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.
August is the hardest month of the year, the time when cumulative exhaustion comes home to roost and summer burnout hits. This year feels different in that we’re right on the ball, caught up and feeling good about the farm. Last week we slaughtered the last batch of meat birds for the year, and yesterday we started our light dep harvest. By the end of this week we’ll be done with replant, which I think of as being over the peak and looking at the downhill sprint that ends in short, wet days with wood stoves, soup and books.
My rule is that I don’t start thinking about cool, rainy days until August. Start too early and burnout is guaranteed, so I force myself to stay focused through July, but now I let my mind wander to the inevitable change of the seasons ahead. It helps that we’re sowing cool weather crops, seeds of broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, cooking greens, salad mixes and root crops that all contain hints of fall in their whisperings of future growth.
To farm is to live with one foot mired deep in the results of past decisions, the other set firmly in present circumstances, and a head that holds thoughts of future production and hopes of perfect harvests. This combination is what keeps the dream alive, even as we pay the price of the labors we set in motion earlier in the year. I’m glad to be done with meat birds until next spring and have ideas and refinements for our process moving forward.
We’ve been perfectly on point with our planting schedules, nailing the seeding dates and getting trays of starts transplanted as soon as they were ready, which means our production lineup is exquisite despite the fact that tomatoes have still refused to cooperate. This is the latest we’ve ever gone without them producing, although the forecasted heat this coming week should push us into the first ripe Coeur De Boeuf’s out of the hoophouses. Striped Germans are still weeks out, the plants holding nothing but small, green orbs.
Last week we sowed the full round of seeds and planted out most of the previous set of starts, which means this week is more for maintenance, weeding, trellising and all the other myriad farm tasks that revolve around the basic cycles of sowing, planting and harvesting. On Wednesday we’ll slaughter three sheep, getting some meat for the freezers that will sustain us through the winter months.
Peppers need weeding and trellising, but the plants are healthy and happy, and we’re expecting a large but late crop that we’ll mostly turn into pepper jelly to share with our many friends and acquaintances out on the road of our sales trips. Usually we’re canning in August, but this year it looks more like September before we have enough abundance to exceed the demands of our market channels and overflow into processing.
This week will bring the need for lots of hand-watering of tender crops, all of which are under shade cloth of one kind or another. The 25% red shadecloth covers two of the vegetable tunnels and has been working out extremely well for salad mixes and cucumbers. Black 30% covers another vegetable tunnel along with the three rows just below it, and I have a final chunk of red for the 4th tunnel if I can get to it. There are an additional eight rows scattered through the garden which are covered with 50% shade for the first week after planting and then switched to 30% for the duration of the crop cycle.
Shade cloth does slow down crop growth a bit, but so does heat stress, so I figure that it probably balances out more or less, and it sure means less time and worry in the watering department. Summer salad mixes, arugula and mustard greens stay milder and more tender under the shade cloth, and combined with daily hand-watering remain highly salable for our market channels. Salad mix is one of my core passions, and it feels good to have abundant harvests in the lineup as we enter August, though we’ll see how it all holds up with the coming heat wave.
Overall, we’ve made some huge strides this year, managing to pull off a giant workload to get to this point. I’m alternating between excited and exhausted depending on time of day and caffeine intake, but we’re approaching a sustainable pathway for the rest of the season. Everything in farming depends on weather, and we’re nervous about the predictions for a “Super El Nino,” but we’re also calm in our processes and as ready as we can be for whatever that may mean. As always, much love and great success to you on your journey!