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.
Spring setup is like a mountain that we climb each year, and the differences in weather make for wildly different conditions year to year. There are more challenges with new efforts, but there are also better strategies and techniques for surmounting the hurdles. The physical labor gets just a fraction more difficult each trip around the sun as the body ages, but we learn new skills to work smarter, not harder. We build teamwork and capacity for shared effort with friends and neighbors, and somehow the work always gets done.
We’re crossing the threshold onto the long plateau of late spring planting, but the heavy climb of early season bed prep is done. From here on out, it’s just flipping beds after spring crops finish up. The first two light dep hoops are in, the next one this coming week and the final one in two weeks. Seed-start cannabis plants will go into their final homes in living soil in the next ten days, and clones will follow after June 10. We like to wait until then to avoid any chances of plants shocking and shifting into flower if there’s a cold, dark June swoon.
All the tomatoes are planted, and peppers go out this coming week. The last rounds of cabbage and broccoli are in, and we’ll plant butternuts on the outside of their beds so that the squash can sprawl in the margins while the brassica size up. Successions of zucchini are ongoing until after the solstice, when we’ll switch back to broccoli and cabbage and then add in romanesco, cauliflower and brussels sprouts as summer wanes towards fall.
We sow seeds every two to three weeks (17 days on average) all year round, which makes for a constant stream of plants coming out of the hoophouses. The Paperpot lineup is consistent year round—five trays of lettuce, five trays of Asian greens for salad mixes, two trays of cooking greens (either bok choy, kale, collards or chard), hakurei salad turnips, scallion, beets and cilantro, with basil in the warm months.
I rely on the balance of push-pull theory to drive farm operations and sales. I want a consistent stream of plants pushing from the propagation house to keep us moving on clearing beds and planting fresh crops, but I want sales to pull so that we always have just barely enough product. When volume exceeds sales, and you have to try to push product, that’s when small farms get into trouble. A successful vegetable farmer once told me, “I try to sow no more than what I can sell in a week, but do it year-round so there’s always something fresh to sell.”
If there isn’t the pressure of fresh plants coming out of the propagation house, the myriad other tasks of the farm will take precedence, and beds will languish with increasing pest problems and lowering quality. When we need to find a place to plant beautiful young crops, it’s much easier to make the decision to clear beds for replant. Learning to manage the timelines of the varying crops is a key part of the puzzle so that I can estimate when things will finish up so that the crop planning works.
There are inevitable tradeoffs; I used to try to do tomatoes early, but that meant sacrificing spring salad mix plantings in the greenhouse. Now I plant greenhouse tomatoes in May, letting go of the chase for early harvests in exchange for bigger volumes of spring salads. The same goes on the tail end of summer, when I’m less likely to let older summer crops linger because I covet the bed space for winter plantings.
Sometimes I think about what I would do with more space so I wasn’t always crunched for what we can grow, but the reality is that I love the puzzle as much as any other part of the farming operation. We expand slowly, adding a few beds every year or two and learning to adjust our workloads and routines to encompass them. I have high hopes for one more high tunnel, which is probably in the cards for this summer. With that additional bed space, I should be able to produce earlier hot crops without sacrificing spring production, and also maintain more volume of things that are now single plantings like cucumbers and beans by doing a second, early summer planting to produce after the spring plantings peter out.
We’re producing more food than we ever have at any point of the year, and I’m enjoying the challenge of managing increased production and the cascading changes in harvest, processing and sales that come with it. Having the cold storage trailer is a complete game-,changer that increases our quality and gives me more flexibility with harvest and planning.
Each year we make upgrades to equipment and practices as time and money allow. It’s an incremental process that I’ve come to treasure as a core part of my life that keeps things fresh and exciting. As we edge towards summer, I’m already excited for the challenge, but also for my plans for next spring, because hope springs eternal. As always, much love and great success to you on your journey!