Photo: Black kan­ga­roo paws in the dying sunlight

I have not been, tra­di­tion­ally, much of a gar­dener. In fact, we built and moved into our house over 6 years ago and up until last month we have not had any kind of gar­den at all.

The rea­sons for this are multiple:

1. I don’t like the tra­di­tional “lawn with flowerbeds” that every­one in our sub­urb has – not only is it bor­ing and ugly, but it’s a mas­sive waste of water, looks unnat­ural and is totally unsuit­able for our drought-crippled West Aus­tralian climate
2. Nei­ther Dave nor myself are gar­den­ers, and we really had no idea how to approach cre­at­ing a native, water-wise gar­den, and
3. Estab­lish­ing a gar­den has really not been a pri­or­ity for us, at all.

That all came to an end a few weeks ago with the help of a friend of mine, Mrs A, who is a gar­den­ing nut and has been suf­fer­ing sep­a­ra­tion anx­i­ety from her own gar­den after the sale of her house. I gave Mrs A free rein and a cou­ple of hun­dred bucks and she chose, sourced and planted around 90 trees, shrubs and ground­cov­ers native to our gen­eral area as well as instruct­ing us in their care.

The gar­den is still quite sparse now (dur­ing win­ter) but next spring we’re expect­ing the ground­cov­ers to start grow­ing spread­ing, the bushes to start fill­ing out and the trees to start stretch­ing. In a cou­ple of years, we’re hop­ing it will become a pocket of riotous wild nat­ural bush­land that uses a min­i­mal amount of our state’s pre­cious water, doesn’t require much in the way of main­te­nance, pro­vides some screen­ing for the house, and looks bloody fantastic.

If you’re won­der­ing where problem-solving fits into all this, hold on, I’m get­ting to it…

For now, each plant is quite small and they are spaced apart. Around each plant we put a small cir­cle of mulch to help retain water. After the first rain shower we had, the weeds start­ing shoot­ing up all over the gar­den, and I started the bat­tle to keep them down. I started by going after the biggest ones, but it seemed that every day there were more and more and I really wasn’t get­ting anywhere.

Then one morn­ing, squat­ting in the front gar­den with a pair of gloves and a weed bucket, I had an epiphany. I’m a geek and a pro­gram­mer. I am fully aware of my anal-retentive ten­den­cies and in my daily work as well as my per­sonal life, I quite often har­ness these ten­den­cies in order to get things done effi­ciently. In essence, the gar­den shouldn’t be any different.

How do we accom­plish a task or project? By break­ing it down into it’s small­est com­po­nents and then work­ing on them one by one until they are fin­ished. I break a new site into sec­tions and com­plete them one at a time. To bor­row David Allen’s exam­ple from the excel­lent book/productivity bible Get­ting Things Done, there’s no point putting “Climb Mt Ever­est” onto your todo list – but if you put down “buy pro­tec­tive cloth­ing”, “book ticket to Nepal” and “research sher­pas”, you’re on your way to accom­plish­ing the larger goal.

The geek fac­tor comes into this as well: make it a game or com­pe­ti­tion, and the race becomes more impor­tant than the end result. The com­pul­sion to keep going, to beat what­ever the cri­te­ria for suc­cess is (short­est time, or longest time, or what­ever it may be) will drive the geek to keep going.

So, back to my gar­den. What is the pur­pose of weed­ing? I don’t care about the weeds them­selves, but I don’t want them steal­ing water and nutri­ents and chok­ing out my plants before they have a chance to estab­lish them­selves. So I set the goal: make the imme­di­ate 30cm area around each plant weed-free. This roughly equates to the mulched area around each one. Then I defined the process: I would go around the gar­den clock­wise and remove all weeds from each mulched area, plant by plant. Once that was done, main­tain­ing that weed-free zone would be a much sim­pler under­tak­ing. The weeds out­side the mulch zones I’m not par­tic­u­larly both­ered about, but if their removal becomes a neces­sity I will for­mu­late a new method­ol­ogy to attack them.

After one full week, approx­i­mately 70% of my plants have a com­pletely weed-free zone. On the first day, I cleared around about three plants. The sec­ond day, I dou­bled the num­ber of cleared plants. On Fri­day, I popped out at lunchtime just to do a spot of weed­ing. That’s my anal-retentive impulses tak­ing over. For now, I’m happy to let them.

In essence, my epiphany is not really news to any­one except me – every “prob­lem” in life can (and should!) be attacked with the same phi­los­o­phy. Embrace your inner anal-retentive geek! It really works.