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.
Timing is everything in farming, and I still have so much to learn to manage the seasonal transitions. My summer crops have slowed way down, but my fall plantings aren’t producing much yet. I’m coming to realize that I need to accelerate my schedule, planting heavily in the heat of summer and utilizing more shade cloth and overhead watering to get the cool weather crops through the hot times and into their preferred weather patterns.
I’m also realizing that I need different distributions of crops, and that I need to sow salad mixes more often than the 2-3 weeks that I’ve been running. I was late on a couple of key planting windows in the hectic rush of the cannabis harvest, which coincided with the slowdown of growth because of the lowering sun and changing season. As a result, I’ve been light on my production for market channels, and I missed the food bank donation this week.
The cool, wet fall impacted growth more than I expected, reminding me just how much I’m at the mercy of the weather. The best laid plans of mice and men… It’s so hard to calibrate timing for sowing, clearing beds and replanting. I realize now that I should have taken the shadecloth off of the salad mix tunnel much sooner so that growth could respond to the cool, dark weather. Lessons learned for next year, although it will probably turn out to be a long, hot fall, and I’ll be operating under different circumstances.
Part of the production problem has been a number of beds impacted by symphylans, small soil creatures that feed on root hairs and growing roots, slowing or halting plant growth. Large portions of these beds have crops that are so stunted as to not be harvestable, or to be delayed by weeks before sizing up enough to get a limited cutting out of them. Given our limited production space, the symphylan pressure has been incredibly problematic, and I’m still trying to figure out how to manage.
Symphylans like to live in soil with good structure and high organic matter, which is exactly what we’re trying to create, so there’s a cognitive dissonance in the experience. Heavy tillage can help reduce symphylan pressure, and I’m switching from heavy compost to more chicken pellets and insect frass for fertility without additional organic matter. It’s incredibly frustrating to plant crops that just sit there and don’t grow, but I’m hopeful that I can work through the problem.
Providing food for the community is a serious responsibility that brings me great joy but also feelings of failure and incompetence when things don’t go how I hope they will. There are so many potential pitfalls and hard learning lessons, but also the successes that make it all worthwhile. Overall, we’re producing at a much higher level than in past years, with expanded sales and donations in all of our market channels. By next week we should be back on track with production, and the next sowings are up and growing in their trays in the propagation house.
Despite my frustrations in some areas of production, I’m grateful for the abundance that we grew this year, and I’m excited for the lineup of winter crops that we have in the ground. Five successions of brassica are growing nicely, and one remains in the propagation house in 3-inch pots to be planted out this week. That adds up to a few hundred each of cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli, and smaller plantings of romanesco and brussels sprouts. These hearty crops will make for many winter meals for family and community, and the knowledge of this makes me happy.
We’re also working on sowing cover crops, planting the Organic Plowdown Mix from LeBallisters, a blend of field peas, bell beans, vetch and oats. We add mustard seed so that it will bloom in late winter and provide a nectar flow for pollinators and beneficial insects. Most of the cannabis beds are already cleared, sown and germinating, and we’ll undersow beneath the brassica in the next couple of weeks so that the cover crops are already growing nicely by the time we harvest the heads from the crops.
The cool, moist fall has meant that everything has finished up earlier than usual, and I expect to have the summer crops buttoned up and cover crops sown by the end of the month, quite a bit earlier than normal. This will free us up to focus on other projects, and I’m especially excited to dig comfrey and make more hugel beds for future biomass production. Farming has many ups and downs, and I remind myself to roll with the punches. 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.
My grandfather lived in Redwood Valley and he pretty much lived by the Farmers Almanac. He said it was never wrong. He always carried a copy of it when he was gardening. I take it that it is still accurate? I sure hope so.