Everything is gardening

0. surely you jest

No, really. I promise. Getting good at gardening makes you good at life. I, personally, have made two gardeners. I think it teaches you things about interacting with the world that bend you towards success.

1. nothing is ever finished

Your house. Your project car. Your roadmap at work. Your relationship with your parents (trust me this doesn’t stop when one party leaves this mortal coil, ask me how I know). Et cetera. The sooner you understand this as a universal truth - a thing that just is, the happier you will be.

2. some things don’t want to live

This is not your fault, cannot be helped, and is generally not worth devoting your time to. There will be other plants. There will be other projects. There will be other relationships.

3. pruning helps

Many plants benefit from regular trims/removals/injury. Sometimes, the optimal growth strategy is aggressive haircuts. Human growth is complicated and messy. There are parts of your life that were supposed to be eaten by deer. You don’t need them.

4. use system interactions and the environment to your advantage

We’re gonna sort of talk about computer security for a minute, but it’ll be accessible, I promise.

Permaculture guilds are possibly one of the most powerful concepts in gardening: planting symbiotic collections together to do everything from nitrogen fixing for heavy extractors like fruit trees to the myriad indigenous “Three Sisters” methods.

Less is more, and it’s your space you should know about it. Where are the dark corners? Where do things grow outside your watchful eye? How can you encourage useful things to grow there instead, without your attention?

How do your systems interact? What do you see all the time? How is that doing? If that part of your yard (or project, or…) takes that much attention, what would you need to do everything?

Is that a sane amount of resources? How can you lower it? Are there symbiotic behaviors, or incentives, or outcomes you can leverage to create a “guild” to solve this problem?

You cannot defeat weeds by pulling weeds. Your strategy must transcend individual plants.

5. sometimes you do need to pull weeds though

Acacia, ivy, laurel, blackberry, mint….the list goes on. There are plenty of things that are probably already in your yard that will take over if you are not careful.

They are, however, constrained by being plants. They require minimum conditions to grow, still grow at plant speed, and will always commit the most energy to the path of least resistance. You can push them back to manageable, but you must remain vigilant.

The best defense is to locally outcompete them. Make the spaces they aren’t in, inhospitable to them.

6. tool maintenance matters more than tools

Crappy pruning shears regularly sharpened are better than gold-plated titanium Plant Chopper 3000s that are never maintained.

7. eventually, you will need a plan/vision

it turns out, haphazard piecemeal gardening does not infinite-typewriter-monkey fart out functional low-maintenance guilds at a high rate.

Eventually, you will need to sit down and have some kind of idea of where you’re at, and where you’re going. A seasonal plan is unfortunately in your future, but always start with vision. The human mind was not meant to perceive temporality and talking about calendars is universally demoralizing. You need a powerful carrot to get you through repeated strikes from the Stick of Time.

However, due to Point #1, nothing is ever finished so you will need to find the equilibrium point that works for you (or your project, or your organization, or….).

Good luck!