What is going on, everyone? This is a week-long experiment posting my gardening podcast here on dsound to see how a decentralized podcast system works - I'm happy to be here! I decided to pay to get them transcribed too, for those of you who prefer words to audio :)

Click on the image above to listen to the podcast, or you can read the transcript if you're more of a words person!

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What's up, everyone? Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you're doing well out there wherever you are in the world. I am in Mexico City. I will be in limited contact enjoying some Mexican food and exploring some of the urban gardens down in Mexico City, which there are quite a bit of actually!

So stay tuned for some future photo-tours of the urban gardens of Mexico, Steemit!

Today's question comes from a friend who is going from a smaller garden and he's up sizing to a much larger garden. His question is this:

> "How do you make the work doable in a short amount of time in respect to gardening chores and time management? What things can we eliminate that a small gardener does that might not be applicable, cost effective, or time effective to someone going from a small garden to a larger garden?"

Basically, he's saying let's say I triple the size of my garden. Would that triple the amount of my work? Or are there things I can stop doing or do in a more efficient manner?

Don't Do "Just Because" Work

I think this is an important question, because when we are gardening or really doing anything in life, it's important to think about if what we're doing needs to be done. There's something called the "Do Something Syndrome", where people, organizations, companies, et cetera, they all think that doing something is better than doing nothing.

Well, that's not necessarily always true. You can see this in the medical field all the time, where doctors will over-prescribe medications or they will advise on a procedure simply because the patient seems like she or he wants something to be done, when perhaps, doing nothing and letting the body heal was the correct choice. Now, I'm not a doctor, of course, but there are clear examples of that in medicine and many other fields.

The same goes for gardening. There are a lot of things that you can do on a small scale that may or may not be necessary or efficient to do on a large scale. Some of those things that come to mind are transplanting seeds multiple times before you put them into the ground. If you're starting in a 100-flat tray, a tray with 100 spaces in it and you're starting 100 different seedlings, and then you transplant those small, little seedlings and pockets of soil into a 50-hole tray. Then, you transplant that into larger pots and then you transplant that into the soil. Yeah, that's not really going to scale when it comes to sizing up your garden ;)

You can get away with that when you have a four by four square foot garden or a single raised bed or maybe you're just a container gardener, because you're really trying to maximize what little you have. There's nothing wrong with that. That's actually what you have to do in that situation.

Systemize Your Garden

If you're moving from one four by four plot to a 10 by 20 section of your home, yeah, that's going to be nearly impossible to keep up with. This is just a general principle of life almost is when you scale up, you must figure out how to systemize things. What I would do, in the example of the seed-starting, is if it can be direct-sown, I'm direct sowing straight into the ground. I'm not going to worry about transplanting or potting it up or potting it down, et cetera. I'm not going to worry about that. I'm going to direct-sow. I might over-sow a little bit. I might "waste" a little bit of seed.

Conserving Your Time

To me, wasting a tiny bit of seed is less of a sacrifice than wasting my time. Time never comes back. Seeds can be regrown. Seeds can be purchased. Let's think about what matters most. If you're really trying to squeeze the most you can out of a large space, you need to think about that. A couple other things that might go out the window are highly targeted and timed watering practices. Going through your garden and hand-watering all your plants in different amounts and ratios, that might start to go away as well. You may want to put a drip irrigation system in. You may want to put overhead watering in. You might want to put both of those, whichever you choose, on a timer, because then you don't even have to worry about that. Based on the weather, you can just have it turn on or off.

Pests and Diseases As Your Garden Grows

There goes your watering. Now your watering has been automated, right? Some other things you might want to rethink are your approach to pests and your approach to weeds. Pests, you may have to let a few plants just die. You might just have to let a few plants be the sacrificial lamb, so to speak, for your garden because if you spend your time hand-picking and inspecting your garden all the time in a few large garden, it might not work out for you. You may be spending way too much time on that, where you could say, "You know what? I'm going to accept 5% of my plants might not make it. That's fine. That's okay."

I'm not saying just don't look for pests at all. Of course you should be practicing integrated pest management, you should be introducing beneficial insects. You should be growing plants that are resistant to some insects. You should be growing plants that attract beneficials so that they will then eat the insects that you don't want. I'm not saying ignore it completely, but I'm saying everything, as you scale up to a larger garden, think about the processes behind it. Think about trying to make it hands-off. How do you get it to be hands-off?

Well, a great way to get it to be hands-off is to grow pest resistant plants, grow disease-resistant plants ... I'm not saying GMOs, I'm just saying plants that are a bit more hearty, right? Get beneficial insects, birds, et cetera to do your work for you. If you must do any sort of pest control, well then do it in a bulk way. Do it in a systemized streamlined way.

How Do You Remove Yourself From Some Gardening Tasks?

There's many more tips I could give, but the general framework, and this is what's going to allow you to solve this problem on your own and come up with unique solutions for your own garden, is you need to think, as you go from a small garden to a large garden, you need to think about, "How do I remove myself from some of these processes that in a small garden I could dedicate my full attention to?" Because we all love gardening, of course. Unless you have ample free time and you want to spend it in the garden, sometimes there's some things you might not want to do. You might want to just enjoy the fruits of your harvest without having to do necessarily so much labor like you had to do in the past.

I truly hope that was helpful. If you have any suggestions for me or for our listeners about what you do to systemize your garden, to streamline it, to make it a little bit easier, definitely leave me a comment. I'd be really interested to hear what you have to say there.

Until next time, good luck in the garden and keep growing.

Thanks For Reading!

If this is your first time reading my writing, thank you! Please leave a comment so I can get to know you better.

My name is Kevin and I run Epic Gardening, a website, podcast, and YouTube channel. My goal is to teach 10,000,000 people how to grow their own food.

I'm a big believer in Steemit and decentralized platforms, so I'm going all in on Steemit, dtube, and dsound. Be sure to check me out there too! You'll find me writing about gardening, travel, health, and philosophy - I can't seem to stick to one topic :P

Thanks and happy Steeming,

Kevin

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