The Team
Peter S. Volz
Peter Volz grew up in the 1950’s in a small Ohio town. His grandmother, the neighbors and just about everybody in town gardened and grew vegetables and flowers. One of his first memories is making his next door neighbor’s large tomato patch into a "castle.&qut;
At the age of ten, Peter moved with his family to Laguna Beach, California, where the family garden featured avocado, tangerine and grapefruit trees, as well as year-round vegetables, a bamboo forest and abundant flowers.
In his early twenties Peter started an alfalfa sprout operation, with distribution up and down the West Coast. In the mid-70’s Peter grew vegetables in a large hobby garden at a Buddhist community in Mendocino County, California.
In 1977, Peter moved to Boulder, where he was intimidated for several years by the wild climate and challenging soils of the area. After some trial and error, he gardened for many years at the Boulder community gardens on Hawthorn Ave, in North Boulder.
After serving for nine years as the director for international education at Naropa University, Peter started Oxford Gardens in 2006.
Elizabeth Kriso
Liz Kriso grew up in Great Falls, Virginia. After completing a degree in psychology at Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she worked as a social worker in local homeless shelters.
Through this work, she became interested in food security issues, and started volunteering on local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farms. She became hooked on growing vegetables, and has since worked on small family farms in Pennsylvania, Florida and Colorado.
Liz is passionate about growing the most nutritious, flavorful and beautiful produce possible, and believes that the way to do this is by using farming practices that protect and nurture the soil and farm ecosystem.
One of her favorite aspects of her job is watching a farm visitor pull a carrot out of the ground in the field and take a bite. This close connection with the earth, which nourishes on many levels, is why Liz loves to be in the field.
Jared Ryan Hagood
Jared is a man of mystery. If you want to know more about him, you’ll have to ask him yourself.