OUTDOOR KITCHEN
Most of us encounter food at the very end of its journey. It’s stacked neatly in grocery stores, polished and predictable, with a price tag. A red pepper, for instance, may look perfect, but you don’t know who grew it or what the land it came from looked like.
A nagging curiosity about everything missing from that story is what pulled Jesse Spaulding toward farming.
“I was looking at a very beautiful, perfect, mass-produced red pepper at the grocery store,” she said. “And I was like, where did this come from? What led this to me? The system of growing it. I didn’t even know what a pepper plant looked like at that point.”
Today, Jesse and her partner, Jake, are trying to answer those questions at Tomorro Farm, a small regenerative farm tucked in the hills of San Luis Obispo.
The farm is just entering its first real growing season. Beds are still being shaped, systems are still being tested, and ideas often arrive faster than the hours in the day. But its purpose is clear: to make food feel human again and to take care of the land in the process.
When Jesse and Jake first arrived on the property in February 2025, they didn’t rush to plant. They paused.
“Permaculture wisdom is that you don’t start anything on your land until it’s been a year of observation,” Jesse said. “And it’s been the hardest principle to listen to because you’re just so ready. You’ve been dreaming about this moment forever. You’re finally here and you’ve got to be patient.”
So, they watched. Fog gathered in the mornings. In winter, the sun slipped behind the ridge early, leaving the fields in shadow by late afternoon. A creek cut through the property, its banks uneven and visibly eroded.
Instead of fighting those conditions, they paid attention. Over months, they tracked how water moved during heavy rains, where wind hit hardest, and which areas stayed wet longest.
The intentional pause runs counter to industrial agriculture, and it says a lot about what Tomorro Farm is.
Jake and Jesse are first-generation farmers. There’s no inherited land here, no hand-me-down equipment, no generational playbook. Instead, they’re curious, patient, and have a shared belief that food is a relationship, not just a product.
“We use ‘regenerative’ as a catchall,” Jesse said. “It’s not a perfect definition. For us, it’s about intention, … about not draining a system and walking away.”
That intention shows up in small choices. Right now, about a quarter acre of the property is planted with cover crops. Legumes, oats, wheat, vetch, and phacelia blanket the beds, feeding the soil and holding moisture. Compost piles steam gently in the mornings. Native plants and herbs fill pollinator hedgerows.
Garlic went into the ground during a community workday, planted by friends who showed up with gloves and a willingness to learn alongside the farmers.
Tomorro Farm is already plugged into the San Luis Obispo community. Jesse and Jake currently collect green waste scraps from the SLO Food Co-op and a local restaurant called The Hungry Mother, hauling bins of vegetable trimmings back to the farm to be composted. Those scraps break down into nutrient-rich soil amendments that feed the crops growing there now.
It’s a small loop, but a meaningful one. Waste from the community becomes food for the land, and the land, in turn, will produce food meant to return to that same community.
In industrial agriculture, food often moves through long, invisible chains from field to processor to distributor to shelf. Those systems feed millions—but they make it easy to forget that food comes from land shaped by weather, water, and human hands.
“Direct-to-consumer is just sweet,” Jesse said. “I love that food system, meeting and having a relationship with the people that are eating the food I’m growing is, like, essential for me to have longevity in this.”
It’s not flashy. It’s not about maximizing yield. It’s about paying attention and nourishing both crop and land.
That mindset resonates with many young farmers, Jake explained, especially those stepping into agriculture without inherited systems or safety nets.
“It helps to not have a past experience that might bias or might just prevent you from trying a different style of agriculture that you didn’t grow up with,” Jake said.
Jake and Jesse talk about their work with joy. Jesse lights up when describing compost piles or seed-saving gatherings where stories are traded along with kernels of corn. Jake speaks about water with reverence, as something to be slowed, shared, and respected.
“This isn’t just a job,” Jesse said. “It’s a way of living in rhythm with something bigger.”
This article appears in Get Outside – Winter/Spring 2026.