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At the Mar Vista inn near Gualala, visitors can harvest and cook their own
meals and experience peace and tranquility in a cozy cottage
By MEG MCCONAHEY
PHOTOS CRISTA JEREMIASON
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
 Each day of their recent honeymoon, Paul Riley and Katie Petrucione engaged
in one of the more sensuous chores of everyday life: They cooked together, a
cooperative ritual of quality time spent quietly conversing over tempting
aromas.
Every afternoon the couple, toting an old-fashioned market basket, headed
down to a garden bursting with late summer ripeness and harvested the
makings of a meal. Whatever they happened to find inspired the menu.
There was fresh rosemary and chives for steak marinade. Salads of bitter
greens like arugula tossed with sorrel and vibrantly colored radicchio.
Mashed potatoes with sweet scallions. A bunch of sweet peas coiling up among
the vegetables in the garden made a fragrant flower arrangement by their
bed.
While other newlyweds indulge in room-service and Zagat-rated restaurant
meals capped by three-figure bills, this San Francisco couple chose to ease
into married life in a cozy cottage at Anchor Bay along the unhurried coast
of southern Mendocino County. Aside from a few splurges, like an authentic
Italian feast prepared by the physician-cook Luciano Zamboni at Victorian
Garden Inn up in Manchester, they mostly cooked in.
"We love to cook and just hang out," said Riley, an artist whose city
dwelling offers no room for vegetable gardening. "The process is as
important as the product. And the environment here is so beautiful and
laid-back."
It's a calculated simplicity that owners Tom and Renata Dorn have worked
hard to cultivate at Mar Vista, a bed-and-breakfast inn where breakfast is
do-it-yourself. A basket of still warm eggs, laid by the colorful Araucana
and black Australorp hens that freely roam among the buttercream yellow
cottages, is hung on a broom peg by each door in the morning. Riley used
them to whip up hearty French toast.
"People experience it on various levels," said Renata Dorn, who managed a
small San Francisco inn for The Four Seasons resorts and later the storied
Manka's Inverness Lodge before she and Tom - a management analyst and
auditor - bought and renovated the old Mar Vista resort four miles north of
Gualala five years ago. "But the idea of simplicity and driving down the
experience to very basic levels has actually turned the tables for some
couples. It's become a very intense experience. People talk about how they
the see their partner in a new way."
Pick-it-yourself
Many bed-and-breakfast inns boast pretty flower gardens, and some have
vegetable patches from which the cook can feed a common table. But Mar
Vista's community-style, pick-it-yourself and prepare-it-yourself garden is
unusual.
Overnight guests at Fetzer Vineyards' historic Valley Oaks in Hopland have
been allowed, informally, to take small quantities of fruits, vegetables or
herbs for cooking from several acres of gardens on the grounds. Three rooms
in the 19th-century carriage house have kitchens, as does the historic Haas
House that can be rented by families or larger groups and overlooks Fetzer's
big culinary garden. But lately, so many other people have inappropriately
filched quantities of food from the open gardens that it's created a
shortage for the winery's Valley Oaks Cafe, said head gardener Kate Frey. So
she suggests overnight guests inclined to cook ask permission first.
At Mar Vista, however, guests are encouraged to take as much as they can
eat. A cradle of baskets sits on the front porch of the office cabin and
clippers are at the ready in the garden. Although more than half of guests
do venture in, the garden still produces more than is consumed, so the Dorns
are considering setting up a highway farm stand.
Before they arrive, guests receive a list of seasonal goodies that will be
ready to pick and prepare. Renata keeps a few cookbooks and recipes on hand
but the timid are reminded that most veggies don't need to be dressed in
culinary finery. It's amazing what a little garlic and olive oil will do.
The Dorns were gardening novices when they first purchased the property,
which came with permits for up to 26 luxury hotel units. But the Dorns were
looking to live easy on the land. And Tom, who had begun studying
permaculture - a philosophy advocating sustainability, self-sufficiency and
ecological awareness in all aspects of life - was fascinated by the prospect
of putting ideas into action on his own land. And the idea of a communal
garden became a way to distinguish their place from other coastal inns.
"I'm a city guy," Tom Dorn said. "I know nothing about all this stuff and I
learn something old every day - because there's nothing new about anything
we're doing here. It's just all new to me."
Organic garden
The garden is organic, enriched with home-grown compost. Each cottage has a
little bin for guests to deposit scraps. Tom uses a method inspired by the
French intensive or "double dug" gardening in raised beds, which aims to
produce the greatest yield in the smallest space.
"One of the things they recommend is you create little garden mounds and
double dig the soil, aerate it out and then plant," he explained. "You turn
the soil over twice. It's bringing up the nutrients from down in the soil so
you don't have to fertilize as much. And because the soil is loose and
aerated you can plant things closer together."
The beds are built up with cinderblocks; in the holes Tom has planted
speciality things like strawberries. Irrigation water comes from a creek
that crosses that property and spills over a waterfall into the ocean on the
other side of the highway.
Dorn has found most crops except corn and tomatoes do well in the cooler
coastal climate. He keeps the garden in production year-round. In autumn and
early winter it will be full of things like fava beans, garlic, lettuces,
onions, peas, beets, broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, kale and leeks. Seeds
are kept and re-cultivated.
Riley said the whole experience swept him back to childhood.
"My father had a big vegetable garden," he recalled. "I had forgotten how
great it was to be able to just reach down in the earth and pick up a radish
and eat it - with the dirt still clinging to it."
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