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Stephen OldfieldAI & transformation · operator & builder

Land · Grow

Garden and Grow System

Thirty-seven crops run like infrastructure — plant cards, daily logs, weather intelligence, and a season that doesn't negotiate.

The crop wheel: 36 crops on one yearA ring of twelve months. Each crop is an arc from sowing to the end of its harvest window; the harvest months are drawn thick. Oct is lit as the current month.ACTUAL CAPTURE · 37 PLANT CARDSJanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec36cropsone year
Fig. 01 — The crop wheel: 36 crops on one year, from the plant cards. Thin: sown to first harvest. Thick: the harvest window. Oct is lit. Actual capture, 2026-09-30; one card (thyme) has no window yet.

The operation

The garden runs thirty-seven crops — orchard fruit and berries, a full vegetable rotation, herbs, and the flowers that earn their keep as companions. Zone 5b/6a, central Massachusetts: last frost in early May, first frost in late September, about 140 growing days if the weather keeps its side of the bargain. It rarely does, which is the point of running it as a system.

The system

Every crop has a card: when it starts indoors, when it transplants, spacing, expected yield, what pests to scout for, which companions it wants. The tomato card knows to start seeds March 15, transplant May 20 at 24-inch spacing, watch for hornworm and blight, and keep basil and marigold nearby. Multiply that by thirty-seven and the garden stops depending on my memory — which, in the years I was also running an organisation full time, was the only way it survived.

Around the cards sit the supporting systems: daily observation logs per crop, a weather intelligence feed that watches the forecast against the frost calendar, a planting calendar cross-checked against the Farmers' Almanac, and a dashboard that answers the only question that matters on a Tuesday evening: what needs doing today.

There are also eight Rhode Island Reds. The coop went in over the winter, and eggs turn out to be the gateway drug of provision — the shortest possible distance between "we raise this" and "we eat this."

What it's really for

Two things. The obvious one: a household that feeds itself a little more every year. The less obvious one: this garden is the working prototype for the growing-systems company I'm building — every plant card, season calendar, and care task gets pressure-tested here before it becomes product. The garden is the lab.

Honest ledger: bed mapping, soil workflow, and harvest tracking aren't built yet. The system tells me so every time I open the dashboard — it refuses to pretend it knows what it doesn't, which is a design decision I've come to respect in tools and people alike.