O’Neill: Shoulder season: ripping out beds to replace with starts straining for ground

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 [email protected].

Ah fall, my old friend returned! Each season holds some of my favorite things; fall brings the abundance of harvest, the skunkfruitroleum smells of cannabis flowers ripening, shortening days and crisp nights. The leaves are already changing, acorns are dropping, and I feel my body shifting towards the slowdown of winter, desiring more rest, more time for reading and reflection. 

I’m tired after a long summer that held the usual heavy workload of prepping, planting and harvesting, with the addition of consistent Farmers Market Friday visits to the Bay Area. Learning to balance farming with being on the road this much has stretched my capacities in both good and difficult ways. I’m deeply excited for this new growth in our ability to get the full range of our production to dispensary customers, representing ourselves in the way we always dreamed about before regulation. 

Despite the excitement, burnout is also real and needs careful management for any farmer, and especially for those of us who run year-round. With the arrival of fall comes the necessary preparation and planting to make sure we have abundant winter crops for our cold season market tables. The propagation house is absolutely maxed with trays of starts that are coming on and will transition out on planting days each week. Salad mixes are overtaking the summer hoophouse beds and heading brassica are straining at their small pots as we clear space for them from fading squash zones. 

It’s always tricky to navigate the shoulder seasons when we’re maxed out on bed space but have starts that need to go out. It’s also the most productive way for us to farm because we don’t allow anything to linger; when production drops off we clear the bed and replant. To this end, we ripped out one of the rows of greenhouse tomatoes much earlier than usual because the plants went to hell and were no longer producing well. Being able to make these difficult calls is a key part of what makes a small farm able to maintain year-round production levels. 

This week we’ll begin the cannabis harvest that brings a lot of joy because of the culmination of so many months of care and the resulting quality of harvest. Everything looks amazing, and we’re chomping at the bit to get started but are holding for the plants to achieve full maturity. My excitement is double because every row of cannabis that comes out is another row of space available for winter plantings that will be occupied by brassica or direct-seeded with salad mixes, cooking greens and tender root crops. 

I learned in the last couple of years that it doesn’t make much sense to try to use the Paperpot system in the cannabis beds because the root masses are so entrenched that it’s difficult to prep the beds to the softness that is needed to pull the transplanter through without it binding up or clogging. Direct seeding runs on a slower timeline than transplanting but has the benefit that all I have to worry about is covering the beds to prevent birds and then irrigating effectively with sprinklers that promote even germination and solid growth. 

Using the Jang JP-1 Precision Seeder works great after we harvest, roll up the nets, stack the cages and cut the stumps off at the soil surface. This leaves the root masses to decay over the winter and build soil, while the quick winter crops at dense seeding rates will soak up any leftover nutrients and produce abundant harvests in time for the holidays and on through into January. Some of the longer-running kales, collards, bok choy and chard will produce reliably through the end of February and into March when they start to blow out and go to seed. 

We’re making crucial updates to our cover crop and winter crop practices because of changes in climate and cannabis planting schedules. I used to figure that I could do either a cover crop or a winter vegetable run, but with later cannabis planting dates and tighter plantings there is more time, and we’ve been having a big gap after spring prep when the beds just sit under occultation tarps while the microbial populations languish without growing roots providing exudates to support them. 

Our new strategy is to double up on the winter run, sowing an early vegetable crop that will be followed by cover crop seed broadcast into the remains of the blown-out crop in early March, or an early cover crop run from which we’ll do the full bed prep and then replant with early spring vegetable crops.

Being able to maximize winter production and cover crop plantings didn’t work in the old days when we planted full-term cannabis in May, but now that we’re planting clones later in June and into July, it creates the space for additional food production while maximizing the time that living plants occupy the beds and help maintain the living soil that does all the work. Each year we learn more as we refine our methods, and that’s a huge part of the fun. As always, much love and great success to you on your journey!