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.
It has been a cool, wet spring, and the trend continues this week with cold rains and light snow in the forecast. Farming is easier in the sunshine, both for the nature of the work and for the nature of my mental state. It’s so much harder to find the motivation on a dark and stormy day, but I’m glad for the greenhouses to work in, and there is always paperwork that needs catching up on.
Today is sowing day, and I’ll be starting cucumbers, summer squash, lettuces, Asian greens for salad mixes, scallions and cannabis seeds. The Orange Durban still has a place in our production plan, and we’re going to be sifting some of the old favorites like OG Strawberry and Lemon Ogre, looking for a killer phenotype that we can put into clonal production in partnership with a nursery that can keep mother stock since our off-grid system doesn’t work well for storing plants over the winter.
I love the shintokiwa cucumber for greenhouse production. The skin doesn’t get bitter even during the hottest parts of the summer, and it is a sizable and reliable producer. We save seeds from them each year, and I start them in 3” pots and then plant them out in the greenhouse on 6” spacing, so it takes 100 plants to fill the 50-foot bed.
This week the last of the bok choy will come out of the left side of the cucumber bed. Last week we cleared kale from the right side of the bed, and I transplanted in salad turnips with the Paperpot Transplanter. After the bok choy is cleared, I’ll prep that half of the bed and leave a space down the center for transplanting the cukes. On the very edge of the bed I’ll sow radishes, which will grow up and then finish out by the time the cukes need helping onto the nylon netting that is their trellis for the summer months.
The netting hangs from a piece of wire tied with a half hitch to a piece of baling twine that dangles from the center purlin of the tunnel. I can raise or lower the netting by loosening the twine, and when we’re done with it for the season I use the twine to tie the netting into a bundle that runs the length of the greenhouse above head height so it is ready for the next year. The less time I need to spend putting in trellis the better, so this method takes just a few minutes to drop the netting after planting the cukes. Then we go through once a week or so and wrap the vines up the netting to keep them moving skyward and avoid them spreading out into the limited pathways.
Planting turnips or other crops on the shoulders of long season hot crops is one of the ways that I offset the limited space we have, allowing me to maximize revenue from the bed space while waiting for cucumbers or tomatoes to begin to fruit. Basil works well with tomatoes in the same manner. Peppers take so long to really get going that they are finding themselves evicted from hoop house space this year in favor of outdoor plantings with low tunnels covering them for extra warmth.
Hoop house space is a high-value, high-intensity crop zone that needs to yield revenue of $300-500 for each bed within a three-month window to make sense for our farm production plan and income needs. Salad mixes bring the most revenue for veggie crops, with a turnaround as little as three weeks for the first cutting when sizable starts are planted with the Paperpot Transplanter. Second cutting at five weeks, then flip the bed and replant. Two cuttings will generally yield a total of 30-50 pounds of salad mix for an average of $400 in sales.
I’m still refining the planning and coordination to make sure that there are starts ready to plant when the beds are ready to flip, and growth is much slower in the winter months with limited sun of less strength and lots of cold, wet weather. That said, even if I flip salad mix beds every two months, then I get four bed flips of $400 in the time I get one run of peppers (April-December). Looking at the numbers, even a crusher of a pepper crop isn’t going to yield $1600 in revenue, so it has gotten much harder to justify growing them in the hoop house, even though they produce far more at higher quality than they do in an outside planting.
As I deepen into the theory and practice of farming, these types of comparisons delight me. I love the puzzle of it all, and even more so the refinement as the years go by. We started doing peppers in the greenhouses 10 years ago, and I was ecstatic about how well they produced. Now though, my focus has been on consistent, high quality salad mixes, and peppers have found themselves outperformed and back on the outside looking in. I have high hopes for more hoop house space in the years to come as we save up and invest, and then maybe peppers will get back into the mix. As always, much love and great success to you on your journey!
Casey O’Neill owns and runs HappyDay Farms, a small vegetable and cannabis farm north of Laytonville. He is a long time cannabis policy advocate, and was born and raised in the Bell Springs area. The preceding has been an editorial column. The Mendocino Voice has not necessarily fact-checked or copyedited this work, and it should be interpreted as the words of the author, not necessarily reflecting the opinions of The Mendocino Voice.