Oregon wine country B&B focuses on connection to the ground

Overnight options in Willamette Valley wine country continue to grow, and the latest entry wants guests to feel connected to the ground.

Inn the Ground opened last month as part of Tabula Rasa Farms in Carlton. The nine-room bed-and-breakfast is built into the hillside of the regenerative agriculture farm.

Owners Brenda Smola-Foti and Frank Foti created Inn the Ground because they want people to learn more about the food system, and they designed the B&B to give guests a sense of being connected to the land.

Drive up a hill past a pasture of cattle to reach the inn. The main floor houses the common areas, including two living room-type spaces and a patio with a firepit surrounded by wildflowers. The back wall is made almost entirely of floor-to-ceiling windows offering scenic views of the valley.

A full farm breakfast is served every morning in the great room. The eggs and meat come from the farm, and much of the fruit and vegetables come from their market garden.

Heather Miller, who’s in charge of community engagement for Inn the Ground, says deer often enjoy their own breakfast of wildflowers right outside the great room’s windows.

Down the stairs, nine guest rooms, one of which is ADA accessible, are nestled into the hillside. The rooms are designed with a focus on looking outside, and each one opens to a small private patio.

The rooms are stocked with local coffee, tea and snacks — including the farm’s own beef jerky — as well water from the property’s spring.

Miller particularly enjoys sitting on the patios in front of the rooms in the morning. She calls it “coffee with the cows” because one of the large pastures ends just a few yards from the rooms and the cows often hang out near that fence early in the day. She says the mornings are really quiet and you’ll see a lot of hummingbirds and dragon flies.

Right beside the inn are several acres of forested hillsides with over 6 miles of hiking trails, ponds and a spring. A copper cup hangs by the spring for visitors to use.

A short drive away, Tabula Rasa’s market garden grows 150 varieties of fruits and vegetables without any spraying or herbicides. Most of the produce is used at Humble Spirit restaurant in McMinnville.

Jordan Hamilton, the farm’s program manager gave me a tour and explained how the regenerative farm mimics nature with three key components: diversity, rotation and rest.

“The more life you put on the soil, the better it will become,” he said.

The five plots in the market garden rotate to the right every year. In the pastures, chickens always follow cattle. The cattle mow down the fields and then the chickens spread out the manure and aerate the soil with their pecking, which speeds up regrowth of the grass, Hamilton said.

Inn the Ground, 15250 NW Panther Creek Rd., Carlton, Oregon 97111, 503-765-9544, stay@theground.love, www.theground.love/stay/inn-the-ground. $700-$800 a night, but through September the inn is offering grand opening pricing of $450-$500 a night

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