By otakuyassine3@gmail.com 
Casey O’Neill is a farmer and owner of Happy Day Farms in Laytonville, Calif. The opinions expressed in this column are not those expressed by The Mendocino Voice.
This first week of October (which feels more like Aug-tober) has been tough to handle with the heat. Everything seems to happen at the same time when it gets this hot: water issues, tender crops need extra irrigation, animals need extra checking, and I become overheated and irritable. Valley folk talk about the cool nights that offset the warm days, but here on the hill it has stayed between 64 and 74 degrees each night for the past week.
The flip side of the warm weather is that another flush of tomatoes is ripening well on the vines, peppers are banging, and the beleaguered squash plants have been flushing hard despite their sorry appearance. Cannabis is ripening up fast with the heat, and there have been a slew of 5 a.m. harvest mornings, headlamps bobbing and clippers flashing in the starlight.
Those early morning harvests are one of the things I treasure most about our lives as farmers. The extra effort to bring in the crop before the sun touches it, the camaraderie of shared work, the cool(ish) morning air and the slowly breaking dawn that lights the sky with colors.
Terpene production in plants rises during the night after the day’s work of photosynthesis, peaking just before daybreak. The plants stand at attention, leaves stretched out, turgid trichomes glistening as though with sweat. I love the morning harvest because the herb is in prime condition, and will be hung on the drying racks well before any wilting or degradation from heat or sun. I am also comfortable, working away in my old button-down long sleeve shirt to avoid the skin irritant from the rubbing leaves and stems on my forearms.
Growing herb is no longer the simple thing it once was. Wrapped up in the journey are all sorts of feelings, from joy and abundance to sadness and loss. Frustration with bad government policy and the difficulties of our North Coast communities weighs on me, as do the realities of navigating the bureaucracy and marketplace. I keep thinking about what it would be like to be able to sell herb on my regular farmers’ market table, like all the other agricultural products our farm produces.
This has not been an easy year by any stretch of the imagination, and as we edge into fall I reflect on the pain points and difficulties, but also on the learnings and lessons that have made us more capable and more efficient.
Despite the heat, we have continued with our plantings of fall brassica, cooking greens, root crops and salad mixes. Yesterday the final round of cabbage and broccoli went out, planted during the heat of the day because that was the only time we could find to do it. As soon as the plants went in, we watered heavily, and as we moved down the row I pulled the insect netting and 50% shade cloth over them so they spent minimal time in direct sunlight after they went into the warm, moist soil.
Shade cloth has been an absolute lifesaver this summer, one of those indispensable tools that leaves me wondering how I went so many years without its regular use. The cabbages and broccolis remained standing happily at attention despite the heat, with no wilting or sadness evinced. I was surprised, having figured that it was a bad gamble at best to plant in this heat, but such are the decisions we make during harvest.
The juggling of harvest and planting, the end of one season juxtaposed with the beginning of the next is a constant in farming, yet is always felt most acutely this time of year. In past years, everything else just went to the back burner as we worked to bring in the cannabis crop, but I found that my winter lineup suffered, and I had little to sell at markets during the dark months. Despite the extra workload, which I fit in sometimes with the grace of learned efficiency and sometimes with the desperation of sheer will, I am deeply excited for the coming suite of winter crops which looks to be far more abundant than anything we’ve been able to produce in years past.
Something is always bound to fall off the plate, and I learned a hard lesson this week when we realized that we were critically low on water. I went down to the ag pond to check on the pumps and found two of the three stranded high and dry by the rapidly dropping water levels. In the center, the pond was still six feet deep, just over my head as I worked to move the floating dock and pump assemblies further out into the water.
Water is life, and never felt more so than during an Aug-tober heat spell at the end of a long season. With more than 30 beds of cool weather crops, tender salad mixes and other, non-heat loving varietals, cool water is the difference between success and failure in this sprint to the finish. It’s been touch-and-go, and will remain so, though with predicted cooling this week my natural optimism soars. As always, much love and great success to you on your journey!
Share this content: