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.
With this glorious period of high pressure sunshine drawing to a close tomorrow, we are working to button things up and get the livestock off the pasture and into the barn. Yesterday I mowed Amber’s flower beds, and we covered the whole zone with cardboard, then layered compost on the beds and straw over the whole area. It looks so different from the profusion of dead and dying flowers, like a clean slate, a blanket covering the beds to sleep for winter.
We’ve also been doing some upgrades, ripping wide sheets of old metal roofing lengthwise into three pieces and using them to shore up the terraces, holding them in place with foundation stakes and rebar. I’m grateful to have been able to gather these materials secondhand this fall, because that’s the only way this type of project will get done in these hard economic times.
I put the metal along a 70-foot terrace, and now we have a sheer foot-tall wall with a much wider planting space. I’m not losing bed space to a crumbling slope! We dug a large quantity of comfrey from the space, which will be replanted in other parts of the farm to produce biomass for forage, fertility and carbon sequestration. Digging and replanting comfrey root is one of the more satisfying aspects of our late fall work, creating future abundance with effort but no monetary cost.
Once the wall was built, I used the tractor to load homemade compost into three wheelbarrows lined up side by side. We filled the space behind the wall and then added a thin layer of high fertility purchased compost across the whole bed surface. Broadfork, power harrow with the BCS and rake and voila, a wide and perfect terrace for planting the next round of paperpot salad mix seedlings.
With all of our hoophouse space fully planted already, I’ve been making sturdy low tunnels out of metal EMT conduit bent into hoops with a cheap hoop bender that provides a frame to wrap the shape. When we set the hoops, I make sure to get them 10-12 inches deep into the ground, using a mallet and foundation stake to predrill the holes if the soil is hard. Once the hoops are set, I drive a foundation stake at each end and run a baling wire purlin from end to end, wrapping the wire twice around each hoop as I go so that it stays in the middle of the top of the hoop through winter storms. This sturdy structure is covered by one layer of insect netting and one layer of Reemay or Agribon floating row cover.
On warm days I open the tunnel up, although lately I’ve just left some open because it’s been so nice out. I’ve had to irrigate all of the tender crops over the last couple weeks, some with drip, some with sprinklers and some by hand with the hose because we pulled the drip at the end of the main cultivation season.
With rain coming I’ll pull the covers back over the tunnels and hold them down with sandbags. With 16 beds under the 4×50-foot hoophouses and six single bed low tunnels over wider terraces, I’m in a good position to produce through the winter, though it’s always a crapshoot depending on the strength and severity of the inevitable winter storms.
It’s almost time to sow another round of seeds for the salad mix beds that turn over every six to eight weeks. I sow every two weeks in the paperpot trays and I shoot to flip two to three beds each week. I have one more squash terrace to rebuild with a new wall, but it will have to wait until the next warm dry period. Other than that, every annual production bed on the farm is planted either with winter crops or cover crops and all the perennials are mowed and blanketed with cardboard, compost and straw.
I’m so grateful for this period of balmy weather over the last few weeks, which has made it possible for us to do all of this buttoning up, rebuilding of terrace walls and also to work in the woods clearing overstocked firs and pines and freeing up the oaks and madrones. We will now shift to making biochar, using a kiln borrowed from a neighbor to burn the wood into charcoal that we’ll inoculate with compost and teas to make an ultra high quality soil amendment for our bed prep efforts next spring.
With the incoming weather, I’m ready for some rest. I have a puzzle I’ve been working on that needs finishing, and I want to spend time with family playing bridge, cribbage and backgammon. I got a game console of the original NES games, and I’ve been getting a kick out of playing Legend of Zelda before dinner in the evenings.
The short days make for more sleep and more downtime than the main growing season, and the older I get the more I love this time of year. 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.