A Fool and His Garden... Or Something Like That...

“Fools ignore complexity.  Pragmatists suffer it.  Some can avoid it.  Geniuses remove it.”
--Alan Perlis, Epigrams in Programming

Gardening in the 21st century is an exercise in programming rather touchy liveware.  We misdoubt much that Alan Perlis, the first winner of the Touring award for advances in computer programming, would know one end of a shovel from the other, but his advice to programmers rings true for gardeners, as well.  Simplify, simplify!

The size and scope of practically any book on the market regarding urban homesteading, urban farming, backyard vegetable raising, square-foot gardening, or any other system or nomenclature you care to use, suggests that there are an infinity of issues involved in growing one’s own food.  This is an inescapable truth, made only more mind-boggling by things like climate change, land degradation, water, air and light pollution, urban heat sinks, and whatever the Kardashians may be up to these days. 

“Keeping it simple” has seemingly never been harder.

However, there are a few guidelines we have come to live by over the past five years of attempting to recreate our grandparents’ idyllic country homes here in the middle of the city.  We hope you find them either useful or at least mildly entertaining:

Don’t bother experimenting.  Just dive in to full production, and adapt on the fly.  We have noticed that those projects where we just dabbled, like our first attempt at water collection, were too timid by half, and have had to be redone entirely.  100 gallons of water in barrels is nowhere near enough to maintain a full scale half-acre garden, and we are totally redesigning the gutters on the roof and the outlets from which they drain accordingly. 

We would have been better off just going for broke and hooking the whole thing up to our pond from the get go.  The pond, meanwhile, is not an experiment, it is a completely nutty idea that we just said “What the heck, let’s do it” about, and it is fast becoming one of the better decisions we made – it will provide all the water for our garden this year, and will keep our bees cool througout our brutal Texas summers.

The amaranth which is the pride of our garden from May to November is another example of our having skipped any empirical research and gone straight into production – we just dove in and planted it everywhere, and the results speak for themselves.  We have tasty greens for the six months out of the year when our neighbors are paying the most outrageous prices for greenhouse greens or, worse yet, trucked in greens from cooler climates.

Anything worth doing is only worth doing as well as you have to.  Put another way, don’t try to make anything in your garden perfect – the best garden, like the best manufacturing process, or the best sports team, or the best computer network, train system, school of fish, etc. – is not the one with the best individual parts, it is the one with the best relationships between the parts. 

In other words, a crooked row here or there, a few more weeds, a few extra bugs in your tomatoes, or a few more dried branches on your perennial herbs – really, any little blemish – is not nearly so important as the overall theme of “how does the whole thing look and feel?” 

The best example of this is weeding – getting all the “non-edible” plants out of your vegetable beds sounds like a good idea when an expert tells you to do it, and they put all sorts of justifications for it in their big hardcover books which sell for $29.99 at Barnes and Noble, but… they’re wrong.  Leave the weeds.  If you do anything to them, cover them up with dead leaves and such.  At worst, pull them and feed them to your livestock.

The healthiest soil is soil that is allowed to be a living, breathing system, and so-called weeds are part of that system.

Don’t give up too soon.  About the time you feel so hot and dry in the middle of a Texas drought that you say, “The heck with this!  I’m not even bothering with a fall garden!” is abou the time that you need to be putting in a fall garden, because you’ll invariably end up with the sweetest, most nutritious fall veggies you’ve ever had, right when your neighbors are paying through the nose for bland, flavorless imports from parts unknown.

Yes, it can be frustrating, but slogging through is just about always worth it.  We discovered this last fall when we were ready to pull up our tomato plants, which had somehow survived the brutal summer, but were not putting out any fruit… we were too lazy to get around to actually pulling them up out of the ground, though, and the end result was some rather tasty tomatoes around Christmas time.

We currently have a wide variety of winter goodies growing – fava beans, several kinds of spinach, kale, lettuce, chard, kohlrabi, broccoli, carrots – but we also have some other things growing, too.  Sunflowers.  Sunflowers?  Yes, sunflowers.  Who knows whether they’ll actually bloom, or if winter weather will intrude sometime in the next few weeks to kill them off, but either way, they have been a fun trap crop to watch as our tender winter greens have struggled to get going, and other than the initial effort of scattering the seed, the sunflowers haven’t actually cost us anything.

In a similar vein, we intend to scatter “lazy” crops throughout the garden this spring.  None lazier than amaranth, we might add, which will probably grow all over the yard whether we do anything about it or not, since the seed was scattered far and wide, willy-nilly, this last summer/fall.  That’s as it should be.  Masanobu Fukuoka would be proud, even if messrs. Perlis and Touring would be utterly befuddled.  And we are 100% certain they would not want to hear our theories about “debugging” either.  But to each his own, we suppose.

Happy farming!