Round Valley · Eastern Mendocino
About Us
Three generations on a ridge at the foot of the Yolla Bolly Wilderness.
The property began as wilderness — three generations ago, before any of it was cleared or cultivated. That is worth remembering when you hold one of our tomatoes: the ground it grew in was forest first, and the clearing happened slowly, with some attention paid to what was already there.
The first farming here was sylvafarming — heritage pigs working the forest understory, a practice old enough that it doesn't appear much in the agricultural literature anymore. The land shaped what was possible. What's possible has changed over the years, and now 1.5 acres of heirloom vegetables — tomatoes, peppers, salad greens, cabbage, carrots, herbs, two dozen varietals and counting — grow on ground that was once forest at the foot of the Yolla Bolly Wilderness in Eastern Mendocino.
We are permaculture-certified. We practice bio-intensive cultivation — no-till preparation, all-natural inputs, close attention to soil biology. The health of the surrounding forest is not incidental to what we do; it is the first condition of it. We have eaten this food ourselves for years, fed it to our children, and we know what it is.
Our work now is finding and perfecting the heirloom strains that want to grow in this particular convergence of valley fog, summer heat, and volcanic soil — and getting them to people in Mendocino and beyond who can taste the difference between a vegetable grown for shipment and one grown for flavor in the ground it belongs to.
Thirty years of stewardship on one piece of land teaches you things that don't transfer easily into bullet points. You learn what the soil wants. You learn which varieties hold through a late fog. You learn that the forest edge is not a boundary to push against but a system to read carefully and work within.
We are permaculture-certified and apply those principles to every decision about how this farm is designed — how water moves, where crops rotate, how the health of what surrounds us shapes what we plant and when. No-till, natural inputs, attention to the life beneath the surface that makes the life above it possible. No shortcuts that cost the land something it cannot afford to give.
Stewardship is a long job and a quiet one. These are the people doing it.
