About Flora Fauna Farm

Flora Fauna Farm is the result you get when two biologists get interested in farming. We have played with just about every farming idea out there, all of them centered around the idea of increasing the diversity of life on our farm. We got started on a two acre valley property in La Mesa, NM, but lack of water quickly made that unfeasible. As we moved further north, to another 2 acre valley property, the water became more plentiful but was still the number one issue for us growing into the future.

Growing vegetables, high density and high turnover in small spaces with plenty of intercropping, became our bread and butter for a couple of years. While this style of growing seemed very efficient in many ways, in other ways it certainly was not. Vegetables require high inputs, the most valuable of which being labor and water.

 As a consulting arborist, I became increasingly interested in trees and began integrating them into the farm system as much as possible. This lead to tree and shrubs being sold alongside veggies and duck eggs at the farm stand. A funny mix, but it worked well enough. 

When a second child was born, and the new vision and direction that comes with change, that was the final push to stop being a vegetable grower with a nursery on the side. Instead, we became a nursery with a few carefully selected farm products on the side. 

We are a small-scale nursery, hovering around 3/4 of an acre of productive nursery space (although this is mixed in with kids and dogs and ducks and orchard so it's hard to be exact). We have a particular focus on grafted Jujube trees, which we hold to be the most resilient and reliable fruit tree for New Mexico. This, alongside a diversity of fruiting trees and shrubs, useful native plants, and unique landscape plants curiously underrepresented in the urban canopy of Albuquerque, is the focus of Flora Fauna Farm.