LINK INTERNSHIP INTERVIEW WITH KATRINA BLAIR This was an interview with Katrina Blair, the owner of Turtle Lake Refuge, and questions regarding her job, life, and beliefs.
Me: What are your main responsibilities for Turtle Lake Refuge? Katrina: (Laughs) What a question! Well, I do a little of everything. However, right now my absolute...like the overview is keeping us dialed like micro-green planting and soil. Composting hauling and teaching. Sometimes I do lunches but I don't do them all the time. Training people, working at the farm, paying checks, outreach like showing up at the Farmer's Market booth, so it's a little bit of everything. What a great question!
Me: What was one of your biggest mistakes when getting Turtle Lake Refuge together? Katrina: I drove too fast to get to this catering job and broke all the dishes. And they were my granddad's dishes, it was so terrible! I had packed them in the car and I was feeling late and driving on a dirt road and I was driving too fast. That was one of my biggest mistakes!
Me: When you were starting your business, what was the most challenging? Katrina: I think in the beginning it was challenging because I made it all up in my head. It's like, "Oh Turtle Lake Refuge! I'll come up with this name and just start doing this thing, and nobody knows anything...is what kind of felt like, are we fake or are we real?" And then after time when it's become real and people are like, "Oh yeah! Of course!" But in the beginning it was real challenging to hold true to this vision that didn't exactly exist yet.
Me: Was it challenging like, getting the house, or..? Katrina: No, it was already here because my mom managed the house. So that came easy. I think the challenge was also...like we wanted to protect this land. This 60 acres of land. And that was really challenging because some of the neighbors felt threatened. Our ownership intention and their private intention was different in the beginning. Like, "we wanna preserve this land even though we don't know what it looks like yet!" And that was threatening them. So that was a challenge!
Me: Are you talking about the garden or? Katrina: No, originally there is a reason why we have the name, "Turtle Lake Refuge". It's because there were 60 acres of land for sale and that ended up being purchased by a neighbor and privately put 47 acres into a conservation easement so it would be protected. We didn't buy that land but we were raising money to buy that land when we first started but it was like 500,000 dollars. We didn't raise that much money. But it worked anyway, it got protected. So our mission is beyond one piece of land, it's wild lands everywhere and Earth so we kept going.
Me: Oh, okay. Sweet! So you also try to preserve lands or? Katrina: Yep. Yep! I protect wild lands
Me: What's your favorite thing to do at Turtle Lake Refuge? Katrina: I do like emptying compost. (Laughs) And bringing it back. I love teaching. Definitely that's probably my favoritest thing I love-working with interested people...teaching them about the wild plants.
Me: What training did you do in order to establish Turtle Lake Refuge? Katrina: I would say my most valuable training was all the time I spent in the woods. All the time with just communicating with the plants and usually it's solo time. But then I also benefited from graduate school because I got a degree in biology but I got a Master's in holistic health education. So, that was useful! And just people skills training. I guess just years of teaching and working with people pays off.
Me: What steps did you take to get into your current position? Katrina: Hmm, well I just had to start it! Like it didn't exist without me just saying, "Oh! There's a need for our town to eat more wild foods and be aware of how important wild plants are." So, I think the steps were going for it and not really thinking where I was going?
Me: I know college helped a little bit. So, (thinks for a second) you have so many things going on and I'm trying to figure out how you managed to do it all. So, before you started off where did you...You already had the house managed and in order to buy the farm you had to buy acres? Katrina: Mhm, two.
Me: Yeah, so I guess like, did you have to buy products to start growing the micro-greens? Katrina: You know, I think it started by my mom and aunt using this as the Rocky Mountain Retreat as a healing center. So I learned how to grow these micro-greens because I worked for them. (And I was in high school) And I also did these recipes and then my aunt got cancer and I went with this healing retreat with them for a couple of weeks. I learned about that program and learned what she was doing. She got rid of her cancer. But then she died. And I actually thought that I was gonna go after graduate school to help my mom do the retreat but then it ended up not turning out that way. Turtle Lake started instead. So, in a way it just had a different nature. Instead of people just coming to study for ten to eleven days to go away, we just started building a community here and growing it.
Me: How long have you've been working here and starting Turtle Lake? Katrina: So, I started it as a concept in 1997. But then the next year in 1998, I came back to graduate school and that's when I started serving lunches on that yellow bicycle at the Smiley building. I sold cat tail cookies, apple juice on dry
ice, you had to reach in the cobwebs to get it! Then the next Tuesday, I just
started doing lunches. And did that for a whole year. And then decided to come and serve lunch here.