A true Green New Deal: Planting natives to enrich biodiversity

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.

We’ve been working as a team at the ranch, installing native plant hedgerows through the Point Blue Conservation Science grant we got last year. It’s super exciting to see the project coming to fruition, and it feels good to know that these plants will grow to support wildlife and pollinator habitat while in the longer term providing shade and dropping food for our livestock.

It’s been really cool to learn more about native plants in the past couple of years, and to realize just how little knowledge I have about the natural landscapes in our area. I was unfamiliar with many of the plants that arrived from McKinleyville’s Samara Restoration native plant nursery. Amber is an herbalist and plant lover so she has a much greater understanding of plant varieties, and our friend and consultant Chris Moore, along with Evan Carlson from Point Blue, have been helping facilitate the grant and teaching us about plant selection.

All in all, we planted grasses, flowering plants, forbs, bushes and trees. We had a dozen young oaks from acorns that had sprouted in pots, so we interspersed them down one of the hedgerows. Phacelia (Bee’s Friend) is a great medium-sized, reseeding annual that makes lots of lovely purple flowers that the bumbles really love, so we sow it every spring in trays and plant them out at the ends of our cannabis terraces and anywhere there are pockets of space in the garden. Amber had two trays, so they also went into the hedgerow.

Lots of plants I had never heard of, such as ninebark, serviceberry, sticky monkey flower, coffeeberry and snowberry, along with more familiar plant friends like elderberry, dogwood, mock orange, currant, crab apple, wild raspberry, ceanothus, toyon, and milkweed have now gone in. Coyote brush went in the far corner where the soil is dry and rocky, while the more water-loving species went down towards the riparian channel that bisects the main pasture. Irises, California buckwheat, tufted hairgrass, creeping wild rye, red fescue and yellow-eyed grass made up most of the low growing ground-cover species.

I’m incredibly excited to see these plants grow and to learn more about them. My life with Amber has been an education on plant species, broadening my scope from cannabis and basic summer vegetables into dozens of crops and flowers and a great variety of wild species. As a naturalist and herbalist, she has studied plants for her whole adult life; I’m always delighted by how much she knows and it’s awesome to see her in her element directing planting and talking plants with the other experts.

The project has been underway for some time, totaling approximately 550 feet of hedgerow along the eastern and southern edges of the pasture. In February I used the walk-behind BCS rotary plow to break the sod and soften the soil. We added a light application of compost, and I ran the power harrow to finish a smooth planting surface. We covered the length of the beds with old dep tarp to prevent regrowth of the sod and to germinate and kill seeds at the surface level so we could start with a clear planting surface.

Before planting day, we pulled off the plastic, installed drip irrigation and laid out the majority of the plants. For the big day, we were a team of eleven plus an assortment of kiddos running around and doing some helping out. It was a huge effort to plant and mulch the whole length in one day, and it left us all sun/wind burnt and fried by the end, but we were content and grateful for the work that we got done together. Pops threw down an epic lunch at the picnic tables in the Hobbit field: turkey meatballs from our turkeys, salad and greens from the farm with rice and pumpkin pie and contributions of apple crisp and banana bread for dessert.

Shared work, land care and community-building feel good, and I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity presented by this grant program. The resources it brings stimulate local economies and help us to do work that we dream of but often don’t have the time or money to accomplish. When I think about the Green New Deal, this type of landscape work lands squarely within the ideology and should be supported and increased through any funding mechanisms available.

Legislators and regulators need to focus on creating and sustaining these types of programs that bring people into greater contact with the land in ways that are beneficial to wildlife and to the communities that the land sustains. My hope is that Point Blue will receive another round of funding that will allow these grant programs to continue for other farms and ranches, and that similar programs can be facilitated by Resource Conservation Districts, California Department of Food and Agriculture, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the federal Farm Service Agency, Natural Resources Conservation Service, and any other agency, foundation or organization either governmental or private. As always, much love and great success to you on your journey!