Earth Day Garden Investments

Painters love painting but writers love to have written. 

So, where does that leave gardeners? It's full tilt spring this week and, baby, I'm rearing to bust out of this winter hole I've been cooped up in. Nobody loves the idea of and having gardened more than me. And yet, it takes a deliberate act of gardening. Is it harvest time yet? I'm not sure I'm cut out for this.

In my typical devotion to the ideas of doing stuff more than the actual doings of the stuff, I have finally trained my little green thumblings this winter to perform a few small acts of doing-- not just the paralysis of analysis that I normally succumb to.

In preparation for spring, I've poured my heart and soul into fathering about two dinky dinner-sized portions of crops inside my window garden.This week, I introduced them into their new habitat.

Day 1 - the idea is planted. Kale, spinach, radishes, lettuce, and other stuff I can't remember.

Gardening must be an endurance sport, and I must have been born a sprinter.

My new year's goal was to turn my entire postage stamp-size back yard into a salad as far as the eye can see and then eat one big salad per day. Salad is what my friend Patrick calls "poor man's EPO". I think my buddy Tim Van Orden would agree, who's won 9 U.S. trail titles fueled primarily by salad and liquid salad (smoothies) and his calves aren't wimpy.

Where does a vegan get his protein? He must eat his own hairy drumstick-looking legs. Yummy.

I'm taking my next gardening strategy from the playbook of professional garden-neglector Mark Shepherd. He's coined the "S.T.U.N." design technique. S.T.U.N. stands for shear, total, and utter neglect. Mark talks convincingly about how we silly moderners tend to waste our efforts trying to kill the stuff that wants to live and trying to make live the stuff that wants to die. This is part of the reason why it takes an average of 10 calories of fossil fuels to yield 1 calorie of food on your plate. Things that are unsustainable, like conventional farming, are quite good at automatically stumbling into the awareness that they are no longer sustained. 

If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let 'em go, because man, they're gone.

-Jack Handy

Meanwhile, Mark's having amazing success doing industrial-scale farming in a way that's far more harmonious with my/his desire to be lazy. These kinds of reduced input systems also happen to be a prerequisite of any economic activity vying for relevance on a planet suffering the ramifications predicted by peak oil. Things that require lots of inputs are failing as we speak and will continue to fail at an accelerating pace.

Basically, what I plan on doing is filling my mouth completely with seeds for nine minutes so the seeds can take in all the information they need about me. Then, I'll walk around barefoot or maybe even butt-friggin naked in the yard planting under the moonlight wherever my drool lands. I couldn't get more lazy.

The weakest plants will have to compete against the plethora of weeds and stuff that have already claimed their home there. Many of these so-called weeds happen to be dandelions, which make excellent salads in themselves. If my designed salad ingredients die, they have only cost me nine minutes of sudoku time. But if they live, I just may be reaping an endorsement deal from the Hidden Valley or Newman's Own's triathlon team.

So, concluding thought-- if you want a gardening technique to have a very high efficiency, then you either need to hope and pray and rain dance for really large outputs (harvests) or else limit investments to nearly-zero inputs. Remember--

Efficiency = Output / Input.

Mathematically, the investment is a no-brainer. As the denominator approaches zero...that is, as my investment approaches an act of drooling on the ground, then my gardening efficiency approaches infinity!!!! And infinity is what I demand on all of my investments.