How Neva Day ’91 cares for the high-maintenance crop at her organic farm in California
The bright magenta pulp inside the dragon fruit that Neva Day ’91 has just sliced into quarters adds to its mystery. This curious produce has a “dragon-scale” exterior peel, but the soft, juicy flesh — a firmness that could fairly be compared to a kiwi — is dotted with tiny black edible seeds and a subtle sweet and sour taste. It’s such a refreshing treat on a hot day that one wonders why these exotic beauties, also called pitahaya, are not more common.
With a tour of Wallace Ranch, owned by Day and her partner, Dicky Augustus, the answer is clear: Dragon fruit is a high-maintenance crop requiring extraordinary care and vigilance.
“It’s a ‘high-touch’ fruit,” says Day, which explains its lofty price in supermarkets. Each vine yields fruit three to six times a year, and the trees must be hand-trimmed. The fruit is hand-pollinated and handpicked. Each individual young fruit is also wrapped in a net bag to keep birds away — at $5 each wholesale, it’s a heartbreaker to see a bird-pecked pitahaya on the ground. And given the delicate twisted branches of the cactus vines the dragon fruit grows on, she adds, “no machine can do it for you.”
In fact, Day, who actively works the ranch with a few employees, sets out in the early morning hours with a makeup brush in hand, gently transferring the pollen from blossom to blossom to optimize the desired taste and appearance of each bud’s eventual fruit.
Long before Day and Augustus bought the hilltop ranch in 2018, she was already smitten with the dragon fruit she tasted during travels in Thailand and Vietnam, along with its healthy attributes, including antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals. When the couple began looking for a new business and lifestyle venture, they discovered this 15-acre “gentleman’s farm” for sale in hilly Bonsall, Calif., northeast of San Diego.
“Turns out, it was a gentleman’s farm on steroids, and we went for it,” says Day of the acreage, where they grow and sell more than 50,000 pieces of fruit annually — among them, Hass avocados, Australian finger limes, passion fruit, citrus, and a dozen other varieties — to wholesalers, farmers markets, organic markets, restaurants, and Whole Foods.
However, in those first days, even the real estate agent could see the challenges that lay ahead for the new owners and told them to remember: “Fruit rots.”
“That was the best advice,” says Day, and they quickly got smart about the business of farming. “We realized we needed to hustle it out.”
Fortunately, Day is no stranger to hustle or hard work: Upon graduation from Colgate with a double major in political science and social science, and a minor in Latin American studies, she started a career with Sears, Roebuck & Co. and then Sears Holdings Corporation in management positions across the country, making her way up the ladder, including a few rungs where she was the first female to tread.
While professional success had been the goal, Day wanted to tackle the athletic dreams she put off during her career. She took a leave of absence and trained as a triathlete.
Her daring pivot took her on a circuitous global journey, including marquee Iron Man competitions and victories, which led to competitive cycling — with daily five-hour workouts — and a spot on the U.S. National Track Cycling Team competing around the world. “The funny thing is that I always said I wanted to be a true athlete,” says Day. “And it happened when I was 37.”
It was a gentleman’s farm on steroids, and we went for it.
Clearly, her intensive endurance training set her up well for the long, physically demanding days on the ranch. With 5,500 plants in the ground, that innate tenacity allowed the couple to transition the expansive property into a certified organic farm: Everything at Wallace Ranch is either edible or a pollinator, says Day, as she picks a pineapple while butterflies quiver about.
Up from the terraced orchards and through iron gates, the ranch house is surrounded by a beautifully maintained compound that has a Secret Garden vibe: a paradise for fruit lovers with Peruvian apple, Asian pear, five-graft cherry, goji, cherimoya, guava, pecans, gooseberry, milkweed, aloe, and hundreds of other delights — even a calla lily field.
“All the steps in your life will allow you to do what you are doing now,” says Day about the ranch responsibilities. “And, of course, you need to be good at all trades.” That, along with patience, trial and error, advice from fellow farmers and customers, tons of research, and expertise on organic pest control: Ants love dragon fruit, she adds, “I’m now proficient with ants.”
Day says she rarely finds reason to leave the farm’s 15 acres and that Wallace Ranch is a beloved daily challenge. “We’ve made chaos into sense.”
Being at Colgate when she was a young kid, Day says, was like “visiting family.” Her father, Joel ’60, attended the University, and her grandfather, alumnus and trustee Harold B. Day, Class of 1928, is buried in Colgate Cemetery.