From the Fields - Wayne Bishop

By Wayne Bishop, Yuba County agritourism operator and farmer 

Weather is the most important factor in how well we do, and we had a nice, cool September—cool by September standards—so we had a good, solid year with a small amount of growth from past years.

The pumpkin crop was probably the best I ever had. I wish I had a few more customers to buy them all. In early September, I didn’t think I had enough fruit set on the vines, but it was an excellent crop. I always plant a little more than what I think I need because you never know when you’re going to have a problem. When it produces well, then I have extra. At least all my customers had a great selection right until the end.

We sell a fair amount (of the unsold pumpkins) for livestock feed. People come in and haul them out. But we have a short window of time to get that done. Then we disk the fields and plant our winter forage crops, which are harvested in the spring for feed for a local dairy. We’re finishing planting now. We don’t like to wait too long after Halloween to get started on that because you can get rain, and it makes it difficult to get those crops planted. 

We took part of our walnuts out last year. I took the Hartleys out. I just have Chandlers left. It’s not a lot of acreage, but we had a good crop this year. We just hope they’re worth something when all that gets worked out. We haven’t figured out what we will plant (in place of the Hartleys). We might grow more pumpkins. We’ve talked about planting apples as a U-pick crop. We’ll put our winter forage crop there in the meantime. We also grow some corn for silage in the summertime, so we might do that on that ground next summer while we think about it some more.