HappyDay: Surviving the Heat Wave

Casey O’Neill is a cannabis and food farmer in Mendocino County who has been writing newsletters about his efforts to provide sustainable produce and marijuana. We feature his column once a week.

   The heat is oppressive, testing my endurance and requiring all of my strategies to mitigate and manage. Under my hat I keep a wet towel on my head with ice cubes on top of it. I soak the old cotton button-down that I wear as an outer layer to protect the skin of my forearms. The damp collar keeps my neck cool and the towel adds moisture as the ice slowly melts. I put ice, lemon juice and electrolytes in my water bottles and guzzle liberally. Even so, some days it is not enough.

     Yesterday was perhaps the hottest day I can remember as a farmer. We started early in a vain attempt to beat the heat, harvesting the abundant garlic crop and hauling it to the barn at the ranch. I was worried that we’d waited too long to harvest, but despite enough gopher damage to cost about an 8th of the harvest, we had our biggest and best haul yet. Last fall we expanded the beds with help from friends and lots of compost, and the efforts paid off with massive heads of beautiful garlic.

      To expand the beds we harvested pine and fir poles that were encroaching on the oak woodlands below the garden at brother Lito’s. The poles made for a bulwark on the slope, holding up the beds and allowing for a wider terrace that we layered compost and amendments onto, forked, raked,  planted and mulched for the winter. I fed with chicken pellets once in the early spring, and we irrigated a handful of times through late May and early June. I was hopeful for a good harvest, but the garlic had waited in the ground for longer than I would have liked, and I was grateful to see that it had held up beautifully.

     We finished at 9:40 in the morning, but we were all sweating profusely and glad to be done. This is the one time of year when we don’t benefit from the properties of inversion. We get warmer air coming up from the valleys as the cool air runs downhill, which means it’s often warmer in the winter on the hill than down below. We also get the coastal breezes most of the time, which keeps us cooler than the valley during the day, but we don’t cool off as much at night because of the inversion layer.

     As I sit writing in the dawn light, it’s well over 80 degrees in the house and the thermometer on the porch reads 78. We sleep outside on top of the grape pergola attached to the south side of the house, and this is the only way that life is bearable. I’ll soon head out to choring, feeding and watering animals at the ranch and then coming back to hand water thirsty crops that need more than the drip irrigation can provide to keep them thriving when it’s this hot and dry.

     The animals struggle in the heat; we make sure they have access to fresh, clean, cool water every morning and afternoon, and we fill wallows for the pigs. Everyone hunkers down in the shade and moves little, except at dawn and dusk. We humans become similar, trying to nap and do administrative tasks inside during the hottest part of the day after lunch. It is somewhat successful, but when the heat stays for days in a row the house becomes unbearable and I take to wandering the gardens listlessly, checking on crops and watering as needed.

     Some crops excel in this heat so long as they receive plenty of water. Full season cannabis plants are booming, growing visibly each day. My Grandpa always used to say that on nights with temps above 70 degrees, the cannabis never stops growing, and we’re seeing the results in this heat wave. Lito hit all the herb with compost tea just before the heat spell began, and the plants are really thriving! Squash, peppers, sunflowers, basil and other warm weather crops are also stunning, while cabbages and the remains of the broccoli crop limp along, their cool weather constitutions struggling in the heat.

     Hyper consistent watering from overhead sprinklers, along with a 50×30 piece of shade cloth stretched across the whole area is keeping salad mixes cool-ish so that they are productive and not bitter, but it’s touch and go and I’ll have to taste test before harvest tomorrow. Summer salads are a key part of our diet and our market plan this time of year, but heat like this makes it real tough to manage.

     The volumes of water that we’re using wouldn’t have been possible without the successful installation of the new pumps in the irrigation pond which were paid for by a grant we got from CDFW. Without this additional pump capacity, we’d be draining our backup tanks. I’m not sure how we’d be managing that stress with this heat wave so I feel a deep sense of gratitude for the assistance in helping our farm adapt to hotter, drier weather. The temps are supposed to drop by a couple degrees today, and every little bit helps. We’ll be working to keep everything alive and thriving as best as possible, and as always, much love and great success to you on your journey!