing all my favorite things.”

She takes children and adults along with her on her artistic/nature journeys, offering camps, nature walks, open studio time for adults, art classes, adult-child programming and more. She is searching for more instructors, so she can offer more classes.

The website, thenaturelink.com, lists the The Nature Link’s offerings.

“I’m starting with the basics and then building the programming,” she said.