Mendocino County Farmers Share Their Thoughts on Spring

Vickie and Mike Brock
Brock Farm, Boonville
Spring is so uplifting after the sleepy winter, flowers and blossoms blooming, everything is abuzz. Time to get off your butt and catch it. Now the work really begins.

Carissa Chineff and Ella Hanson
Forget-me-not Flowers, Laytonville
Ella: Spring is all about the trials and tribulations of the seasons, the process of waking up from a long winter sleep and visions taking hold and blooming into fully realized actions.
Carissa: During the winter months, I’m constantly on the hunt for signs that spring is coming. I’m scooting aside leaves and grass, hoping to find the tiny evidence that the bulbs haven’t been sucked down by ground dwelling critters. When spring arrives, so does the thrill of watching the thousands of new seedlings that are about to burst with growth. It signals a time of fresh, new life.

Blaire, Daniel, and Aedyn AuClair
Folk Life Farm, Covelo
We are excited about spring lambs and spring brassicas.

Rita Bates
The Apple Farm, Philo
I love how surprised I am at my enthusiasm every year when spring is on the horizon, and I get so giddy about shopping for seeds and popping them in the dirt. Never seems to matter how zeroed out I was from the end of apple season just a couple months before. Plus the fruit tree blossoms never get old!

Ruthie King
School of Adaptive Agriculture, Willits
Spring! Dormant perennial grasses shooting up out of the ground, using their stored energy to grow new solar panels and push sugar out of their roots, feeding the microbes … Spring for my flock means fast rotation in portable fencing over lush green grass, lambs jumping and playing, and shearing season for the woolies who grow renewable fiber that pulls carbon out of the atmosphere, building it into soil.

Pam Laird
Blue Meadow Farm, Philo
I love the emerald nearly neon-green of spring. New life bursting out of the soil! I come alive as well. Such a time of promise, but this year tinged with anxiety that we may not get enough rain.

Rachel Britten
Mendocino Grain Project
What’s different for me this year is the scale of field preparations. Almost everything we do is dry farmed, so the weather in the spring is critical and especially interesting in the era of climate change. So right now is our planting window and it will be a sprint. I’m looking forward to getting acreage planted and growing.

Kyle & Mel Forrest Burns
Nye Ranch, Fort Bragg
All winter we anticipate those early blooming flowers on our farm and the coastal headlands around us. They’re the sweetest symbol for the most exciting and physically challenging time of the year for a regenerative small farm!