About Our Farm

Milleflora Farm is a small farm located in the hills outside of Cazadero, CA, in Sonoma County. We grow heirloom vegetables for flavor and biodiversity, medicinal herbs for their reliable and safe support of health and wellbeing, and specialty cut flowers because they are beautiful and attract a fantastic array of wildlife to our farm.

Milleflora Farm is owned and operated by Dan Ginsburg and Demetra Markis. Dan is a natural builder with over 20 years experience in the construction trade, a glass artist, and a long-time gardener. He has been living in the coastal hills since 1999. Demetra is an acupuncturist and herbalist by profession, and founded Yerba Buena Community Acupuncture in San Francisco in 2010, which provided over 50,000 acupuncture treatments in five years. In 2015 she sold the clinic and relocated to the coastal hills with her daughter, Lily.

Demetra and Dan joined forces in 2018 and discovered they both shared a love of gardening and the bio-intensive farming practices promoted by John Jeavons of Ecology Action in Willits, CA. Together they decided to transform part of Dan’s pasture into a thriving garden.

In the winter of 2019, Demetra signed up for the renowned Floret Farm workshop, completing the program in 2020, and dedicating several beds toward a flower production trial. That summer and fall, Milleflora Farm joined the pop-up farmer’s market at Fort Ross Store, offering our first round of locally grown bouquets, heirloom produce, and bulk medicinal herbs.
In the spring of 2020, we applied to become Certified Naturally Grown producers and were thrilled to receive our certification. We love the CNG program because it is designed for farmers just like us: growers who use organic practices, provide products to our local communities, and desire to participate in a peer-to-peer model, sharing resources and best practices that make us all better farmers and producers.

How We Farm

We are proud of our farming practices! Our farming space is quite small, about 1/4 acre, but on it we grow over 100 different kinds of vegetables, herbs, and flowers. We use a gentle rotary plow to create new beds, which we amend with compost and organic amendments. We space beds and plants closely to encourage deep root growth and reduce weed competition, keeping the soil moist and cool and reducing the need for irrigation. We irrigate using drip lines to conserve water, and add mulch to keep the soil covered while plants grow. Once beds are built we keep them planted at all times either with our main food-producing or flowering crops or with nutrient-dense cover crops.

We are a no-till farm, believing that the less we disturb the soil, the healthier the soil microbiome will be. We leave roots in the ground to decompose when we clear finished crops, enriching the soil. We manage pests by companion planting, using row cover and netting to protect plants, and encouraging natural predators- we have seen everything from red-tailed hawks to bobcats to gopher snakes helping out in the garden! Our farm work is done by hand because it is so pleasurable and rewarding to work closely with the plants.

In addition to farming, we run a community grazing program to reduce wildfire risk and create a more resilient landscape. Our program serves our neighbors on Gualala Ranch off of Fort Ross Road, and you can learn more about it by visiting our Grazing page. We also grow extra garden starts every spring and fall which we make available to our newsletter subscribers via a pre-order form, as well as by plant sales.

About Our Farm name

We both love botanical Latin (definite plant nerds!) and are both people with a ton of varying interests: from blowing glass and propagating trees from seed (Dan), singing jazz and playing several instruments (Demetra), forest work and long, delicious dinners (both of us!). We also love growing a huge array of plants. So we wanted to come up with a botanical-esque name that reflected our lives, and invented our own word by joining mille (thousand, for the thousand things we do and grow) with flora (flowers, for their beauty and diversity).
Sign up for our Market List here!
We are so excited to share our bounty with you! When you sign up, we will send regular updates from the farm every Sunday and you’ll be the first to know when our weekly market opens this spring.