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.
The cherry trees are blooming, air redolent with their scent mixed with the daphne by the front porch. I have a deep love for the successions of spring smells emitting from the plants we tend near our home, reminders of the beauty and joy that come from the simple things in life. I stop and smell the flowers, dropping to my knees to stick my face in the hyacinths and harvesting bouquets of daffodils, narcissus, rose and daphne or cherry blossom.
The oaks have begun to leaf out, demonstrating that they know something about the arrival of spring. The land is green and lush, creeks burbling with good flows and the ground soft and spongy. The days are a whirlwind of sowing, seedlings, transplanting, bed prep and work in the woods thinning firs and freeing up the venerable oaks and madrones on the back side of the ranch.
Spring mania is full upon me, and I relish the challenge of the work, the soreness in my muscles that speaks of jobs well done. In the past few days we’ve sown seeds for hot crops like tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers, along with more of the cool weather cabbages, broccoli and salad mixes. We planted out Asian greens mixes for spring salads, along with kale, collards and cabbage, while tending to the low tunnels of beets, scallions, cooking greens, turnips and radishes. Lots of opening tunnels and irrigating with the warm weather, shuffling and tending to the tender little plants.
We’re turning over hoophouse beds as the winter plantings blow out and begin to go to seed. I’m enjoying nibbling on the floret-like seed heads of collard and kale as we make the transition into spring, and I enjoy the warm, sunny days. Though I know the spring storms will return with a vengeance, I treasure these periods of high intensity labor when we begin to tame the wildness of winter cover crops, mowing, adding compost, broadforking, harrowing and covering with plastic to let the biomass decompose and hold the nutrients in place until we’re ready to uncover and plant.
I’m in the midst of a mental transition in how I think about our crop planning, which will play out in the physical realm of the farm in the months to come. As we increased our production over the last couple of years by using the Paperpot Transplanter to save space and time instead of direct seeding crops and waiting for germination and growth, I focused more on bunching crops like beets, salad turnips, scallions, bok choy, collards and kale.
It worked amazingly well last year to send hundreds of bunches to the MendoLake Foodhub for distribution to local food banks through the Farms Together grant that paid us for the produce. The grant runs out this spring, and we’re seeing increased demand for our salad mixes from local schools and other wholesale accounts. To this end, I’m pivoting my crop planning from starting all the Paperpot trays of seeds every two weeks to just doing salad mixes and salad turnips on that schedule, and dropping scallions, beets, kale, collards and bok choy to once a month.
We shoot to do 200 heading brassica every two weeks from January through April, when we switch to 100 summer squash every two weeks from mid-April until the end of June. In July it’s back to heading brassica. These are early-maturing Farao cabbage and Bellstar broccoli most of the time alternating with cauliflower and later in the summer brussels sprouts and romanesco, with the final sowing in late September. This makes for a steady succession of heavier crops throughout most of the year with a gap in April and May.
We’re getting quicker at setting up the EMT conduit low tunnels, using the bungee system from Tennessee-based Neversink Tools to hold the row covers down so we don’t have to deal with sandbags anymore. Next winter I’m planning to do mostly longer run crops like the cooking greens and heavier root crops in the low tunnels so that we don’t have to put them up and take them down so often like we do when they’re planted to salad mixes. This crop pattern will free up space in the tunnels for the quick rotation crops so that I can cycle through them faster and with greater ease.
Every year I find myself excited by the lessons learned, by the new techniques we’ll be applying, by the health and vitality of our produce. The inevitable mistakes teach me what changes to make for future rounds. One of the nice things about rapid rotation crops is that you get 15-25 shots at them each year, so there is lots of opportunity for revision and refinement. It’s a fun game that keeps the work exciting and avoids feelings of drudgery in the repetition. As always, much love and great success to you on your journey!