"Visit Mesa Limitless"

Mesa is a city located about 20 miles (32 km) east of Phoenix with a population of about half a million. Though it's a city of it's own technically, the whole Greater Phoenix area melts together and it is huge and spread out! Only today we drove 105 mi. just to get to few different points on the so-called "Fresh Foody Trail", which is the main focus of our visit.

Nobody would really expect farms, citrus, peach and olive plantations, veggie gardens and wineries in this urban area. To support family farms and family-owned restaurants and other places in and around Mesa, which are providing and using a bounty of seasonal goods year-round, and, to promote them to visitors were main goals by creating this Foodie Trail.






Our first stop this morning for a delicious breakfast-meeting with Visit Mesa was Queen Creek Olive Mill Arizona’s only family-owned and operated working olive mill and farm. Olives are grown and pressed for the production of high quality extra virgin olive oil. Also, a lot oils are infused with natural other ingredients, like lemon oil, orange or rosmary, and there are fancy vinegars as well. The shop and café, all in one building, carry produce of different other producers in the area, like honey, flour or baking goods.

Schnepf Farms offers "Agritainment", entertainment for everybody in different implementations. As a fourth-generation working family farm it is mostly known for its many events year-round and its organic U-PICK garden with a selection of seasonal produce. Especially popular are the peaches (right now in bloom, see pic). Also, one of the owners renovated old Airstream RVs, which can be booked for overnight stays at The Cozy Peach (pic below).

Horseshoe Park and Equestrian Center, our next stop, is a large equestrian event center and we were fortunate: extra for us, they had set up a Cowboy Mountain Shooting presentation with participants of the competition taking place on the next weekend. What a treat! Have only seen this sport on TV before, it's to some degree similar to Barrel Racing, just with shooting involved.

Agritopia, in neighboring Gilbert/AZ, is the utopic brainchild of a guy by name Jim Johnston. Where Joe’s Farm Grill, a ‘60s-era diner, is situated today, there was originally the homestead of the Reber Family (1927). In 1960, Jim and his wife purchased the farm and built a home. The Johnstons operated the florishing farm, and by the late 1990s the vision of "Agritopia" was born. Collaborating with a land planner, landscape architects, the Town of Gilbert, and community developers they came up with a community surrounding urban farmland, a place where people live, work, eat, shop, create, and come together. (Organic) farming still is the backbone of Agritopia. Lots of different veggies and fruit are being grown and sold in the farm store, on farmers markets and to restaurants throughout Greater Phoenix. Also, there is a community garden (pic below), where we chatted with one of the garden owners, and a chicken coop in the center, a coffee shop and Barnone, a craftsman community including Garage-East micro-winery (had a tasting there, on pic), 12 West Brewing, restaurants, retail and more. For lunch we enjoyed great BBQ at Joe's - the portion on the pic was for one person!

By the way: Arizona is up & coming in the American wine industry (Garage-East Winery and one of the owners on the photo). Grapes mostly come from southern AZ, the Sonoita or Wilcox region. And, they got good breweries in the meantime, too. After our Agritopia tour and after a quick stop at the Outlet Center at Chandler ("quick" here, in general, means like a 10-20 mi drive and 1/2 hour of time in dense traffic), we stopped by at Beer Research Institute (what a name!) with at least half a dozen of different IPAs (also a hazy, a dark and a red IPA).

Then we drove through downtown Mesa and back to the hotel with a stop at closeby Riverview Park (pic below).