I'm almost always at my most dangerous when I have a desire to do something but no clue what I'm doing. However, I've always been fond of research - probably a callback to my degree in Physics, or a misspent youth and subsequent career working with computers. Do the research up front, and things tend to become easier. It's pretty much key to my maxim of being long term lazy. If you don't know that one, it's the idea that you have to be lazy in the long term, not in the short term. It's vitally important to being a good code monkey - do the work up front so that you have do less work in the future. Being lazy in the here and now always means that you'll have more work to do in the future, so a little bit more effort up front will always lead to less effort in the long term. It's also about doing the right work up front, and doing that work exactly once.
See, the thing about gardening is that it's not a short term thing. There's an old saying that you should live like you're going to die tomorrow, but garden like you're going to live forever. I think that applies to code as well, in the sense that you've got no idea when you'll need to come back to old code to fix it or modify it. If it's a disorganised mess, then you'll have to deal with that later. Worse, you'll have forgotten all about what you were doing when you wrote it. If you want to make your life easier then you have to write it in such a way that it's easy to come back to. To do that right you need to plan ahead and be thinking for the long term.
Under the hammer of long term laziness, everything looks like a nail. To me, gardening would not be an exception. So, having watched a ton of TV shows and read everything my local library had to offer, I felt like I had some of the basics down. After all, we were in a rental property so I would have plenty of time to come up with ideas and do the up-front research. At this stage, I felt like I knew enough to start asking the right questions and to start thinking about gathering the requirements for a garden. That position of gathering enough information to understand the problem and working the rest out from there had been the starting point for how I wrote code for nearly two decades. It had worked well there (and continues to do so, I might add), so I figured it could be applied here as well.
And, happily, it did. I spoke to my wife and our daughters and we'd talked about the things that we'd seen that we liked on the TV shows or in the gardens that we'd visited and we collected some ideas we'd seen online. Pinterest was a great way to put a sort of mood board together, too. I started gathering together the names of plants we'd seen and liked as a starting point for looking into later on. But the main thing was trying to figure out how the garden would be used.
That, in some ways, was the key question. I mean, if you want a garden for entertaining then that use is going to shape everything else around it. You'll need a place for tables and chairs, so that's probably going to mean some sort of patio or gravelled area. If you want somewhere for the kids to play then that means certain things are required such as areas they can run and fall over, or somewhere that the various toys can live. If you want to grow produce, you'll want veg beds or planters or a greenhouse or whatever. The things that you want to do in the garden will inform the things that you need to put into it.
In our case, we wanted a multi-functional space:
- An area with a table and chairs and space for a barbecue
- Somewhere for the children's trampoline and slide to live and a request for a gymnastics bar and a hanging chair
- Plenty of things to attract wildlife into the garden
So, in a nutshell, entertaining, playing, and wildlife.
That's a fairly substantial set of requirements to fit into a garden, but it certainly wasn't impossible. We'd seen plenty of examples on the TV and I'd picked up a few design ideas from those and the books I'd read. We also knew that there were some elements that we'd have to put into the garden to fit those things in:
- A pond, because wildlife adores a pond
- Plenty of pollinator-friendly plants and flowers
- Plenty of shrubs and berry-bearing trees for birds
- Some sort of patio area that would either be gravelled or flagged
- A table and chairs, and maybe some bench seating
- Some sort of pergola-type structure for the gym bar/hanging seat
That was a pretty solid set of requirements for me to start with. Now that I had an idea of what we wanted to put into our future garden, I could go away and start looking into things in a bit more detail, and I could pay more attention to the various TV shows we watched or to the gardens and shows we visited. At this stage, I knew the sorts of things I needed to pay attention to and could focus my efforts. After all, I wasn't going to be a professional gardener, or even a keen hobbyist. I wanted to be putting in the effort for long term laziness so we could enjoy the garden with the bare minimum of work. I had plenty of time to understand and figure things out.
At least - I thought I did, anyway...
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