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 coffee is hot and good in the predawn light. Fall time cometh, and we’re gathering in the abundance. This morning I’ll head to Pops’ for processing day. We’ll make pepper jelly, finish canning a batch of ketchup and grate zucchini to freeze for winter batches of muffins. Rows of jars already line the shelves in the kitchen of my childhood home, a testament to the efforts of summer and a prayer for winter meals flavored with stored sunshine.
As the seasons transit, I change how I sow seeds. The last round of brassica seeds are sprouting, cabbages that will last us through the winter for fresh eating and making into sauerkraut, and a hopeful batch of cauliflower that is a bit of a gamble. Farming in the winter here is always a crapshoot; I know that there will be a few deep cold snaps that cause crop loss, but I never know when they will be. Sometimes it’s December, sometimes February, sometimes not at all. So I plant successions to march through the winter and figure I may lose some of them.
I hedge my bets by covering the heading crops with a heavy frost blanket if a cold snap comes. Cauliflower and broccoli are especially susceptible to hard freezes when they are in the process of heading up. The large heads that freeze can rot, although the plants themselves are deeply cold hardy and don’t mind multiple frosts. I need worry only about deep freezes in the last couple of weeks before harvest, so I shake the dice with each planting and figure it will mostly work out.
Winter farming is a gambler’s paradise, lots of chances to win an easy run of ultra tasty harvests, but with a strong possibility of crapping out at least once along the way. As fall arrives, I’ll stick to sowing seeds every two weeks so that there is always something fresh and ready to go, focusing on the hardy Asian greens (Tokyo Bekana, tatsoi, purple choy, mizuna, bok choy), lettuces, arugula, salad turnips, beets, scallions and radishes.
I’m trialing a new method of transplanting carrots using the Paperpot system because I’ve had terrible trouble with bugs eating my freshly germinated seedlings when I direct sow. If it works, then I’ll be doing far more carrots in the future. From what I understand, transplanted carrots are more likely to grow crooked and weird instead of perfectly straight, but I figure funny looking carrots are as much a part of the fun of farming as anything else, and if I can produce them reliably I’ll be ecstatic.
Nothing beats a winter carrot (and winter crops in general) because freezing weather causes the plant to synthesize more sugars as a cold defense strategy. Sugar water freezes at lower temperatures than regular water, so plants make more sugars to fend off the cold, and we get to enjoy their sweet, crisp flavors. This is why winter kales, collards and other cooking greens are so lovely.
Casey O’Neill owns and runs HappyDay Farms, a small vegetable and cannabis farm north of Laytonville. He is a long time cannabis policy advocate, and was born and raised in the Bell Springs area. The preceding has been an editorial column. The Mendocino Voice has not necessarily fact-checked or copyedited this work, and it should be interpreted as the words of the author, not necessarily reflecting the opinions of The Mendocino Voice.