46 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM towards the kids’ college funds, the other half to the St. Francis Center. When the family moved to Portola Valley, Lisa started her own vegetable garden and took a five-year break from Mission Farm. In May 2022, she returned to help ramp up production—and marvels that the transformation from “weed patch” to “spectacular” took about three months. This fall, Lisa expects to harvest pumpkins, cucumbers, eggplants, beans and zucchinis. With {punchline} It’s clear, though, that Lisa’s first passion is for working the soil. Even if it means worrying about wild bunnies ravaging her peppers or leaf curl afflicting her peach trees, she’s already thinking about natural solutions to those problems and the next potential challenge. Carrying on the family’s automotive legacy, her younger brother, Kent, who was in diapers for the train ride west, manages eight Putnam franchises. Still, “He has an amazing garden and huge orchard,” Lisa points out, just a couple of miles from Mission Farm. “He wants us to farm there and has been building up the soil—we are all farmers at heart!” the coming of September, her attention shifts to getting all of her winter crops planted before winter weather sets in. She stops watering the tomatoes and puts seeds in the ground to grow kale, broccoli, cauliflower, beets, spinach and sugar snap peas. In past years, Lisa helped out at her children’s school gardens at Woodside Elementary and Woodside Priory. Now, when she’s not farming or teaching, she works part-time with her husband, specializing in real estate development, subdivided land and managing apartments in Sacramento and Tracy. ABOVE (right): Mission Farm volunteer Luisa Serna-Borja doing a “chop-and-drop” on the cover crop.
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