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.
And so comes the solstice, the longest night of the year, the time for reflection and reverence. The storm blows outside as rain pelts the roof and windows; the creeks boil with rushing water, and the pond has filled to capacity. Winter is here, and so comes the time for taking stock of the year gone by and making plans for the year to come.
Fall brassica plantings have been highly successful with beautiful crops of cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower already harvested and eaten by the community. There remain successions of cabbage, romanesco and brussels sprouts to go as winter deepens and the days begin to lengthen again. I sowed seeds for 200 plants every two weeks from mid-July until early October and am pleased with the results.
I’m realizing that for the best consistency in succession planting, I should plan to sow a crop of large plants every time I start seeds from early January until early October. Brassica every two weeks from January until late April, then summer squash from late April to the end of June, then back to brassica from July to early October. Managing bed space requires clearing and replanting as soon as a crop finishes, rather than my tendency to want to let things linger to eke out some final harvests.
Other refinements to planting have to do with the harvest crunch in late September and October. During the rest of the year I sow Paperpot trays every two weeks for salad mixes, cooking greens and root crops, but I’ve realized I need to switch to direct seeding to save labor during harvest. The bed prep that’s required to transition from cannabis to Paperpot plantings is much more intensive because we have to pull the stumps and clear and soften the soil enough for the transplanter’s furrower to cut smoothly and the plants to go in evenly. The seeder can glide over a rougher surface, so I can just cut the cannabis stumps at the soil level, leave their roots to decompose and enrich the soil while I sow fall crops right over the top. This reduced labor means I can stay on track with fall plantings unlike this year where I fell behind and had a gap in salad mix production in late November and early December.
Despite that gap, this was our best salad mix year yet, and the Farm to Schools grant we received via the MendoLake Food Hub and California Department of Food and Agriculture provided the support for us to begin selling salad mix consistently to the Laytonville School District — a major milestone for me. I grew up eating in the school cafeteria, and it makes me happy to know that our salad mix is part of what’s available to students. In the year to come, we’ll continue expanding our production so we can provide more lettuce and fixins for the school salad bar.
It took a dozen years of practice before I was able to harvest salad mix for each of the 50 weeks that we market produce in a trip around the sun. I get a little better at it every year, and a key part of that process is taking a hard look at what has worked well and what improvements can be made. It all comes back to being consistent with sowing seeds. So long as there is a steady march of plants coming out of the propagation house, the rest of the work will flow downhill from there.
I expanded the volumes of lettuce and the tender Asian greens that I use for salad mix this year, sowing more seeds and planting more beds on each two-week succession. This made for tricky crop planning with the longer Paperpot crops like beets, scallions, kale, chard, collards and bok choy. We were at full production with every bed planted more this year by far than any year in the past, which was more work but also fit a solid rhythm once we got in the groove.
I learned that it’s far better to keep prepping and planting through the winter, cutting the cover crop on the earliest sowings as it matures and we catch breaks in the weather in January and February. The more I can be consistent with bed prep, the easier it is to get going in the spring. We were able to sell almost $15,000 in produce through the MendoLake Food Hub this summer in large part because the early efforts at prepping and planting allowed me to pull a full rotation of spring crops out of my cannabis terraces before it came time to plant the full season crop.
We scaled back our cannabis production this year, taking a dozen beds out of production in order to refine our methods and raise the quality of what we produce. I’m pleased with the results, it was our best crop yet despite the early rains and wet fall. Switching to red shade cloth for all plantings kept the plants happier, lowered water usage and kept the color bright and beautiful on the final flower. Having less overall production meant that we were able to harvest at peak timing and nothing went longer than it should have.
Each trip around the sun is an opportunity to learn and refine our methods, and this is one of the great joys in farming. Thinking about what I’ll do differently next year helps to get me through hard times and the sense of defeat that comes with failure, and seeing how much better we get as time goes on gives me hope for the future. I’m grateful to experience the miracle of seeds, growth and the alchemy of harvest that springs from soil well tended. 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.