Josh Mayfield
@joshmayfield
regen market grower plant breeder + ecology & built environment
The workloads might be crushing, but at least we have tomatoes! Summer harvests are really coming in now, yet I’m already transplanting our first fall crops, and need to clear out some weedy plots before I can sow the fall/winter carrots 😅
My butternuts are looking great so far. No spray No till No fert (yet) No plasticulture No weeds (just a little clover) Hoping for 1-1.5k lbs from this patch, which would put it on par with a good conventional butternut crop.
I only transplanted these butternuts 28 days ago. With the first male flowers opening in 1-2 days, I’ll be harvesting the first squash just 80 days after transplanting. Screaming fast for a butternut!
Scenes from the farm this morning. Details in the alt text. We’re starting to fall behind on some tasks, but hopefully cooler (still warmer than normal) temps this week help us get more done.
Big basil harvest today, the first peppers (shishitos), and more romas and Black Angel tomatoes. Big tomato harvest coming next week!
A good time to solarize for the next three days. These beds will become fall/winter leeks, and this solarization will kill the problematic nutsedge and even the nematodes in the very top layer of soil. Cover crop to follow that I’ll terminate and plant the leeks into.
I was planning on tossing this lettuce, never thought it would be palatable with temps up near 90F every day. But it stayed sweet and gave us a big harvest for market last weekend! Variety is ‘Milagro’, a great summer lettuce and an even better fall lettuce.
Low yields on the garlic this year, perhaps planted too densely or late. And a terrible allium leaf miner infestation. I’ll be scaling down garlic planting this fall, but see if I can get yields up. Something always seems to go wrong with garlic, it never does as well as it should.
Rambling about summer cover crops. Overall, I’m a big fan, and I’m going to try to get almost a quarter acre planted next week where spring veg are coming out, to create a nice mulch for fall veg.
🌱 Morning glories are native here and can be one of the more problematic weeds, but I sure do like them! They tend to be a little bit smaller, this might be the biggest one I’ve seen.
Here’s what they’ll look like in 12 days! Netting keeps squash bugs and vine borers off as long as possible. Otherwise, we can easily get three generations of squash bugs in one season. I’d love to skip it, but my trap crops haven’t done well enough this year.
Squash seem to benefit from a little extra protection when transplanted in heat like this. The rye cover crop mulch does the trick.
No till carrots sown in March. Averaging 8" long with 2' greens. I’m having to cut half the greens off just to get them in our market bins!
It’s time to terminate the sorghum-sundangrass and iron clay cowpeas. Actually, it’s about 10 days early, but I want to solarize some weeds, bean beetles, and grasshoppers. Loving this mix, lots of biomass and no galling on the roots from nematodes.
I ended up hanging some welded wire fencing from our garage rafters, and I’m curing onions on that. Thanks to a fan we bought most of them are already pretty dry. The saga of my first year growing onions is about over, thanks to everyone who lent their advice along the way!
🌱 this might be my biggest onion this year, almost six inches in diameter.
Happy Friday! Here’s a carrot. Now time for a nap to recover from this month of a week.
Jericho romaine, a fantastic summer lettuce. Quickstar kohlrabi. Wish I’d grown more—surprisingly popular at market. Chinese cabbage, extremely popular. My beloved roasting peppers getting destroyed by grasshoppers. Impossible to control it seems, just have use netting until the plants mature a bit.
🌱 Overwintered red onion, started from seed on 9/30/25 and grown without frost cloth. This might be my favorite variety I grew this year, zero fuss. It’s a hybrid called Red Rock.
Summer cover is still looking good despite the drought. Looks like we’re going to have a week of straight rain, so things should really start popping around here.
Thinning Badger Flame beets this week. We’re selling these as baby beets to one of our chefs who raves about them.
A quarter acre of rye and clover under tarps now. My hope is that with good weed control and earlier cover crop varieties, I’ll be able to stop using tarps after two years on the new lots. Really would only like to using them when breaking new ground.
Three tarps down (just two shown here). Done crimping for the day, then another 6k ft2 on Sunday morning.
About 10,000 square feet of dusty rye to crimp today! Cover crop looks good here where the composted beds are, but very sparse further down. But tarps cover a multitude of transgressions, I like to say.
🌱 Big onions starting to come in! Weigh about a pound each (uncured). Seeing a little bulb splitting (maybe from the 2.5" [65mm] rain), so I don’t think they’ll be keepers.
Biggest issue I’m facing is our grasshopper problem. Almost a biblical-level population we have here. Anything direct-seeded is chomped, even if I put netting down. Twice monthly neem applications helping a bit, but I may need to research other control methods.