Fail Gardening Followups
Crash Early Crash Often?
Someone asked of my Fail Gardening post: “isn’t that Venkat’s thing? Crash early crash often?”
To which I reply, “now that you mention it, yes, and:
until like 80% of people are using this as their learning method*, it bears repeating.
‘fail fast’ and ‘crash early, crash often’ and ‘rapid prototyping’ are (I think) psychologically just a lot easier in software. Nobody needs to see you fail. The costs are literally time and only time. Physical domains have higher costs of failure—both perceived (the neighbors are judging me) and real (I bought these grow lights and everything died anyway, it would have been cheaper to just buy broccoli).
So the things I think are key in applying the ‘crash early, crash often’ mindset to meatspace in general, are:
Keep your financial and time inputs low. I believe that you can garden without buying anything except seeds. $45 gets you a variety of seeds.
If the neighbors are looking and you’re feeling embarrassed, tell them what you’re doing. “I haven’t gardened before, and I figure the best way to learn is by trying and failing.” Worst case they shrug. Best case, you’ve gotten one more person to adopt a rapid prototyping mindset. You haven’t used all 200 of your sugar snap pea seeds anyway, so maybe you can offer the rest to your neighbor.
There is also domain-specific information that can help some through know the right place to invest their financial and time inputs to get results (whether vegetables or knowledge), and help someone know whether they’re on the right track. I’ll refresh my punchlist for gardening—I would also love to read domain specific “guide on how to fail” essays from my friends in their meatspace arenas of expertise. So, key in applying the ‘crash early, crash often’ mindset to gardening in particular, are:
Fifteen new things in a year is a good number. Unlike software, you only get one chance to “start” per year, so you need to be running concurrent experiments.
Don’t start seeds indoors. Transitioning from an indoor to outdoor environment is a common failure point even for experienced gardeners, and plants grow completely fine when “planted out”—save yourself the heartache.
Gardening blogs, unfortunately, are not great sources of information. Use Extension.
Time to execute?
*I actually said “living that way,” but another friend observed “that's a useful corrective too; at some point you should be exploiting, and if you never are, that's also real failure.” I figured that was implicit, but yes, let’s say that out loud too:
Each year in my garden, I repeat successes (things that didn’t die and that I liked eating), cycling out some (“these carrots just weren’t that much better than the grocery store”, “the deer loved my beets more than I did”, “I already grew potatoes last year and if you put potatoes in the same ground year after year, you’re inviting blight”), and trying new things. With 10+ years of gardening under my belt but a full time job and non-zero travel, I’ll set out to grow 15 crops (4 of which are perennial, 5 of which I grow every year, and 4 of which are either a new crop or a new variety. And I’ll fail at maybe 3—but I have the same mindset of “my most important crop is what I learned” when I contemplate the 3. I don’t let myself lose sleep over them. I like to tell myself that if I was retired, I’d keep a 45 crop garden like my grandma did—but even with 90+ years of accumulated successes, grandma had some failures salt and peppered among the rows.
This essay is part of an overarching series on rural tech and how it works.