The farm sits at the end of an unmarked gravel drive between Petaluma and the coast, on land that until 2018 was a horse paddock. There is no sign at the road. The proprietors do not want one.
Maren Vasquez and her husband Pete Loring bought the three acres in 2019 with the proceeds of selling a restaurant in Oakland that Vasquez had cooked at for eleven years. The plan was to grow vegetables for two restaurants in Petaluma and a Saturday farm stand at the property.
The plan has held, mostly. The restaurants are now three, including a small wood-fired place in Sebastopol that takes the bulk of Vasquez's tomato crop in August. The farm stand operates on Saturdays from May through October.
On the morning of the visit, in early May, Loring is harvesting the first of the season's anemones from a forty-foot row of Anemone coronaria De Caen mix that he planted in October. The flowers are cut at first colour, before the petals fully open, because they last longer in the vase that way.
He cuts perhaps two hundred stems in an hour, working from the bottom of the row to the top, using a pair of stainless-steel snips that he keeps in a hip holster. The stems go directly into a black plastic bucket of cool water that he carries from row to row.
Loring is fifty-one and trained as a landscape architect. He left the profession in 2015 and worked for four years at a wholesale flower farm in Half Moon Bay before he and Vasquez bought the Petaluma property. He grows the cut flowers. Vasquez grows the vegetables.
The vegetable beds are at the back of the property, on the slight slope that runs down toward a seasonal creek. There are twenty-three beds, each fifty feet long and thirty inches wide, separated by woodchip paths.
Vasquez uses no machinery in the beds. The soil was broken once, in 2019, with a small rotary tiller borrowed from a neighbour. Since then she has worked it by hand with a broadfork and a wheel hoe. The broadfork is a Meadow Creature, manufactured in Washington State, that she bought new in 2019 and has had re-handled twice.
Asked about the no-till commitment, Vasquez says she is not a purist about it, but the soil has gotten better every year and she sees no reason to stop. The organic matter on the most recent soil test, in March 2025, came back at eight point two percent. The starting figure in 2019 was three point one.
She credits cover crops and composted horse manure from a neighbour's barn. The cover crops are a winter mix of fava beans, oats, and crimson clover, sown in early October and rolled flat in late March. She does not turn the cover crop under. She lets it die in place under a layer of compost and plants through it.
The morning of the visit she is transplanting tomato seedlings into the second of three beds dedicated to tomatoes this season. The varieties are mostly heirlooms: Cherokee Purple, Aunt Ruby's German Green, a yellow paste called Banana Legs, and a small red called Stupice that she has been growing from saved seed for six years.
Vasquez saves all her own tomato seed. She does not grow hybrids. The reasoning is partly economic, partly aesthetic. The seeds she saves are adapted, after six seasons, to her soil, her late-spring fog, and the particular pest pressure of her property.
The pest pressure includes gophers, deer, wild turkeys, and a single resident bobcat that takes one or two chickens a year. The chickens, of which there are eleven, live in a movable coop that Loring rotates through the cut-flower rows after harvest.
By eleven the morning's harvest is done. Loring has cut roughly six hundred stems of anemone, some ranunculus, a small bucket of early sweet pea, and a flat of the first calendula. Vasquez has planted out forty tomatoes and weeded a row of bok choi.
They take coffee on the back porch. The house is small, two bedrooms, built in 1947 and unrenovated except for the kitchen, which Vasquez gutted in 2020. The coffee is from a small roaster in Petaluma. They drink it black.
The conversation turns, as visitors' conversations on small farms tend to, to the question of money. The farm grossed roughly ninety-six thousand dollars in 2024, of which perhaps twenty-two thousand was profit after expenses but before either of them paid themselves. Loring works two days a week as a consulting landscape architect. Vasquez teaches a knife-skills class one evening a month at a culinary school in Santa Rosa.
Neither of them describes the arrangement as ideal. Neither describes it as a hardship. Vasquez says that she cooked in a kitchen for eleven years and the only thing she misses is the camaraderie, which she has partly replaced with the Saturday stand.
The Saturday stand opens at nine and closes when the produce runs out, usually by one. Regular customers, she says, are perhaps eighty households. About thirty of those show up every week. The rest cycle through.
The seed-saving room is at the back of a small barn near the chicken coop. The room is unheated, north-facing, and holds perhaps four hundred labelled jars on shelves that Loring built from salvaged Douglas fir. The labels are written in pencil on masking tape, year and variety.
Vasquez pulls down a jar at random. Banana Legs, 2024. It contains roughly two tablespoons of seed, enough for her own planting and trade with perhaps eight other small growers in the county.
On the way out the visitor stops at the farm stand, which is being set up by a young woman named Cleo who works Saturdays in exchange for vegetables and a small stipend. The stand is a folding table under a canvas awning. There is no card reader. Cash and Venmo only.
The drive back to Petaluma passes two larger farms whose fields run to the road, each with a permanent sign and a website. Both of them are good farms. Neither is the farm at the end of the unmarked drive.