Casey O’Neill is a farmer and owner of Happy Day Farms in Laytonville, Calif. The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of The Mendocino Voice. If you’d like to write your own column for The Mendocino Voice, send your idea to info@mendovoice.com.
So begins the New Year, and I find myself filled with a mix of excitement for the days to come and a wistful nostalgia at the passage of time. The older I get, the more the cliches ring true; time does fly, life is precious, and I try to remind myself to make the best of it no matter what comes. I’m grateful that the weather is supposed to clear this week so I can get back in gear after days of rain and paperwork.
We’ll hold our first Tuesday farmers market in Laytonville after many years of Monday market, and I’m excited for the shift. Market day is the metronome of my life, setting the cadence, and a shift to Tuesday gives me prep time that was harder to come by on Sundays. My hope is to start out each week with a short planning and administrative meeting to set a clear schedule and task list so that we have less chaos and more stability in our operations.
I’ve been deep in gathering receipts and year-end accounting, along with filling out grant applications and dealing with regulatory agencies. I managed to get paperwork into the Farm Service Agency before the January 8 deadline, and with luck we may see some funds through the Marketing Assistance for Specialty Crops program. We’ve ordered packaging and other dry goods for the vegetable business and have been discussing seed orders and tool upgrades.
I’m hoping to purchase a wheel hoe to shift clearing beds from stoop labor to making three passes with the 12” sweep and then raking the detritus into piles to be scooped into totes to feed to the rabbits, chickens and pigs. This would be the final step in upgrading our rapid-rotation crop system that began with the tilther, then the Paperpot Transplanter system and drop seeder.
Clearing beds is now the biggest part of the workload in transitioning crops, and if I can cut that labor down, I’ll be able to flip beds faster and have less lag time. In an ideal world, I’d be able to clear and prep a 50’ bed in an hour and then Paperpot the seedlings in half an hour. When I look at four tunnels x four beds x four crops per year = 64 bed flips in just the main vegetable tunnels each year, I realize that any savings of time and effort adds up to big gains in efficiency and productivity.
Bed prep is one of the most physically demanding jobs on the farm, and it remains consistent at some level throughout the growing season. Cannabis beds are all prepped in the spring, but many of them also get a fall vegetable crop, some also an early spring crop and all beds get sown to cover crop before winter sets in. Outdoor vegetable beds rotate mostly between brassica in spring, squash or other hot crops in summer and back to brassica late in the year.
Now, deep in the winter, I need to prep two hoop house beds that are cleared but haven’t had compost or amendments, broad forking or tithing yet. I need to clear and prep another couple of beds, and then I’ll be ready to plant the bok choy, kale, salad mixes, lettuces and scallions waiting in their trays ready to go out. Everything grows so much slower with the low light that it’s always tough to maintain enough winter production with the extended length of time that it takes from bed flip to the point when the next crop is up to harvestable size.
I’m ready to start sowing seeds again after a December hiatus. The first round will be Paperpot trays of salad mixes, bok choy, collards, tatsoi, salad turnips, beets, scallions and onions. I’ll sow a few 72-cell trays of cabbage and broccoli, and direct seed arugula and radishes wherever I run short of Paperpots to fill a bed. It feels exciting to be gearing up for another season as the light begins to return.