With more whimsey than strategy, two professional women from San Francisco buy a rickety 13-acre farm at Fiddletown in Amador County.

They haven’t much experience at digging soil, but the farm includes a scattering of pomegranate, apricot, walnut, olive, peach and plum trees, a plot of vegetables, a few vines.

They round up books on horticulture, buy the requisite pickup truck, stock the barn with weed whacker and tractor.

Early on, they work the farm only on weekends and during vacations. Gradually, they take up permanent residence on the site. They learn about black-widow spiders, rattlesnakes, poison oak.

And they become acquainted with their neighbors, and their neighbors with them, not always amicably.

One of the two, Mara Feeney, an environmental consultant specializing in socioeconomic analyses of complex developments, keeps a journal and writes stories of the couple’s evolution from city folk to country folk.

Mara Feeney

And now she has pulled together those writings into a book, “Estate Grown: Planting Roots in Fiddletown” (Gaby Press, 372 pages, $18.49).

Her chronicle is part easy-loping memoir and part helpful manual for anyone who has dreamed of moving from city to hinterland to take up farming.

Their odyssey began in the early 1990s when with dinner in a San Francisco restaurant they ordered a bottle of Zinfandel that turned out to have been made by Bill Easton in Amador County’s Shenandoah Valley.

The wine, which they rather liked, prompted them to start exploring Amador County, unsure whether they would buy a weekend retreat, certainly never seriously contemplating a leap into the foothill wine trade.

But over the next four decades they spent more and more time at Fiddletown, built a home on what they had christened their Middle Age Spread, dedicated two acres of the plot to Zinfandel, began to produce olive oil, and established their own wine brand, DAMAS, both Spanish for “ladies” and an acronym for Mara, her partner Deborah and their first dog Scooter.

They aren’t the first people, nor will they be the last, to make this sort of trek from the San Francisco Bay Area to the Mother Lode, but what sets apart their journey from many others is their commitment to doing most of the farming by themselves.

Granted, they hired an architect to design their home, and consulting winemakers to help them make their wine, but most of the day-to-day drudgery of working the land they assumed on their own, energetically and happily.

That isn’t to say that they didn’t rely on neighbors for occasional guidance and assistance. They did, fairly often, and therein is the book’s most telling theme: If you want to thrive in a remote, isolated, largely wild environment, be prepared to reach out for instruction and help. A continuing thread through the book is the evolving realization that if you hope to sustain a small business in the sparsely settled Sierra foothills you best develop a network of talented and obliging neighbors.

Thus, all sorts of Fiddletown and Shenandoah Valley folk emerge at Middle Age Spread to help the two with no end of chores – pounding in posts to hold up vines, laying irrigation pipe, repairing fences, harvesting grapes.

In tone, the book is sympathetic, congenial, humorous and doggedly upbeat, despite obstreperous neighbors, machinery breakdowns, water shortages, wildland fires. Mara is the more romantic of the two, while Deborah, a physician, is focused on practical solutions to the swarm of vexing issues they face.

Out of respect for the privacy of their neighbors, Feeney only rarely includes the surnames of the many characters who weave in and out of her narrative, but people who have lived in or about Fiddletown will recognize who she is writing about.

All this plays out against Fiddletown itself, an historic if sleepy Gold Rush camp now home to a broad range of individualistic souls who while diverse in political attitudes, economic strata, sexual orientation and ethnic identity show in Feeney’s telling that a melodic life in the hinterlands ultimately relies on cooperation and conciliation. A kind of poetic justice is realized when the couple ultimately buys the structure housing the community’s Moose Lodge, a neighboring source of agitation and conflict during their early years on the ranch.

Nonetheless, there were other setbacks they had to weather – pulling out pecan and peach trees that didn’t take well to the setting, and giving up their experiment in bee raising.

The book ends on a high note, however. They now bring in bountiful crops of pomegranates, walnuts, olives, pears, figs and grapes, the latter transformed into what they can boast of as award-winning wine. At the Amador County Fair commercial wine competition a couple of years ago their DAMAS 2019 Zinfandel was voted the judging’s best Amador County Zinfandel out of more than 50 entries. They had arrived.

But the biggest takeaway from “Estate Grown: Planting Roots in Fiddletown” is that anyone who envisions a successful farm in the foothills best be energetic, resourceful, adaptable and level-headed.

“Estate Grown,” in both print and electronic versions, is available through Amazon. Print copies are at the wine shop Amador 360 in Plymouth, the gift shop Made in Amador in Sutter Creek, and the tasting room of the winery Terre Rouge/Easton Wines in Shenandoah Valley. Signed and inscribed copies can be requested from Mara Feeney at damasvineyards@gmail.com.

(Footnote: Mara Feeney and I are to make a joint appearance at the Shenandoah Valley winery Terre Rouge/Easton Wines on Nov. 18, noon to 3 p.m.)

To learn where copies of my book “The Signature Wines of Superior California” can be found, please visit my website SignatureWines.us.