A Time to Reap and to Sow for Local Farms : Agriculture: There’s no rest in Ventura County, where three crops a year are coaxed from the soil. Peppers are harvested as parsley is planted.

Peppers are out and celery is in. But we’re not talking the latest trends in tastes; we’re talking harvesting and planting.

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For fall in Ventura County means that peppers, onions, tomatoes, the last of the lemons and avocados and some oranges are being picked and plucked for markets here and abroad.

While growers in the nation’s Farm Belt hustle to harvest their crops before the ground freezes in the fall, leaving their land to lie fallow through the winter, there is no rest in Ventura County, where farmers coax three crops a year from the fertile soil.

Here, they are planting lettuce, endive, kale, cabbage, broccoli, bok choy, spinach and parsley.

“You name it, we grow it,” said Dave Clark, manager at one of the county’s largest vegetable growers, Boskovich Farms of Oxnard. “We’re one of the few places in the nation that can grow year-round.”

Farmers are also preparing the ground for strawberries, a $129-million crop last year and the second-largest crop in the county. Growers are spreading out huge tarps of plastic, fumigating the land and bedding up the fields before they poke the small berry plants into the ground.

And while some growers are picking oranges, others are tearing up their groves, having been squeezed out of the orange market by imports from South America, Europe and Florida, said Chris Taylor, vice president of farming at Limoneira, the largest grower, packer and shipper in Ventura County.

“We’ve pulled out hundreds of acres of oranges,” he said. “It was costing us more to grow fruit and harvest it than we were getting on the return.” He plans to put either lemons or avocados on the acreage.

Valencia oranges were a $42-million crop in Ventura County last year.

But the markets are fluid from year to year and the crops change with the vagaries of the market, said Bob Tobias, operations manager of Mission Produce, which packs and ships fruit for 1,400 growers from San Diego to Morro Bay.

“When I grew up, we raised walnuts where the lemons are now,” he said.

The harvest of lemons, the county’s leading crop, worth $198 million last year, is 99% complete. But the fruit is still being shipped to market, having been stored through the summer.

“Our unique climate in Ventura County is marvelous because fruit has a longer shelf life here,” said Carolyn Leavens, a lemon and avocado grower.

Shipping them at a steady pace throughout most of the year helps keep the price steady.

Avocados, a $69-million crop last year, are mostly off the trees. But that harvest, like lemons, continues to some extent all year-round.

Growers like to keep some on the tree as long as possible to avoid flooding the market in early summer and leaving it barren of avocados in the fall.

“They store better on the tree,” Leavens said. “And our fairly benign climate here allows that, unless we get a nasty east wind.”

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Other growers who were in the Medfly quarantine area waited to harvest their avocados until after the quarantine was lifted, avoiding the necessity for extra pesticide applications to satisfy federal regulators.

While the most popular variety, the Hass, is mostly in, the harvest for a winter variety called the Reed is just beginning.

“They love them on the East Coast,” Leavens said.

But that isn’t the only obscure variety of avocados grown in the county, said Tobias, who is also a Ventura County grower.

“We do all sorts of varieties, most of which you have never heard of,” he said.

November will bring another round of harvests in the county, with the new crop of avocados ripening and much of the celery being pulled out of fields, said Rex Laird, executive director of the Ventura County Farm Bureau.

“The first big market for celery is for Thanksgiving for stuffing,” Laird said.

But the biggest harvest of the area comes in the spring, when the strawberries are being picked, as well as lemons, more celery and all the vegetable crops, Laird said.

“It’s the second wave,” he said.

Then it’s on to the summer harvest, and it’s out with the last of the berries, more lemons and avocados, the zucchini, corn and tomatoes.

Most of the tomatoes grown in the county shipped out by the truckload at the end of summer are not destined for the family salad, Laird said.

They are grown for “product,” as they say in the industry. They are small, with thick skins and are harvested by machine.

“They’re designed to wind up in Pace picante sauce in San Antonio, Texas,” he said.